I’ve always been a procrastinator. I pushed everything to the last minute, I found a thousand valid excuses to do something else, and I knew perfectly well the mechanism by which I trapped myself.
Over time (I'm 21 as I'm writing this), I realized I wasn't going to "stop" procrastinating. You don't change your nature by beating yourself up.
But you can change what surrounds that nature: your habits, your environment. That's what suddenly makes it much harder for my brain to convince me that one more YouTube video is more important than a task that's already late.
It's Not Laziness
Most people think procrastination is a motivation or organization problem. After spending some time observing myself, I understood it wasn't that at all.
We procrastinate because we try to avoid an emotional discomfort: the fear of doing it wrong, the stress of a fuzzy task, the pressure to be perfect, or simply boredom. Procrastination has nothing to do with laziness; it's an avoidance mechanism.
And the more a task feels vague, intimidating, or poorly defined, the more the brain labels it as "dangerous," so it avoids it. That's what task aversion is.
Understanding this helped me, because it means you can't just brute-force your way through. You have to reduce the negative emotion around the task, and the most effective way I found is to break everything down into micro-steps. As long as the first action is tiny, I have far fewer reasons to avoid it.
Change Your Identity to Change Your Actions
To change myself, I had to literally re-teach my brain how to do hard things. It started with constant critical thought: questioning my choices, my impulses, my excuses, why I open that app by reflex.
Changing how I see myself, my identity, helped too. Instead of saying "I need to stop procrastinating," I started saying "I am someone who keeps their promises to themselves." Instead of "I need to work out," I repeated "I am someone who trains consistently."
It seems trivial, but it changes everything. When an action aligns with who you say you are, it becomes natural. You don't do it because you're motivated, you do it because it's simply who you are.
The Ultra-Short Content Pandemic
The reason I had to go that far wasn't just because I had difficult tasks ahead of me: my brain was constantly pulled elsewhere.
I have to mention a massive problem affecting my generation, a real modern pandemic, and it's not Covid but ultra-short content. A huge portion of our free time disappears in an endless scroll of videos engineered to capture and fragment our attention.
We don't even notice it, but this content trains our brain to seek quick rewards, avoid effort, and flee discomfort. I was a victim of it myself.
Retrain Your Brain
When your brain spends hours feeding on small hits of instant dopamine, it makes sense that it rejects any task requiring concentration, slowness or frustration. To escape it, you have to literally retrain your brain to stop seeking pleasure in immediate distractions, and find it again in deeper, longer, far more rewarding activities.
Create Systems
Changing a habit doesn't mean deleting it, it means replacing it. For me, it started with a daily appointment with myself, a moment where I had no choice but to do what I planned. You can go slowly, it's normal for it to take time. Little by little, you learn to appreciate difficult things simply because you’re used to them.
Building systems around these habits helps a lot. Working in the same place, at the same times, reducing friction as much as possible, deleting apps that drag you down, anything that makes action easier is useful.
Aim as Far as Possible
Another powerful lever was setting goals that felt almost too hard, but not impossible. Not long ago, I set the goal of running a marathon in five months, even though I had never run in my life.
The goal felt absurd (I don't even like running), but that's exactly why it motivated me. I blocked training sessions every week, impossible to skip, because I had made myself a promise.
And five months later, I ran my marathon and finished in 3h43 (in pain).
As Darius Foroux puts it, life without challenges isn't really life. It's an early death.
Just Do It
When you hesitate before doing something difficult, don't wait. I often think about Nike's slogan, simple but true: Just Do It. The worst moment is right before you start. Once you’re in, everything becomes easier. The hardest part is beginning.
And once you understand that these "too hard" goals aren't actually that hard, everything becomes exponentially more accessible. What once felt insurmountable becomes realistic.
Of course, there will still be evenings where you stay too long on your phone, where you miss that appointment with yourself. It happens to me almost every day. We're human.
Don't blame yourself, and don't listen to the gurus who pretend you need to become an emotionless machine. Take a step back, forgive yourself, and try again tomorrow. The night brings clarity.
