If you’ve ever wondered how to stop procrastinating, the description that sticks with us comes from Dr Timothy Pychyl, a professor who has spent his career studying it: we avoid doing what we should, and give in to feeling good instead. It’s an accurate account of what’s happening. It’s also useless as an instruction, because knowing why you’re avoiding the literature review has never once made you open it.
The advice we come back to, and the one Alison shared alongside Dr Nonhlanhla Dube, is that the way out isn’t “just do it”. It’s just get started. Not the chapter. Not the whole review. The smallest possible move you can name. Open one paper and read the abstract. That’s the entire commitment.
Give yourself permission to stop
The part that actually makes this work is what comes next: you’re allowed to stop after that one small thing. Genuinely allowed. Most people don’t, because once you’re in contact with the task it tends to be less awful than the version you’d built up in your head, and starting gets a bit easier the next time round.
This is also why self-compassion matters here rather than being a nice-to-have you get to once the real work is done. Beating yourself up for avoiding the task adds another layer of bad feeling to push against, which makes starting harder, not easier. Treating yourself decently isn’t a soft option. It’s the first step.
We’ve written before about why procrastination is not a time management problem, and this fits the same pattern. It’s not about finding more hours. It’s about shrinking the entry point until there’s nothing left to resist. If you want the fuller version of this idea, we go into it in how to overcome procrastination.
If this is a pattern you recognise in your own work, it’s the kind of thing we help people work through in coaching.
If this sounds familiar at work, our ADHD leadership coaching helps leaders and managers build support around what gets in the way.
