What putting it off buys you

Nobody keeps up a habit for years if it pays them nothing. Putting off the proposal pays you, and it pays at once.

Go back to the swerve. You opened the document and felt something unpleasant. You closed it, or drifted to your inbox, and the unpleasant feeling eased. That easing is the payment. It arrives within seconds, it's reliable, and it costs nothing you can see at that moment. For the part of you that wants to feel all right this afternoon, swerving works perfectly.

Two researchers who have spent much of their careers on procrastination, Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl, set this view out in a 2013 review. Procrastination, they argue, has less to do with managing time than with managing mood. A task brings up a bad feeling, and avoiding the task is a quick way to repair the feeling. They add a second point. The relief goes to you today, and the cost is passed to the person you'll be a week on Thursday. They call that person the future self, and note how easily we assume that he or she will somehow be better placed to cope.

There's a neat experiment behind the idea. Dianne Tice, Ellen Bratslavsky and Roy Baumeister put people into a bad mood and then gave them time to prepare for the next task, with pleasant distractions to hand. People in a bad mood spent more of that time on the distractions. The clever part was a further group who were led to believe that their mood was fixed for the time being and nothing would shift it. Those people stopped putting the preparation off. If swerving couldn't make them feel better, they didn't bother to swerve. That tells you what the swerve is for. It's an attempt to feel better, and it has nothing to do with a shortage of effort or a wish to fail.

So the relief is real, and I'd sooner say so clearly than pretend the habit gives you nothing. Tice and Baumeister also followed students through a term. Early on, the students who put things off reported lower stress and less illness than the ones who got on with their work. For the first few weeks, putting it off was the better deal.

Then came the rest of the result. Late in the term the same students reported more stress and more illness, enough that over the whole term they came out sicker. They also got lower marks on every assignment. The authors summed the pattern up as short-term benefit and long-term cost.

Relief is the main payment, and there are others worth naming, because each gets a chapter. Putting it off buys you the sense that you work best under pressure, along with a focus on the last night that you can't seem to find on a quiet Tuesday. It buys protection, because a disappointing result from rushed work says nothing about what you can do. It buys the comfortable idea that you're waiting for the right moment, when you'll be clear-headed and ready. And it seems to buy efficiency. The job took one night, and started early it might have eaten a fortnight.

Now look at what the relief does to the feeling it relieves. The proposal is still there tomorrow, and it's slightly worse. There's a day less to do it in. On top of the original feeling there's a new layer, made of guilt about not having started and a little alarm. So tomorrow's swerve has more to swerve from, and the relief is that much more welcome. The habit feeds itself.

I don't want to push this too far. The original discomfort was real, the work is hard, and delay didn't create either fact. What delay does is add to the discomfort daily and then offer you relief from the total.

You might object that you sometimes put things off for good reasons, and you do. Delay isn't always this habit. If you're waiting for figures from someone else, or the brief is about to change, or something more urgent really has come in, then waiting is a plan. There's a rough test. A plan has a date in it, and a reason you could say out loud to a colleague without embarrassment. The habit has the word "later" and a feeling.

The name you gave the feeling in chapter 1 matters here. Whatever it was, that's what the swerve has been treating. The rest of this book is about treating it some other way, one that doesn't make next week worse.