So you got the job. Now what? Join me, Eleni Mata, on HBR's new original podcast, New

Here, the Young Professionals Guide to Work, and how to make it work for you. Listen for

free wherever you get your podcasts. Just search New Here. See you there!

Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickiff.

You don't have to be a member of Procrastinator's Anonymous to appreciate how paralyzing Procrastination

can be. And yes, there is such a group. They call Procrastination the grave where opportunity

is buried. We're all prone to it. We all feel guilty about it, and yet we still do it.

For many of us, it's a hard habit to break. A lot of the focus on overcoming Procrastination

has been on habit forming and discipline, getting the gumption to face the tasks you don't

like doing. But if it were that simple, it wouldn't be a problem anymore. Our guest today

offers three strategic paths to beat Procrastination in a comprehensive way. Habits, emotions, and

thought patterns, and she's here to lay those out for us. Alice Boyz is a former clinical

psychologist and the author of the book Stress Free Productivity. She also wrote the HBR article,

How to Stop Procrastinating. Alice, thanks for being here. Thank you for having me.

Now, what's your understanding of Procrastination? What purpose does it serve?

Yeah, so it's quite complicated. I think that it's often part of the creative process that

sometimes we, sometimes we procrastinate because we're doing something hard. Sometimes we need

that incubation period. Lots of problems of benefit from an incubation period where you take

a pause between when you hear the problem and when you start working on it. And of course,

we all know about Procrastination. You're a number one task that you're avoiding, but you've

also got a bunch of other things that normally you would avoid and it's the only time you ever

get around to doing those. The classic example is the student who, the only time they have

...