Some people ascribe procrastination to fear — of success or of failure — or to perfectionism, but Cal Newport suggests that your brain doesn’t buy your plan:
Assume you’re a student who feels a strong urge to put off studying for an exam. The first question to ask: What is your plan for studying? Most students don’t put much thought into their study habits, so your plan is likely vague and haphazard, rife with distraction, pseudowork, and passive review.
What I’m arguing is that the complex planning component of your brain evaluates this plan — as it has evolved to do — and then rejects it as not sound. (Grinding it out all night at the library is as haphazard a plan as charging the mammoth with a spear: your frontal lobe is having none of it!)
Here’s the second relevant question: What does this rejection feel like? Complex planning is a pre-verbal adaptation, so it’s not going to manifest itself as a voice in your head exclaiming “plan rejected!” Instead, it’s going to be more intuitive: a biochemical cascade designed to steer you away from a bad decision; something, perhaps, that feels like a lack of motivation to get started.
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It also helps explain deep procrastination: a sinister variation of this trait that causes students to lose the will to start any work. As I’ve argued, deep procrastination afflicts students who are suffering though hard course loads without a strong sense of why. In other words, deep procrastination can be seen as a rejection of a plan, but this time the plan is on a larger scale: your grand narrative for why you’re at college and how it will help you live a good life.This perspective also helps us cope with procrastination beyond graduation. Why do we delay on ambitious projects that could change our life for the better? The common explanation from the blogosphere is because we’re afraid of failure and lack courage.
The evolutionary perspective on procrastination, by contrast, says we delay because our frontal lobe doesn’t see a convincing plan behind our aspiration. The solution, therefore, is not to muster the courage to blindly charge ahead, but to instead accept what our brain is telling us: our plans need more hard work invested before they’re ready.