Why High Achievers Procrastinate on the Things They Care About Most

You can clear forty emails before lunch, fix a colleague's problem in ten minutes and run a meeting you prepared for in the car. And the one thing that actually matters (the proposal, the application, the chapter, the conversation that could change something) has been sitting there for three weeks.

If that sounds familiar, you have probably tried the obvious explanations already. You need a better system. You are disorganised. Deep down, you are lazy. But lazy people do not usually lie awake about the thing they are avoiding, and disorganised people do not usually run the rest of their lives this well. Something more specific is going on, and research on perfectionism has a good account of what it is.

(If you do not think of yourself as a high achiever at all and just want to know why you put things off, the companion piece is written for you: Why Do I Procrastinate? (It's Usually Not Laziness).)

The more it matters, the harder it is to start

The strange thing about this kind of procrastination is its aim. It is not spread evenly across your to-do list. It gathers around the tasks whose outcome says something about you: work that will be judged, compared, graded, published, or read by someone whose opinion you care about. Low-stakes work gets done. High-stakes work waits.

That pattern is the clue. If the problem were time management, the important tasks would suffer no more than the trivial ones. When the delay targets exactly the things that carry a verdict, the delay is usually about the verdict.

High standards are not the problem. The fear riding on them is.

For years perfectionism was studied as a single trait, and the results on procrastination were confusing. An earlier meta-analysis that treated it that way found almost no link at all. The picture changed once researchers split perfectionism into two parts that often travel together but behave very differently:

• Perfectionistic strivings: setting high standards for yourself and working hard to meet them.
• Perfectionistic concerns: fear of making mistakes, harsh self-criticism when you fall short, doubting work you have already finished, and the sense that other people's approval depends on how well you perform.

In 2017, Fuschia Sirois, Danielle Molnar and Jameson Hirsch pooled the research on perfectionism and procrastination, covering roughly 10,000 people. The two halves pointed in opposite directions. Concerns were linked to more procrastination (a correlation of about .23). Strivings were linked to less (about −.22). Both effects are modest, which is normal in personality research, but the direction is the point. The high bar on its own goes with getting started. It is the fear of falling short of it that goes with delay.

The same split shows up with burnout. A meta-analysis by Andrew Hill and Thomas Curran combined 43 studies and nearly 10,000 people. Perfectionistic concerns had medium-to-large links with burnout. Strivings had small negative links, or none. And in some of their comparisons, work was where strivings looked least protective and concerns looked most harmful.

This is why the usual advice gets it backwards. "Lower your standards" asks you to give up the part that is mostly helping you. The part worth understanding is the one that turns each piece of work into a referendum on whether you are good enough.

If you would describe yourself as Type A, that label is a different thing again. It began as a theory about pace, competition and hostility rather than standards, and most of it did not hold up. Our article on what the research actually says about Type A personality untangles the two.

Why fear of falling short looks like putting things off

If finishing something means it will be judged, then not finishing it keeps the judgment away. As long as the report is not submitted, it cannot be found wanting. As long as you have not really tried, a weak result says nothing about what you could have done.

Procrastination researchers describe this in terms of mood. Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl argue that procrastination is largely about short-term mood repair: the task brings up something unpleasant, such as anxiety, self-doubt or dread, and putting it off makes that feeling go away right now. The bill goes to your future self, who inherits the same task with less time to do it.

Piers Steel's large 2007 review, which pooled 691 correlations from procrastination research, points the same way from another angle. Among the most consistent predictors of procrastination were how unpleasant a task feels and how little confidence a person has that they can do it well. A task that might expose you is about as unpleasant as tasks get, and self-doubt is exactly what perfectionistic concerns produce.

Seen this way, the delay is not a failure of willpower. It is a strategy that works, briefly, at its real job: making the threat of judgment go quiet for an afternoon.

The impostor cycle: over-prepare or delay

Psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes first described the impostor phenomenon in 1978, from their work with high-achieving women who believed, despite clear evidence of success, that they had somehow fooled people about their ability. Later research found the same experience well beyond that group, in men and women and across many professions. Clance was clear that it is not a disease. It is an experience that gets in the way of enjoying what you have achieved.

In her later work Clance described an impostor cycle, and it explains why high achievers can look like opposites from the outside:

1. A task arrives that will show what you can do.
2. Anxiety, self-doubt and worry show up.
3. You respond in one of two ways. You over-prepare, starting early and working far past what the task needs. Or you delay, putting it off and then working in a rush near the deadline.
4. It goes well, and you feel relief.
5. Then the credit goes somewhere else. If you over-prepared, the success was down to sheer effort, not ability. If you delayed, you got lucky.
6. The next task arrives, and nothing from the last success has carried over.

The hard part is that success does not break the loop. It feeds it. Each win gets explained away by effort or luck, so each one adds to the sense that you are getting away with something.

It also means the over-preparer and the procrastinator may be running the same pattern. One person rewrites the slide deck six times. Another does not open it until eleven at night. The path is different. The fear underneath can be identical.

What it looks like across a week

From the outside it often runs like this. A big piece of work lands. You clear everything else first, because the small things feel good to finish. You tell yourself you are gathering your thoughts. Eventually the deadline gets close enough that the fear of missing it outweighs the fear of doing it badly, and you sprint. It turns out fine, often better than fine. Someone says so, and the praise does not land, because you know how close it came. You are tired, and you promise yourself next time will be different. Then the next time arrives.

Over enough months, this is the loop the burnout research is describing. The cost does not come from the high standards themselves. It comes from living under the constant threat of falling short of them.

What helps, and what usually does not

What usually does not help is more pressure. Harsher deadlines, stricter systems and telling yourself off all add to the threat, and the threat is what drives the delay. Productivity tools are built for a scheduling problem, and this mostly is not one.

Being kinder to yourself sounds soft, but it has some evidence behind it. In a study that followed students across two exams, those who had procrastinated heavily before the first exam and then forgave themselves for it procrastinated less before the second, apparently because they felt less bad about the subject. It followed students rather than running an experiment, so it shows a link rather than proof. Separately, across four groups of people, Sirois found that those who procrastinate more tend to be less self-compassionate and more stressed, and that lower self-compassion explained part of that link.

Is it one pattern, or just procrastination?

For some people, putting things off, never feeling good enough, feeling like a fraud and running on empty move together as one pattern. For others it is mostly one of them. Plenty of people procrastinate heavily with no sense of being an impostor at all, and it is worth knowing which is true for you, because the useful next step is different. That is the question The Achiever's Pattern is built to answer: it scores whether the four move together for you before anything is written, rather than assuming they do.

Delay also has routes in that have little to do with achievement: pushing back against tasks other people impose, freezing when something feels too big, or only being able to start once a deadline is close. The plain guide to why people procrastinate walks through each of them.

Procrastination also shows up with ADHD. In a 2021 study of 490 adults, people who reported more ADHD traits also reported considerably more procrastination. If putting things off has been with you since school, across almost everything and regardless of what is at stake, fear of judgment may not be the whole story. The neurodivergence traits profile looks at attention, time and focus as traits, without diagnosing anything.

The bottom line

If you procrastinate on the things you care about most, it is probably not because you care too little. It is because a part of you cares a great deal about what the result will say about you, and keeping the work unfinished keeps that question unanswered. The high standards can stay. The fear riding on them is the thing worth understanding.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do high achievers procrastinate?

Often because the work feels like a verdict on them rather than on the work. Research that splits perfectionism in two finds that high standards themselves are linked to less procrastination, while fear of mistakes, harsh self-criticism and worry about falling short are linked to more. Delaying the work delays the verdict, which brings short-term relief.

Is perfectionism the same thing as procrastination?

No. Many perfectionists start early and over-prepare. In a 2017 meta-analysis of roughly 10,000 people, perfectionistic strivings (high standards) went with less procrastination, and perfectionistic concerns (fear of falling short) went with more.

Should I lower my standards to stop procrastinating?

The research suggests the standards themselves are mostly not the problem. High standards are linked to less procrastination and show little or no link to burnout. The fear of falling short of them is what is linked to both, so that is the part worth working on.

What is the impostor cycle?

Pauline Clance's description of how impostor feelings keep themselves going. A task that will show your ability brings anxiety and self-doubt. You respond by over-preparing, or by delaying and then rushing. It goes well, but the success gets credited to effort or luck rather than ability, so the next task starts the cycle again.

Is procrastination a sign of ADHD?

Not on its own. People procrastinate for many different reasons. Procrastination is more common among adults who report more ADHD traits, so if it has shown up across almost everything since childhood, it can be worth learning how attention works for you. Only a qualified clinician can assess ADHD.

Sources

• Sirois, F. M., Molnar, D. S. & Hirsch, J. K. (2017). A meta-analytic and conceptual update on the associations between procrastination and multidimensional perfectionism. European Journal of Personality, 31(2), 137-159.
• Hill, A. P. & Curran, T. (2016). Multidimensional perfectionism and burnout: a meta-analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20(3), 269-288.
• Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: a meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65-94.
• Sirois, F. & Pychyl, T. (2013). Procrastination and the priority of short-term mood regulation: consequences for future self. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(2), 115-127.
• Clance, P. R. & Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241-247.
• Sakulku, J. & Alexander, J. (2011). The impostor phenomenon. International Journal of Behavioral Science, 6(1), 73-92. (Describes the impostor cycle from Clance, 1985.)
• Wohl, M. J. A., Pychyl, T. A. & Bennett, S. H. (2010). I forgive myself, now I can study: how self-forgiveness for procrastinating can reduce future procrastination. Personality and Individual Differences, 48(7), 803-808.
• Sirois, F. M. (2014). Procrastination and stress: exploring the role of self-compassion. Self and Identity, 13(2), 128-145.
• Oguchi, M., Takahashi, T., Nitta, Y. & Kumano, H. (2021). The moderating effect of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder symptoms on the relationship between procrastination and internalizing symptoms in the general adult population. Frontiers in Psychology, 12.