Procrastination is evolutionary, actually.

2AM on a Thursday night (Friday morning?). An essay to be done, a blank page in front of you. Maybe you shouldn’t have watched that episode 7. You try to force yourself to start typing, to get in that flow state that helped you complete every essay before; but you just can’t. Everything distracts you: the glow the streetlight casts on your floor, the dust on your lamp, the odd tree that’s outside your window. You do this dance before every deadline, this tango with your mind that seems inclined to do anything but the task at hand. Every dance leaves you simultaneously frustrated and inexplicably paralyzed – why does this transpire every time?

Procrastination today is seen as the quintessential modern character flaw, the Achilles’ heel we all share. It not only leaves us with emotions of guilt and a pile of work, but directly sabotages the productive potential we hold into a landscape of missed opportunities.

Go on YouTube today and search “procrastination” and you’ll be bombarded with hundreds of hours of content on 10 ways to stop being lazy or 3 easy steps to 100x your productivity – none help. Maybe there’s a needle in the haystack with the golden recipe that just clicks for you, but more often than not, lifestyle content just doesn’t work. So you turn to motivational content. What best to get you to work than scare you into it? You spend the rest of the night with a sweaty bald man screaming about how he’s going to carry the boats and the logs. You set your alarm for 5 AM and put your running shoes out, planning to finish that essay before the average man wakes up, only to snooze through all your alarms and wake up at 9AM. Maybe this wasn’t the best strategy.

So what’s the fix? Does one even exist? There are the obvious adjustments like putting your phone away, blocking distracting apps and websites, being in a quiet and neat area, maybe closing that window or putting that fidget toy away. These can all make marginal improvements while working on a task, but what about the effort needed to sit down and convince yourself to do it in the first place? I argue that procrastination, the friction in doing a task (no matter how important, crucial, etc), is grounded in our evolutionary or genetic blueprint.

Studies have found that procrastination is somewhat heritable and that approximately 46% of individual differences attribute to genetic factors. Actually, perhaps more remarkably, studies found a complete genetic overlap between procrastination and impulsivity, which means that they share exactly identical genetic influences despite being distinct behaviors.

So perhaps it isn’t procrastination that we’re directly looking at, but maybe impulsivity. Piers Steel, a famed expert on motivation, explains how “without a genetic component, the ability to procrastinate couldn’t easily be passed on. We evolved to be procrastinators.” This follows his evolutionary theory that we stumbled upon with impulsivity. However, it doesn’t mean procrastination itself was directly selected for, but rather emerged as a consequence of impulsivity. This is an especially important distinction, since impulsivity makes perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint. For our ancestors, impulsivity would enable survival via a reward function favoring a greedy search of sorts, seeking immediate rewards when even the next hour or day held an uncertainty (from being eaten by a tiger or something). I imagine that natural selection would award individuals with more impulse (which would contribute to a higher fitness) and this was gradually trained into our genetic makeup.

But impulsivity can’t possibly be the best strategy. There has to be some notion of weighing options and having a form of horizon in our actions. Researchers termed this temporal discounting, stating that organisms might choose a more distant award given it has a marginally higher fitness payoff relative to a short-term reward. Of course, any uncertainty on this distant award would significantly reduce its appeal.

This makes sense, but also naturally favors impulse choices. An organism that waited for uncertain future rewards might never get to reproduce while those who secured immediate resources survived to pass on their genes. This tradeoff suggests some mathematical grounding, and models suggest that natural selection would rarely promote individuals toward more advantageous but distant rewards if it required passing over lesser immediate ones. In fact, future rewards would need to be dramatically larger to compensate for even modest temporal distance: up to 20 times as high for peaks 3-4 times as far in temporal distance.

So maybe, in the perspective that survival used to depend on a more consistent access to resources, procrastination is a rational response to uncertainty rather than a failure of willpower. Bringing this back to modern times, perhaps you knew(either directly or subconsciously) that you were going to get a B on that essay you were trying to write at 2AM. Is it really worth sacrificing sleep and energy for a subpar reward? As a corollary, this also fuels cheating, since it is an easy grab with high reward.

Energy is an interesting concept here. The prefrontal cortex is an energetically more expensive brain region, which means that when energy is scarce, the limbic system (responsible for immediate survival, I like to think of this as the flight-or-fight control center), tends to dominate decision-making. For this reason, procrastination just becomes easier at these moments.

On this notion of energy, a fundamental and general unit, it is natural to ask if procrastination exists across species. In fact, a study found that corvids (crows and ravens), can delay gratification for up to 10 minutes, dogs for 66 seconds, and wolves for 24 seconds (weird dynamic here). Chimpanzees, interestingly, seem to sometimes outperform humans in these delayed gratification tasks, which alludes to these processes predating human evolution.

So what now? Especially in the digital age, with dopamine literally at your fingertips, true productivity is almost a relic of the past. Modern technology just makes it easier to escape a long-horizon task in exchange for a fun reward in an hour of doomscrolling.

This framework of instant gratification ingrained in our society and minds give us a beautifully simple method of attaining the quick reward we were trained to. Perhaps it was never our fault that we procrastinate at the extent we do, perhaps it is that the reward function has optimized us towards favoring distractions since they are most often the easiest, most available, most guaranteed, and most rewarding action we can take. Remember, we evolved to prioritize these – it is just that we were led astray in the midst of our timeline.

But we can’t fix that no matter how hard we try. At the end of the day, all we can do is maximize our reward signal by attempting to nullify the modern monster that tries to take us into the tango we participate in every 2am work session.

I’ve been following a simple strategy that has worked somewhat well for me: