Many people associate procrastination with laziness. But psychologists find that procrastination is not a time management problem—it’s an emotion management problem. When you procrastinate, you’re not avoiding effort. You’re avoiding the unpleasant feelings that the activity stirs up. Sooner or later, though, you realize that you’re also avoiding

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Pondering why I don’t feel like doing what I say I want to do, yet discovering one more time how great it often feels after I’ve done it, is just another reliable way to distract myself from the effort of doing the next thing. There is no substitute for “accepting my feelings” (of laziness or boredom, or anxiety, or whatever happens to appear),

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We're culturally conditioned to view resistance as a personal deficiency. "Successful people push through resistance," we're told. "High performers don't procrastinate." This narrative creates a costly misinterpretation—we dismiss as character weakness what might actually be intelligent guidance.

The distinction between random laziness and specific... See more