When you've left it late anyway

It will happen. There'll be a heavy month, or a job you dreaded more than most, or a bad start that never got its second session. You'll look up and it's Wednesday night, and the old situation is back. This chapter is for that night and for the week after.

On the night, skip the trial. "I've read a whole book about this and I've still done it" is a tempting thought and a useless one. It adds bad feeling to a task you're already avoiding because of bad feeling, and chapter 10 explained where that leads. Remember the Wohl study. The students who forgave themselves for the first round of putting off were the ones who did less of it in the second.

The method still works with nine hours left. Do fifteen bad minutes on the whole thing, even now. It matters more now, because late-night panic tends to pour its effort into the first section and leave the ending as a stub. Get a bad version of everything, then improve the parts in order of importance. Decide the size out loud. What does this need to be by five o'clock tomorrow?

If it truly can't be done, say so early. Asking for an extension on Wednesday morning is an ordinary professional act. Asking at ten to five on Friday is a different thing. Most people put off asking for the same reason they put off the work, and it goes the same way.

Afterwards, once it's handed in and you've slept, spend ten minutes finding where it went wrong. Treat that as a practical question and not a moral one. There's usually a first point of failure, and it's usually small. You never did the day-one start because the brief arrived on a Friday afternoon. Or you did it and wrote no next step, so the document went cold. Or you booked sessions and gave them away to other people's meetings. Find that point and patch it. One lapse doesn't show that the method has failed, or that you have. It shows you where your particular weak joint is.

I'd advise against counting streaks. "Six projects in a row started early" is pleasant until the seventh, and then the broken streak becomes a reason to feel you're back at the beginning. You aren't. Every early start you made still happened, and what you learned from each is still true.

For some readers the honest conclusion, after a fair try, will be that this isn't shifting. If the method proves hard for you, that doesn't mean you misunderstood it or didn't want it enough. It may mean something else is involved, and there's help for it. I'd talk to a GP in any of these cases.

• Your mood has been low for weeks, and you've lost interest and motivation across most of your life and not only at work. The NHS lists these among the symptoms of depression.
• You've always found it hard to organise your time and finish tasks, you're easily distracted and often lose things, and it happens everywhere, going back to childhood. The NHS lists these as signs of ADHD in adults and says the symptoms usually start before the age of 12. It also warns that waiting times for assessment can be long, which is a reason to start the conversation soon.
• Worry takes up a large part of most days.
• The putting off is threatening your job, your degree or your finances, whatever the cause.

In England you can refer yourself to NHS talking therapies for anxiety and depression without seeing a GP first. If you ever have thoughts of harming yourself, that needs urgent help the same day, through NHS 111 or your GP, or 999 in an emergency.

Procrastination itself responds to treatment as well. In 2015 Rozental and colleagues in Sweden ran a trial with 150 people who had serious trouble with it. Those given an internet course based on cognitive behavioural therapy improved more than those left on a waiting list, whether or not a therapist guided them through it. The effects were moderate. Somewhere between a quarter and two fifths of the people treated improved to a degree the researchers counted as clinically meaningful. So it's no miracle, but it's real. If a book doesn't do it, a therapist who knows this kind of work has something to offer.

Two smaller suggestions. If you're a student, your university is likely to have study advisers and a counselling service, and this problem won't be new to them. If you're employed, a plain conversation with your manager about interim dates costs less than you fear. I'd expect most managers to prefer a rough draft on Tuesday to a surprise on Friday.