The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing the task itself.

It can be alarming to realize just how much of life gets shaped by what we're actively trying to avoid. We talk about 'not getting around to things' as if it were merely a failure of organization, or of will. But often the truth is that we invest plenty of energy in making sure we never get around to them. It's an old story: some task, or some entire domain of life, makes you anxious whenever you think about it, so you just don't go there.

Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task

A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there's work to be done.

...will feel itself like a man who continues putting off some unpleasant business from day to day, yet knows it must be done, hates to set about it, wishes it over, and is continually haunted with the thoughts of its necessity.

The longer something takes, the less likely it is that you're going to finish it.

Boring Frustrating Difficult Unstructured or ambiguous Lacking in personal meaning Lacking in intrinsic rewards (i.e., it’s not fun or engaging) The more of these attributes a task has, and the more intense these attributes are, the less attractive a task will be to you, and the more likely you’ll procrastinate on it.

I'm a big believer in putting things off, In fact, I even put off procrastinating.

-Ella Varner

Another reason people don't work on big projects is, ironically, fear of wasting time. What if they fail? Then all the time they spent on it will be wasted. (In fact it probably won't be, because work on hard projects almost always leads somewhere.)

I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance…and if you have anxiety about initiating a project, then of course you will associate risk with failure.

The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don't just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed.

The longer you wait to do something you should do now, the greater the odds that you will never actually do it.

The habit of procrastination fatigues you more than the effort it takes to do the task.

Procrastination makes easy things hard and hard things harder.