Sometimes, putting things off can be a good thing. Maybe you need to step away from an angry email you composed, and then come back and reread it with a calmer heart before sending (or not sending) it. Or you could pause before buying your next item online, because you know it’s an impulse purchase and you need to think on it. But when every reason—no matter how shaky—gets you to delay and delay and nothing gets done, that’s a psychological issue: procrastination.
Technically, procrastination means “to delay the task initiation or completion despite expecting to be worse off for doing so.” Now researchers, with the help of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), know that procrastinators have distinctly different brains.
