How to Stop Procrastinating: a simple Guide to Mastering Difficult Tasks and Breaking the Procrastination Habit

Reason #3: You Promise to Do It “Later”
This common excuse is a reminder that you can work on the pending task
at some point in the future. It could be a few hours from now, in a couple
of days, or the “perfect” free day that you envision sometime in the future.
Unfortunately, this line of thinking creates a strong disconnect between
how you will ideally feel in the future and how you will actually feel in
the future.
In your imagined future, you will have boundless energy, eat a healthy
diet, exercise on a regular basis, and work well into the evenings in order
to get everything finished.
However, the realistic “Future You” is tired, unmotivated, burned-out,
handling unruly children, and craving chocolate cake.
This phenomenon relates to two concepts: the hot-cold empathy gap and

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time inconsistency. Let’s start with the first concept and see how it relates
to procrastination.
The Hot-Cold Empathy Gap
The hot-cold empathy gap is a concept that’s widely covered in
Willpower
by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney. It’s a state of mind that causes
people to underestimate the influence of their instinctive drives on their
attitudes, behaviors, and preferences.
The most important aspect of the hot-cold empathy gap is that human
understanding greatly depends on one’s state of mind. For example, if
you’re feeling angry, it’s hard to picture yourself feeling calm. Or if you’re
hungry, it’s hard to think of yourself as being full.
The inability to minimize the empathy gap can cause negative outcomes
in professional settings. For example, when a doctor is gauging the
physical pain of their patient or an employer is assessing how much paid
leave an employee should get for a death in the family, these subjective
decisions can easily be influenced by the hot-cold empathy gap. Maybe
the doctor had previously been in a similar accident as the patient and
feels like they are overreacting to their pain, or maybe an employer also
recently had a death in the family but was able to return to work relatively
quickly. These past experiences and feelings can have an influence on
people’s decisions.