The Delay Taxonomy: Is This Actually Procrastination?
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Pychyl argues that most self-flagellation about procrastination is misdiagnosis. In the research literature procrastination has a precise definition — the voluntary delay of an intended action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay — and most delay in a normal life does not meet it. Purposeful delay (rational scheduling), inevitable delay (an internet outage, a cancelled flight) and delay due to emotional problems (grief, illness) are all delay, none of them procrastination. The framework is a sorting rule you run before you allow yourself any guilt: identify what kind of delay this is, then respond to the actual category. It also closes the escape hatch — a vague, 'anemic' intention that was never really formed is itself an act of procrastination.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Start from the definition, not the feeling
Ask whether this delay meets the research definition: a voluntary delay of an intended action, taken while expecting to be worse off for delaying. If any of those three elements is missing, it is not procrastination.
Pro tip Write the definition down somewhere you can see it. Most guilt evaporates on contact with the word 'voluntary'.
- 2
Rule out purposeful delay
Did you use practical reason and decide, all things considered, that this is better done later? Rescheduling a call to a slot that fits both diaries, or bumping a task because a genuinely higher priority arrived, is rational agency — an intention update, not a failure.
Watch out Do not use this category as cover. Purposeful delay comes with a reason you could defend out loud, not a vague 'later'.
- 3
Rule out inevitable delay
Was the delay imposed on you? Infrastructure failures, cancelled flights, other people's schedules. Nobody looks at a stranded traveller and calls them a terrible procrastinator; extend yourself the same reading.
- 4
Rule out delay due to emotional problems
Grief, bereavement, illness and mental health crises stop the world for a while. Pychyl's own world stopped when his father died in 2016 and things did not get done — and neither he nor anyone else called it procrastination. Name this category when it applies instead of stacking guilt on top of pain.
Watch out This is the category people most often deny themselves, which turns a hard season into a shame spiral.
- 5
Check for an anemic intention
The subtle case: 'I'll do that on the weekend.' When does the weekend start? What exactly will you do? A weak, unspecified intention lets you claim you never really intended it — but failing to form the intention is itself the act of procrastination.
Pro tip Test an intention by asking for the start time and the first physical action. If neither exists, the intention is anemic.
- 6
Respond to the category you actually found
Purposeful and inevitable delay need no fix. Emotional delay needs care and time. Anemic intentions need a concrete implementation intention. Only genuine procrastination needs the emotion-regulation work — and knowing which one you're in is what stops the nightly self-beating.
In the wild
Pychyl's father died in 2016. He describes sitting on his porch next to a picture of his dad and says that when his father died, his world stopped for a little while and things didn't get done. Not once did he tell himself he was a terrible procrastinator, and nobody else did either. In the taxonomy this is delay due to emotional problems — a distinct category from procrastination, requiring time and compassion rather than technique. His point is that people routinely deny themselves this category, applying the procrastination label to grief and adding a moral failure on top of a loss.
→ The delay was correctly classified as grief rather than character failure, avoiding a guilt-and-shame spiral on top of bereavement.
Ali mentions never having read Seneca or Marcus Aurelius, and catches himself: it isn't procrastination because he never actually intended to read them by a given date — it's just on a list and will happen at some point. Pychyl accepts the distinction, then sharpens it: you can also let yourself off the hook by never forming the intention, and if the intention was anemic ('I'll do that on the weekend'), the not-forming is where the procrastination lives. The taxonomy runs both ways — it acquits harmless delay and convicts the vague intention people hide behind.
→ The item stays on a list without guilt, but the same test would flag a vaguely-intended goal as procrastination in disguise.
Common mistakes
Using one word, 'procrastination', for every delay
If delay is the only word you own, every rescheduled task ends the day as self-criticism. Pychyl's point is that people beat themselves up at night over what was in fact a conscious, sensible decision to wait.
Inventing a 'good procrastination'
Pychyl is blunt that turning the vice into a virtue for the sake of a catchy headline is nonsense. There are good forms of delay; procrastination, by definition, leaves you worse off. Don't rehabilitate the term — use the right one.
Hiding behind an intention you never formed
'I never really decided to do it' feels like an acquittal. But an anemic intention with no time, no scope and no first action is the procrastination — the avoidance happened at the planning stage, not the execution stage.
From the transcript
“procrastination in the research literature is defined as the voluntary delay of intended action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay”
“so there's three right off the top purposeful inevitable delay due to emotional problems that um aren't procrastination and we need to separate those”
“sometimes we can let ourselves off the hook of procrastination because we say well I never really made the intention when not making the intention…”
From the episode
World's Leading Expert On How To Solve Procrastination - Dr Tim Pychyl
Dr Tim Pychyl