For centuries, we’ve treated procrastination as proof of personal weakness. A defect to be optimized, to be fixed. But what if we thought of procrastination as a signal, rather than a flaw, suggests neuroscientist and author Anne-Laure Le Cunff.

To decode these signals, Le Cunff introduces ‘The Triple Check Method,’ a diagnostic tool to understand the root cause of the delay. She also reveals how to identify your personal “magic window,” a tool for effortless concentration that can help you rewire against procrastination.

ANNE-LAURE LE CUNFF: Procrastination has become a little bit of a dirty word, and that's because we have just been through hundreds of years of moralization around productivity and work. Being productive means that you are a good, useful, helpful contributor to society. In a way, we have all agreed to tie our self-worth to our productivity, and so not being productive means that you're being lazy, you're not contributing, you're not being useful and helpful to society. Because of the efficiency worship that we have developed in our industrial age, we are now seeing procrastination as a character flaw rather than what it is, a signal that is worth listening to. This has propped up an entire industry of productivity, whether it's online courses telling you how to manage your life and your time, and how to make the most of every single minute. Templates for you to track all of your tasks, wearables to tell you whether you've been using your time in the right time, and making sure that you're not missing any notifications. Calendars are ruling the way we spend our time. So, even if at a personal level you don't feel like productivity is the most important thing you want to optimize for, it's very hard to resist the sirens of our society telling you, you must be more productive. As a result of this society that keeps on telling us that we need to be productive to be a good person, whenever we find ourselves procrastinating, we just try to ignore it. We push through using our willpower and we feel self-blame and self-judgment. Instead, there's a very simple tool that you can use whenever you experience procrastination. A tool that is based on self-discovery, on thinking like a scientist and trying to understand what the signals are. This tool is called the Triple Check, and it's about asking yourself, why am I procrastinating? Is it coming from the head, from the heart, or from the hand? If it's coming from the head, it means that at a rational level, you're not fully convinced that you should be working on that task in the first place. If it's coming from the heart, it means that at an emotional level, you don't think this is going to be quite fun or enjoyable to work on. And if it's coming from the hand, that means that even though at a rational level you feel like I should be working on this. At an emotional level, you feel like that looks like fun. At a practical level, you feel like you're not equipped with the right tools or you don't have the right resources in order to get the job done. What's great about the Triple Check tool is that it's not just a tool for a diagnosis. It also tells you what to do for each of those situations. So, if the problem is rational coming from the head, it means that you might want to redefine the strategy, maybe reach out to your colleagues and tell them, "Hey, I'm not quite convinced this is the way we should go about this. Do you want to go and brainstorm together and see if there's a better approach that we could use?" If the problem is emotional coming from the heart, you might want to redesign the experience so it's more fun. That could look like going to your favorite coffee shop or grabbing a colleague and say, "Hey, let's do a little bit of coworking, while I work on this task." And if the problem is practical, where you feel like you don't have the right tools, or resources, or skills, then raise that hand, ask for help. Tell people around you, the people you're working with that maybe you need a bit of mentoring or coaching, or you need to take a course in order to be able to do that task. Sometimes you'll go through the Triple Check, head, heart, hand, and everything feels in alignment and still you're procrastinating. In this case, it might be worth looking outside of yourself for systemic barriers, and that means having honest, sometimes difficult conversations with other stakeholders. Redesigning your environment, if it is not conducive to you being focused and productive. Or sometimes completely removing yourself from that work environment and doing something else, because you might not be able to change that situation every time. Your magic windows are those moments of high productivity, creativity, and focus. Where you feel like there is zero effort involved, time is flowing, and your attention is completely locked onto the task that you're working on. Whether you've noticed it or not, we have all gone through those kinds of magic windows in our lives. Those are the moments when you look at the time and you feel like, where did it go? What happened? Maybe you were lost in a conversation with a friend, maybe you were working on a creative task, maybe you were taking a walk. Those are your magic windows. And what's amazing is that once you learn to identify them, you can start becoming a bit more intentional and opening those magic windows at will during your daily life. You might think that mindfulness and productivity are kind of antithetic and don't really belong together, but when you go back to the very definition of mindfulness, it's really about paying attention to your experience in the present moment without self-blame or self-judgment. Mindful productivity is about cultivating this awareness in the way you work and direct your focus. Mindful productivity is really about answering three key questions. When is my magic window, what belongs in this window, and how can I keep that window open? The traditional definition of productivity only focuses on time as the most important resource, and the assumption here is that every minute is a little box that you need to fill with as much stuff as possible in order to be productive. With mindful productivity, you consider other very important resources, your physical resources, your emotional resources, and your cognitive resources, and that really means thinking about your emotions, your energy, and your executive function. To practice mindful productivity requires to change your perspective as to what the most important resource is, from time to energy. We have a very negative relationship with procrastination. If you go online trying to find solutions as to how to deal with procrastination, you're going to only find articles that tell you how to beat procrastination, very violent, but instead, if we start seeing it as a useful signal, it allows us to better connect with the emotions that are around that procrastination and to understand that this is really just your brain trying to send us a signal. By reconnecting with these emotions instead of trying to ignore them, not only are we going to understand ourselves better, but also better understand our relationship to work and become more productive in the process. In Buddhism writing there is a concept called Death by Two Arrows that tries to explain some of the sources of human suffering. So the way it works is that whenever we experience a difficult emotion, that's the first arrow. So, in the case of procrastination, when we procrastinate, that's the first arrow. But then there's a second arrow, which is the shame and the self-blame that we experience, because of the first experience. What's very important to know is that, that second arrow is completely optional. We don't have to add a second layer of suffering to the difficulty and the challenges that we're facing in the first place.