The Many Faces of Work Avoidance

Why You *Still* Procrastinate (And What to Do Differently)

You know it. You’ve felt it. You’ve done it.

In fact, you’re probably doing it right now.

There’s this task. This goddamn task. You know it’s important. It matters. You’re capable of doing it. And still — you don’t.

You have a rough idea of what needs to happen. You’ve even done the same thing before, a couple of years ago. Yet here you are, holding back. Waiting. Finding any excuse to look away.

You feel the resistance.

And this isn’t the first time.

Why does this keep happening?

Sometimes, you tell yourself it’s just perfectionism. That’s what you’ve always been—a perfectionist. The perfect excuse. Other times, you know you were just scared, and you needed to beat that fear before you felt “ready.” But sometimes—in the most frustrating cases—you drift into other work. You stay busy. You keep moving. And then hours later, you look up and realize you’ve done everything except the one thing you meant to do.

Procrastination has many faces. And it’s one of the most stubborn, slippery challenges in the entire forest of accomplishment. It’s been with us forever. No other work problem has been written about more. No other failure has been studied from so many angles.

So, what have we learned across philosophy, religion, science, and self-help?

The consensus, it seems, is always the same: there must be some flaw, some weakness of character, some hidden conflict that makes us hold back. An irrational delay of valuable effort—that’s how I framed it myself, two years ago, in How to Beat Procrastination, trying to compress all the different faces of this habit into a single definition.

To be honest, I thought it was a pretty good distillation at the time.

But I’ve changed my mind.

While working on my book Scale-Smart, I did a deep dive into personal accomplishment—far deeper than anything I’d explored before. I went beyond the usual advice and familiar frameworks. And surprisingly, it wasn’t just psychology or productivity methods that shifted my perspective. It was mathematical concepts—fractals, set theory—that showed me a different way to look at work, resistance, and progress.

Among all the ideas I revisited, procrastination was the one that stood out. It was everywhere. It was as old as any record we have of human struggle. And I started to wonder: after thousands of years of thinking and writing about this, why haven’t we solved it? If anything, you could argue that modern life has made procrastination worse.

Are we really just getting lazier? Are we simply lacking discipline? Did social media, smartphones, and the internet damage our capacity to act?

I highly doubt it. And in this essay, I want to look at these questions. I want to offer a different way to see the issue. Because the traditional advice for “beating” procrastination usually sounds like this: tighten your schedule, add deadlines, get other people to hold you accountable, set up rewards, meditate (supposedly the answer to everything), or the classic—just do it. Force yourself to push through, you weakling.

And sometimes, by sheer luck, any of these can work. That’s why, for a long time, I was right there with everyone else—trying to find the perfect combination of willpower, emotional management, and productivity tactics to get over the hump.

But eventually, I started to see that we’ve been looking at procrastination in the wrong way.

Underneath all the layers of discussion, procrastination has always been framed as a flaw, a failure, or a shortcoming within the person. The solutions have all assumed it’s something to be fixed, avoided, patched, or conquered. All of it rests on the idea that procrastination is a problem to overcome.

Maybe that’s because we’re obsessed with free will and control and the belief that there is always a space between stimulus and response—and that if we try hard enough, we can power through anything.

However, when I began exploring accomplishment through a more mathematical lens, devoid of emotion and character, yet still with our psychological underpinnings in mind, I started to wonder whether procrastination was something entirely different.

One hint was the simple fact that there was avoidance or resistance in the first place. Much like I wrote in my popular essay on effort density: resistance can be a compass, if we only listen.

What if the hesitation and friction we call procrastination aren’t evidence of a flaw, a weakness, or a lack of self-discipline—but instead, a valuable signal?

What if they’re clues that the work, in its current form, simply doesn’t fit our lives?

When the size or shape of a task doesn’t match your current capacity, friction appears. And when friction lingers, we stall. That’s why we should always look for the size that fits (or size that works). I’ve known this intuitively for a long time. However, it was only recently that I began to understand the immense power this idea holds.

I’m now convinced that most procrastination isn’t about laziness or lack of discipline at all. It’s a size-and-shape problem. A mismatch between the work and the state you’re in when you attempt to approach it.

So maybe the most helpful way to think about procrastination is simpler than we’ve been taught. Not as a moral failing. Not as proof you’re broken or lazy. But as a signal to pause and reconsider. A voice from your subconscious is telling you that you’re trying to engage a misfit.

This doesn’t mean all the old advice is useless. Philosophical insights, research, and strategies can help us navigate additional emotional challenges. However, when it comes to procrastination, I think they often succeed by coincidence, with a too low success rate.

I see procrastination as a highly practical problem. And practical problems need practical solutions. No amount of theory or self-criticism will move you forward if the work itself feels too vague or too big to touch.

That’s what I want to share with you in this essay.

This essay is based on a section of my book Scale-Smart
and is available exclusively to members of the Fractal Productivity Club.