How to Stop Procrastinating (What the Research Says Works)

If you want to know how to stop procrastinating, start with what is going on when you put a task off. You open the document, feel a small drop in your stomach, and twenty minutes later you are reading about a footballer's transfer fee. Psychologists who study this have a fairly settled explanation for that drop, and the tactics that work all follow from it. Most take under five minutes.

Why you put things off

In 2013 Fuschia Sirois and Tim Pychyl published a review in Social and Personality Psychology Compass titled "Procrastination and the Priority of Short-Term Mood Regulation." Their reading of the research is that procrastination is mood repair. A task makes you feel bad, avoiding it makes you feel better right now, and the cost lands on your future self, who feels like someone else.

Pychyl, a psychologist at Carleton University, lists the task traits that set this off. A task is more likely to be put off when it is boring, frustrating or difficult, when it has no personal meaning, when it is vague, or when it has no structure. A quarterly report often has four of them.

Piers Steel's 2007 meta-analysis at the University of Calgary drew on 691 sources and put habitual procrastinators at 15 to 20% of adults.

How to stop procrastinating in the next ten minutes

The bad feeling peaks right before you start, so the fixes all target the start.

1. Commit to two to five minutes. Tell yourself you only have to work until a timer goes off, then you are allowed to stop. Most people keep going.
2. Shrink the first step until it is almost silly. "Write the report" becomes "open the file and type the title."
3. Write an if-then plan. "When I sit down after lunch, I open the budget sheet before I open my inbox."
4. Forgive yourself for the last time you put it off.

The two to five minute idea has two roots. David Allen's Getting Things Done says anything that takes under two minutes should be done the moment it comes up. Pychyl's advice is blunter. Just get started. In his pager studies, students rated avoided tasks as stressful, difficult and unpleasant early in the week. Once they had started them, by Thursday or Friday, those ratings had dropped significantly. As Pychyl puts it, "Once we start a task, it's rarely as bad as we think."

The forgiveness tip comes from Wohl, Pychyl and Bennett (2010), who followed 134 first-year students across two rounds of midterms. Students who forgave themselves for procrastinating before the first exams procrastinated less before the second ones and did better on them.

How to stop procrastinating at work

At work, your inbox and Slack are always open, and each offers a small, easy win that feels productive. The hard task loses to both.

The strongest tool here is the if-then plan, which Peter Gollwitzer calls an implementation intention. You decide in advance the exact moment and place you will start, written as "when X happens, I will do Y." In a 1997 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Gollwitzer and Veronika Brandstätter asked students to write a report about how they spent Christmas Eve within two days of it. Of the students who had written down when and where they would do it, 71% handed it in on time. Of those who had not, 32% did. A 2006 meta-analysis by Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran pooled 94 tests and found an effect size of d = 0.65, medium to large.

At a desk, a good if-then plan ties the hard task to something that already happens every day. "When I put my coffee down at my desk, I work on the proposal for 25 minutes before email." For more on keeping that going through the afternoon, see our guide on how to stay focused at work.

Motivation shows up after you start

Most people searching how to stop procrastinating and get motivated are waiting for the motivation to arrive first. Pychyl's pager data points the other way. The task felt worse before the students touched it and better once they had.

That puts a lot of weight on the first sixty seconds, and it is why a fixed start-of-work ritual is worth building. Keep it short and identical every time: the same seat, the same headphones, the same first action. Repeat it enough and the sequence itself becomes the cue to begin, and starting stops being a fresh decision every morning.

One spray as the signal to start

A ritual needs a clear physical marker, something you can feel, that says the avoiding is over and the work begins. Ours is a spray of Dragon Breath.

Dragon Breath is a mouth spray made from chilcuague (Heliopsis longipes), a root from Central Mexico also called golden root. One spray and the taste is earthy and a little peppery for a second. Within about ten seconds a bright electric buzz spreads across your tongue and mouth, your mouth floods, and then a clean, fresh feeling lingers. It is a hard sensation to ignore, which is what you want from a start signal. You come out of it switched on and in the zone for the task in front of you.

Dragon Breath – Chilcuague Extract

50 ml mouth spray. Wild-harvested chilcuague root, dual-extracted. 250+ sprays.

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The moments people use it are the ones where procrastination usually wins. At the desk with the hard file open. Before the first email, so the inbox does not get the first hour. Before the report you have moved to tomorrow three days running. Pair it with your if-then plan: "When I spray Dragon Breath, I open the proposal and write one sentence."

One customer, filmed in a reaction video moments after one spray, said "Definitely energized." Mitchell S., a verified buyer, put it in three words: "Epic. Must buy"

The bottle is 50 ml and holds 250+ sprays, so it lives in a pocket or a desk drawer. The root is wild-harvested from growth zones the Mara team selects with the help of local elders, then dual-extracted in organic solutions. The extract stays sealed in Miron violet glass. It keeps air and light off the extract and adds significant longevity to the quality of the extract. If you want the background on the plant itself, read our full page on what chilcuague is and where it grows.

Start with one spray. Once you know the feeling, you can go up to five.

Dragon Breath considerations

The recommendation on the product page: if you're pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or allergic to plants in the daisy family, ask your doctor before using it.

Questions people ask

How do I stop procrastinating and get things done?

Pick one task, write down the exact moment you will start it, and commit to only two to five minutes. Starting changes how the task feels, and most people keep going past the timer.

Is procrastination just laziness?

Researchers Fuschia Sirois and Tim Pychyl describe it as short-term mood repair. You avoid a task to escape the bad feeling it gives you right now.

What is the 2-minute rule?

It comes from David Allen's Getting Things Done. If something takes under two minutes, do it the moment it comes up instead of adding it to a list.

How fast does Dragon Breath kick in?

The buzz across the tongue and mouth arrives within about ten seconds of one spray, followed by a rush of saliva and a fresh feeling that lingers.