Know the terms
Plain-English definitions of every concept in procrastination research, from akrasia to the Zeigarnik effect.
26 entries · updated 4 September 2026
Deliberately delaying because you thrive on pressure, versus delaying because you cannot start. Only one of them costs you.
The 2,300-year-old name for knowing what you should do and doing something else anyway.
Research is comfortable and starting is not. When comparing options becomes the procrastination itself.
Switch tasks and part of your brain stays behind: Leroy's name for the cognitive smear that follows you.
Every jump between tasks bills you twice: once to leave, once to reload. The bill is bigger than it feels.
The idea that choices wear you down, and the honest story of the parole-judges study that made it famous.
Not a pleasure juice you run out of. What the prediction-error science actually says, detox myths included.
The famous limited-willpower theory, and the honest story of how a 23-lab replication found nothing.
When the brain's task-management system struggles to initiate, plan and switch, delay stops being a choice.
The absorbed, time-vanishing state everyone chases, with an honest note on how hard it is to measure.
New week, new month, day after your birthday: why temporal landmarks genuinely make starting easier.
The specific curve shape that makes you sincerely plan to work tonight, then sincerely not.
Give a task a week and it takes a week. The 1955 adage behind every deliberately tight deadline.
You have been wrong about how long things take every time so far. The planning fallacy says you will be again.
The opposite failure mode: grabbing the near bucket and carrying it further, just to feel done sooner.
The systematic overweighting of right-now: the economist's name for why tonight's plan loses to tonight's sofa.
Avoider, thrill-seeker, indecisive, perfectionist: the common typologies, and how seriously to take them.
Staying up too late to reclaim the free time your day never gave you, and paying for it tomorrow.
Task-specific confidence, not general self-esteem. One of the strongest correlates of getting started.
Start late and you can blame the lateness, never your ability. The excuse-generating engine behind much delay.
The umbrella skill of steering yourself toward goals. Procrastination is its most familiar failure mode.
Throwing good hours after bad: how effort already spent hijacks decisions about what to do next.
The overwhelmed freeze state: too many tasks, too much ambiguity, and suddenly you can do none of them.
The reason future-you's deadlines can't compete with present-you's phone: rewards shrink with distance in time.
Now and not-now, with little in between: the time-perception difficulty behind much ADHD-related lateness.
Unfinished tasks keep a mental tab open. The classic 1927 finding, with an honest note on shaky replication.
A technique, a study worth knowing, and one thing to try. No streaks, no guilt, unsubscribe any time.