The solution, instead, is to look for what is holding the procrastinator back. If anxiety is the major barrier, the procrastinator actually needs to walk away from the computer/book/word document and engage in a relaxing activity. Being branded “lazy” by other people is likely to lead to the exact opposite behavior.

Often, though, the barrier is that procrastinators have executive functioning challenges — they struggle to divide a large responsibility into a series of discrete, specific, and ordered tasks. Here’s an example of executive functioning in action: I completed my dissertation (from proposal to data collection to final defense) in a little over a year. I was able to write my dissertation pretty easily and quickly because I knew that I had to a) compile research on the topic, b) outline the paper, c) schedule regular writing periods, and d) chip away at the paper, section by section, day by day, according to a schedule I had pre-determined.

Yeah, this matches my experience from when I used to tutor people. They tended to be below grade level and would fall victim to a fear of failure, since their self-esteem has taken hits from struggling with the work, in their mind the failure would be confirmation that they’re stupid and would make them not want to try. Getting them to change their mentality resulted in more productive sessions going forward and accomplishing that required addressing the root causes of their anxiety and/or skill deficits.