If Not Now, Then When? Why You Keep Procrastinating on Your Goals
For years I had a list of things I was going to get to "one day." The photo books I wanted to make. The clothes I needed to clear out of my wardrobe. The exercise routine I wanted to stick to. The 5 kgs I wanted to lose, the way I wanted to eat. Decisions I knew I needed to make but kept putting off.
None of them felt particularly urgent, which made them incredibly easy to push to tomorrow, next week, when work was quieter, when I had more time, or when I felt more motivated. The problem was, that time never really came. There was always something more important to do, someone who needed something, work that needed finishing or life that got in the way. So these things just kept following me around.
And while each one seemed relatively harmless on its own, what I hadn't appreciated was the impact of carrying around a long list of things I'd repeatedly told myself I was going to do, and then didn't. Because every time I saw the clothes I hadn't sorted, thought about the photo books I hadn't made or broke another commitment I'd made to myself, there was often another conversation happening underneath it: I really need to get onto that. Why haven't I done that yet? I said I was going to do that. Why can't I just get my sh#t together?
I think this can be particularly interesting when you're someone who is incredibly capable in other areas of your life. You can manage huge amounts of responsibility, meet deadlines, solve complex problems and be the person everyone else relies on, while simultaneously collecting all these little pieces of evidence that tell you that you can't seem to follow through on the things you want for yourself.
Over time, it's very easy for the unfinished thing to stop being about the thing at all. Instead, it becomes evidence that you're disorganised, that you lack discipline, that you never finish things or that you can't trust yourself to follow through. So you decide you need to try harder, another plan, a better routine, more discipline, a new deadline, when perhaps the more useful thing to do is understand why you're not doing it in the first place.
Why do we procrastinate on goals that we actually want?
When I started looking properly at the things that never seemed to come off my list, I realised I wasn't procrastinating on all of them for the same reason. And this is where I think a lot of the usual advice about how to stop procrastinating on your goals can miss the point.
Take my photo books. For years I had imagined I would somehow find the time during a normal working week to sit down and make them. Realistically, that was never going to happen. So instead of continuing to carry make the photo books around as something I should be doing, I decided they were a summer holiday job. I could do them with my son, he could be part of choosing the photos and I could actually enjoy doing them rather than trying to squeeze them into an already full week.
The photo books weren't finished, but I had made a decision about when I was going to do them, which meant I could stop thinking about them now.
My wardrobe had a different problem. I had good clothes I didn't wear anymore and didn't want to throw away, but I didn't know the best way to sell them. So "sort out wardrobe" kept sitting on my list when the next best step wasn't actually sorting out my wardrobe at all. It was finding somewhere I could sell the clothes and booking an appointment to understand how it worked. Once I worked out the actual obstacle, the action became obvious.
Sometimes the obstacle isn't practical at all
My daily walk was different again. I knew walking was good for me, I wanted to do it and I planned it into my day. It was sitting right there in my diary, yet when the time came, I would often stay at my desk.
I could easily have labelled that procrastination or told myself I needed to be more disciplined, but the more useful question was: What am I making going for the walk mean? For me, the answer was that I was making it mean I was taking time away from work. Once I could see that, it made complete sense that work kept winning.
I didn't need another calendar reminder. I needed to change the way I was thinking about the walk. The compelling reason to go wasn't simply that walking was "good for me"; it was that I work better when I do it. I have more energy, think more clearly and have greater capacity for the rest of my day. The walk wasn't a cost to my workday, it was part of what made the rest of it work. That realisation changed everything.
I also realised I'd created another unnecessary obstacle by telling myself it needed to be 90 minutes. It didn't. An hour gave me what I needed and was far more realistic to fit into my day. So what had looked like a motivation or discipline problem was actually something quite different.
Sometimes we're trying to solve the wrong problem
Food has probably been the best example of this for me. There have been plenty of times when I've decided how I want to eat, committed to a plan and then not followed it. My instinct was always to focus on the mechanics: find a better plan, be stricter, recommit, have more discipline.
Except I already knew what to eat. The mechanics weren't the problem.
What I eventually understood, was that the majority of the times I was eating something I hadn't planned to eat, I was trying to change how I felt. If I was stressed, frustrated or uncomfortable, food gave me an easy way to feel different. So I could keep changing the food plan as much as I liked, but I was solving the wrong problem. The problem wasn't that I didn't know how to eat; the problem was that sometimes I didn't want to feel how I felt, and no meal plan was going to solve that for me.
I think we do versions of this all the time. We tell ourselves we need better time management when the real problem is that we don't want to say no. We think we need to make a decision when really we're scared of making the wrong one. We tell ourselves we need more discipline when the action we're trying to take is competing with something we value more. We look for another strategy when what we're actually avoiding is how something makes us feel.
Then, when the new strategy doesn't work either, instead of questioning whether we've correctly understood the problem, we question ourselves. Why can't I stick to anything? Why am I still doing this? Why can't I just get my shit together? Which only gives us more evidence for a belief that perhaps wasn't true in the first place.
How to stop procrastinating on your goals without just trying harder
If you have something that has been following you from one to-do list to the next, I don't think the answer is necessarily another productivity hack, a better app or telling yourself that this time you're finally going to be disciplined enough to do it.
Instead, start by asking yourself what is actually stopping you.
Do I genuinely want this enough to make it a priority? Is there a practical obstacle I haven't solved? Is there a feeling I'm trying to avoid? And what am I making it mean about me that I haven't done it yet?
That last question is particularly important because sometimes the weight of an unfinished goal has very little to do with the goal itself. It's the judgement we've attached to not having done it.
Once you understand what's actually getting in the way, the next step is often much simpler. It might be booking the appointment, changing the expectation, putting something in the diary for January, allowing yourself to feel what you've been trying not to feel, or consciously deciding that this simply isn't something you're prioritising right now and taking it off the list.
The goal isn't to get everything done. It's to stop carrying around a list of unfinished promises to yourself and using them as evidence that you somehow aren't disciplined enough, organised enough or good enough.
Because "one day" has a habit of becoming another year. And if something genuinely matters to you, at some point "one day" needs to become an actual day on the calendar.
