Procrastinator perfectionists wait for the conditions to be perfect before starting. Dwelling in hesitation, they live alongside the void that forms within you when you don’t do the thing you most want to do.

For me, motivation is this horrible, scary game where I try to make myself do something while I actively avoid doing it. If I win, I have to do something I don’t want to do. If I lose, I’m one step closer to ruining my entire life. And I never know whether I’m going to win or lose until the last second.

The fourth one is that procrastinators tell themselves that succeeding at a task requires that they feel like doing it; and, fifth, is entertaining the false idea that working when not in the mood is somehow suboptimal—that it’s best to wait till the lightning of inspiration strikes before motivating ourselves to stop procrastinating.

This is a little like the sensation of procrastinating. Often, the reason we don’t make a start is because we don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing in the first place – a mystifying fog has set in around us. I call it the fog of uncertainty. This is a well-studied phenomenon; one that scientists call ‘uncertainty paralysis’. It happens when we