Procrastination
Voluntarily delaying what you know you should do now, against your own interest.
What it means
Procrastination is the voluntary postponement of an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay, which distinguishes it from sensible prioritization or rest. It is best understood not as laziness but as a self-regulation failure rooted in present bias, in task aversion (the chore is boring, anxiety-provoking, or ambiguous), in low expectancy of success, and in a long delay to the eventual reward — factors that the temporal-motivation account combines into a single equation. The mechanism is that the immediate discomfort of starting an aversive task is overweighted relative to its distant payoff, so the mind reaches for any more pleasant activity at hand. Critically, procrastination has an emotion-regulation core: delaying repairs short-term mood at the cost of long-term goals, which is why it correlates with stress, guilt, and worse health and performance. Effective countermeasures attack the equation's terms — breaking tasks into small concrete steps, raising expectancy, removing distractions, and using implementation intentions or temptation bundling. It matters because chronic procrastination is widespread and measurably damages academic, financial, and health outcomes.
Examples
Putting off the tax return until the night before the deadline, every single year, then scrambling under stress.
The dentist call sits on the list for eight months because making it feels unpleasant today — by which point a small filling has turned into root canal work.
The awkward email to an unhappy client goes unwritten while you tidy your inbox instead: tidying feels good now, and the email feels bad now.
First described in Synthesized by Piers Steel (2007).