Procrastination is on the rise, partly because of digital distractions and modern work, according to a new book from Cambridge University researcher Dr Itamar Shatz. Working out which type of procrastinator you are, he argues, is crucial to overcoming a problem that harms finances, health and relationships.

Worrier, Pessimist, Perfectionist, Dreamer, Zigzagger, Rebel, Thrill Seeker, Hedonist, Burnout — these are the nine types of procrastinators identified by Shatz in Solving Procrastination: The Science of Why We Put Things Off and How to (Finally!) Stop, published by Tarcher (Penguin Random House).

Rebel procrastinators, Shatz argues, feel they don’t have enough control over what happens in their life, so they procrastinate to assert their autonomy and get back at authority figures they resent. He advises them to find their own reasons for taking action, focus on their own standards rather than perfectionistic ones set by others, prioritize taking care of themselves, and switch their environment so authority figures feel less prominent.

Zigzagger procrastinators constantly shift between whatever has their attention one moment to whatever catches their eye the next. Shatz recommends they add structure and concreteness to their plans by setting specific goals and unpacking the steps needed to achieve them, engineer their environment to reduce temptations and distractions, ride the waves of their productivity rhythms, and seek support from an “accountability buddy.”

An Old Problem in a Fast-Changing World

“Procrastination isn’t just a matter of motivation or bad time management,” Dr Shatz says. “These are really unhelpful misconceptions. Procrastination revolves around the tug-of-war between helpful elements of our drive to act and harmful elements of our drive to delay.”

Shatz draws on insights from hundreds of studies in psychology, behavioural economics, neuroscience, and related fields. He emphasises that procrastinators come from a wide variety of backgrounds, and that people can embody more than one type at once. “Procrastination is an ancient human problem but the increasing bombardment of digital distractions in our lives may be making it worse,” Shatz says. “It can be hard to tear ourselves away from the various apps, platforms and games that provide an endless torrent of content that’s been ruthlessly optimized to capture our attention.”

Modern work is also encouraging procrastination, Shatz argues, partly because many tasks are “hard to care about at a basic psychological level.” “Long ago,” he says, “people mostly needed to do things that had fairly clear and immediate consequences, like hunt food (or starve). People were unlikely to procrastinate on those tasks because the drive to not starve is powerful in a visceral way. Today, we regularly have to do nebulous things with amorphous future consequences, like email tax forms to our accountant.”

The Real Cost of Putting Things Off

Shatz shows that procrastination causes serious harm to lives and careers, as well as to entire organisations and national economies. For many people, it bites hardest at university: leaving assignments and revision to the last minute leads to worse grades and sometimes outright failure. Half of students have been found to procrastinate chronically, and while adults in employment fare somewhat better, one in five still procrastinate chronically, contributing to unemployment and lower salaries. Shatz points to one large-scale study that found a $21,000 drop in average salary for every point decrease on a five-point procrastination scale, and notes that procrastination has been found to cost employers an estimated $20,000 per employee per year in the US, given that employees spend roughly two hours a day procrastinating on average.

“Overcoming procrastination will become even more important as use of AI grows,” Shatz argues, because “personal productivity is expected to be one of the skills that remains essential for most types of work — including deploying AI.”

Beyond the workplace, procrastination causes serious financial harm, including when people delay paying bills or saving for retirement. It can also interfere with relationships. “It can make colleagues resent us, if they have to pick up our slack. At home, it can cause fights with our family, if we don’t do the chores we promised to. It can get in the way of making friends and finding romance. All of this can make procrastination a very isolating problem, which hurts us when we need other people the most,” Shatz says. He adds that procrastination can inflict serious harm on emotional wellbeing and even physical health, partly because of the stress, shame, guilt and regret it generates, but also because it leads to unhealthy behaviours such as going to sleep too late, exercising too little, or postponing medical screenings.

The Psychology Behind Why We Delay

“We are naturally wired to try to increase the pleasure that we experience and decrease our pain, a phenomenon called the hedonic principle,” Shatz explains. “This leads us to pursue activities that we hope will make us feel good and avoid ones that we worry will make us feel bad, like when we watch funny videos to forget about an unpleasant task on our to-do list.” In the meantime, the task lurks in the back of the mind, draining energy, filling us with stress, and getting in the way of enjoyment.

“The reason we procrastinate despite this heavy cost is that we’re also naturally wired to focus on what’s immediately in front of us. When this immediacy principle combines with the hedonic principle, they push us to do whatever will make us feel better right now, instead of what will be better for us in the long term,” Shatz says.

Shatz’s toolkit for overcoming procrastination includes calling out catastrophizing, planning how to handle potential obstacles, eliminating distractions, adding friction between yourself and temptations, engineering your environment in your favour, unpacking overwhelming tasks into manageable steps, starting with easy wins, rejecting perfectionism for good enough, and riding the waves of your productivity rhythms. He advises perfectionist procrastinators to “avoid an all-or-nothing mentality and remind themselves that imperfect progress is still progress,” and to set aside other people’s unrealistic expectations and avoid comparisons that stoke fear of imperfection — a pitfall he says carefully curated social media highlight reels make particularly easy to stumble into.

Shatz also offers specific advice to people with ADHD, noting that they might need to work in a place with lots of background noise and retain certain temptations, such as video games, that people without ADHD might find distracting. The book offers further guidance for helping friends, loved ones, colleagues and employees stop procrastinating.

Shatz acknowledges that some high-functioning procrastinators, including Steve Jobs and Douglas Adams, can be extremely successful, but warns: “These procrastinators gain a false sense of security, which leaves them vulnerable to things going wrong in the future.”

“Solving procrastination isn’t about squeezing every possible drop of productivity out of your day,” Shatz emphasises. “It’s about helping you do the things you want to, when you want to, without guilt or stress. The key point is that you can choose how you spend your time, rather than have this choice stolen from you by procrastination.”

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Reference: Itamar Shatz, Solving Procrastination: The Science of Why We Put Things Off and How to (Finally!) Stop (Tarcher, 25 August 2026). Hardcover ISBN: 9798217047406