Procrastination: why “tomorrow” is not a plan, and “tomorrow at 7 pm” is

An intention without a time rarely arrives anywhere. Here is what the research actually shows, and also where that research is weaker than the self-help books let on.

Write on a slip of paper: I am going to move more. Put it on the table in front of you. Look at it for a moment.

What is written there is a wish. Not an appointment.

That difference sounds small. Yet it is the difference between an intention that evaporates and an intention that happens. And unlike you might expect, that difference has been measured.

So the question of this piece is simple. Why does a good intention so often arrive nowhere, and what really changes when you attach a time and a place to it?

Why an intention is almost never enough

Psychologists call this the gap between intention and behaviour. You want something. You do not do it.

The German-American psychologist Peter Gollwitzer described in 1999 just how wide that gap is. Intentions account for roughly 20 to 30 per cent of what people go on to do.¹

In plain language: if all you know is what someone plans to do, you still know almost nothing about tomorrow. You know maybe a quarter of the story.

Paschal Sheeran and Thomas Webb summarised this field in 2016. Their conclusion is sobering. Even when you strengthen someone’s intention considerably, their behaviour shifts only a little.²

So it is not strange that your note does not work. It is not your character either. This is simply the standard outcome, for almost everyone.

The parcel with no address

Picture your intention for a moment as a parcel.

You packed it yourself. There is something good inside: thirty minutes of drawing, a walk, a chapter of a book. All that remains is delivery.

Your brain is the courier. And written on the parcel is one word: tomorrow.

Tomorrow is not an address. Tomorrow is an entire country. The courier drives around all day and never finds a door to ring. By evening the parcel is still in the van.

Now write instead: tomorrow at 7 pm, at my desk, thirty minutes. Now there is a street, a house number and a time.

That second sentence has a name. Gollwitzer called it an implementation intention.¹ Put very simply: it is an if-then sentence that decides in advance when, where and how you will act. If it is 7 pm, then I sit down at my desk and draw.

What happens in your head when you name a time

Willpower rarely collapses during the task. It collapses at the moment of deciding.

At seven in the evening you are standing in the kitchen, choosing all over again between the sofa and the desk. And tomorrow again. And the day after that. Every evening you put the same question to yourself, while tired.

An implementation intention removes that choice. You link a situation to an action in advance. The clock striking seven becomes the cue. You no longer have to negotiate, only to notice.

In 2006, Gollwitzer and Sheeran brought together the results of 94 studies, with more than eight thousand participants in total. The average effect on reaching a goal was medium to large.³

What does a finding like that mean? Roughly this. Take two comparable groups of people with the same goal. The group that made an if-then plan in advance reaches that goal noticeably more often. Not everyone. But noticeably more often.

I noticed this myself, and not because I had read it somewhere. I work full-time. After a long working day I would come home with a list full of plans, and lose, every single time. I thought I was too tired, or not motivated enough. Until I stopped saying “cook tonight and then draw,” and wrote it down precisely instead: what time I stand in the kitchen, what time I sit at my desk, what time I open my book. It worked, not through more willpower, but because my head no longer had to renegotiate every five minutes.

And what if it goes wrong?

An address does not help if the street is closed off.

That is why Falko Sniehotta and his colleagues studied a second kind of plan in 2005. They followed 352 cardiac patients during and after rehabilitation. Alongside the action plan, which fixes when you act, they looked at the coping plan. That is a plan for the setback.⁴

In plain language: you decide in advance what you will do when it does not work. If I come home tired, then I draw standing up for five minutes.

Their finding was striking. Action plans helped mainly early on, just after discharge. Coping plans helped later, once the first motivation had faded.⁴ The two do different work, at different moments.

And here the nuance belongs straight away. In 2013, Dominika Kwaśnicka and colleagues reviewed all the research on coping plans.⁵ Their verdict was more cautious than you might hope. It appears to help, but the studies differ widely in design and many of them are small.

Where the metaphor stops holding

An address gets the parcel to the door. It does not make anyone open it.

That is where this technique reaches its limit. Gollwitzer wrote that limit down himself, in the very same 1999 paper.

First, an implementation intention does not work when the underlying goal is weak.¹ Someone who does not really want to draw will not start drawing because of “tomorrow at 7 pm”. The plan strengthens a wish that is already there. It does not create one.

Second: let go of the goal, and the effect is gone within roughly two days.¹ The link in your head simply fades again.

And then the third point, which you rarely read in a productivity book. In 2014, Martin Hagger and Aleksandra Luszczynska reviewed the state of this whole field.⁶ They found considerable variation between studies, and remarkably few pre-registered randomised trials in which behaviour was measured objectively. Many results therefore rest on what participants report about themselves.

That does not make the technique worthless. It makes it less certain than a list of ten tips suggests. A tip that feels right is not yet a proven tip.

The misconception about mindset

Now the layer underneath, because that is where a misconception sits that many people have adopted by now.

The American psychologist Carol Dweck described two self-images in her book Mindset.⁷ A fixed self-image says: I am simply lazy. A growth-oriented self-image says: discipline can be trained.

That idea became enormously popular. And along the way it was made too big.

In 2018, Victoria Sisk and colleagues carried out two meta-analyses.⁸ The first examined 273 studies with nearly 366,000 people, looking at the link between mindset and academic achievement. The second examined 43 intervention studies with more than 57,000 people. In both cases the effects were, overall, weak.

Even so, the story is not empty. In 2019, David Yeager and a large team published a national experiment among American secondary school students in Nature.⁹ A short online session of less than an hour improved grades, but mainly among the students who were performing least well.

So what is left? This. A growth-oriented self-image is not a switch you flip. At best it is a door that opens for someone who is stuck.

And that is good news, really. Because writing down a time asks no belief in yourself. It asks for a pen.

What you can do tonight

1. Write down the time. Not “tomorrow”, but “tomorrow at 7 pm”. Your brain needs an address.
2. Add a place. “At my desk.” “In the kitchen.” Concrete, salient cues of exactly this kind are what the research recommends.⁶
3. Write it as an if-then sentence. Not “I am going to draw”, but “if it is 7 pm, then I draw”. That is the form that performs best in the studies.⁶
4. Let your plan be guided. Plans that come with a clear example and a fixed form do better than plans people invent entirely on their own.⁶ So feel free to copy the sentence above.
5. Make a plan for the setback too. “If I come home tired, then I draw standing up for five minutes.” This is the coping plan from Sniehotta’s research.⁴
6. Repeat your plan after a few weeks. A booster belongs, according to that same review, to a well-designed planning intervention.⁶
7. Work with your own clock. Till Roenneberg and colleagues developed a questionnaire that more than 55,000 people have completed. It shows that the timing of sleep and waking differs strongly between people, and depends on age and sex.¹⁰ So choose your hour, not that of a morning person on the internet.
8. Treat one miss as data. One missed evening says something about that evening. It says nothing about who you are.

An appointment with your future self

Tonight, when you think “I’ll start tomorrow,” ask yourself three questions. What time? In which place? For how long?

Write the answer down. Not because a note is magic. But because your brain needs an address to deliver your intention to.

“Tomorrow” is a promise to no one.
“Tomorrow at 7 pm, at my desk, thirty minutes” is an appointment with your future self.

And if it does not work? Then one parcel did not arrive. That is not a verdict on the courier.

Which intention have you been carrying around for months now without a time attached? And when did you last give yourself a real appointment, with an hour written next to it?

This article provides general information and is not medical or psychological advice. If you have questions about your own health or wellbeing, please speak with your GP or a treating specialist.

Related reading

• Discipline Doesn’t Begin with Making the Bed
• The Desire Path in Your Mind
• Letting go: why your brain clings to yesterday

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Sources

The numbers in the text refer to this list.

1. Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493–503. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.7.493
2. Sheeran, P., & Webb, T. L. (2016). The intention–behavior gap. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 10(9), 503–518. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12265
3. Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1
4. Sniehotta, F. F., Schwarzer, R., Scholz, U., & Schüz, B. (2005). Action planning and coping planning for long-term lifestyle change: Theory and assessment. European Journal of Social Psychology, 35(4), 565–576. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.258
5. Kwaśnicka, D., Presseau, J., White, M., & Sniehotta, F. F. (2013). Does planning how to cope with anticipated barriers facilitate health-related behaviour change? A systematic review. Health Psychology Review, 7(2), 129–145. https://doi.org/10.1080/17437199.2013.766832
6. Hagger, M. S., & Luszczynska, A. (2014). Implementation intention and action planning interventions in health contexts: State of the research and proposals for the way forward. Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, 6(1), 1–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/aphw.12017
7. Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.
8. Sisk, V. F., Burgoyne, A. P., Sun, J., Butler, J. L., & Macnamara, B. N. (2018). To what extent and under which circumstances are growth mind-sets important to academic achievement? Two meta-analyses. Psychological Science, 29(4), 549–571. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617739704
9. Yeager, D. S., Hanselman, P., Walton, G. M., Murray, J. S., Crosnoe, R., Muller, C., Tipton, E., Schneider, B., Hulleman, C. S., Hinojosa, C. P., Paunesku, D., Romero, C., Flint, K., Roberts, A., Trott, J., Iachan, R., Buontempo, J., Yang, S. M., Carvalho, C. M., … Dweck, C. S. (2019). A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement. Nature, 573(7774), 364–369. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1466-y
10. Roenneberg, T., Kuehnle, T., Juda, M., Kantermann, T., Allebrandt, K., Gordijn, M., & Merrow, M. (2007). Epidemiology of the human circadian clock. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 11(6), 429–438. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smrv.2007.07.005

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