Our story…

Each year I visit my home town in Adelaide, Australia. I studied psychology, so going back home always involves catching-up with good friends who became clinical psychologists. These conversations are always extremely interesting! 

On my last visit I learnt that one of the most common presenting problems is procrastination! I found that so surprising. After a long conversation, I asked my friend Jeremy if he could treat my unhelpful procrastination habits. I was genuinely curious to see how you treat procrastination. 

That kicked off a 10 week mission of intentionally trying to overcome procrastination! Each week I completed a self guided workbook and reported back on my progress, sharing insights about what did and didn’t work. 

Astonishingly, it was quite effective. I always procrastinate replying to emails (probably because of my dyslexia). However, after a few weeks I was able to sit at my desk, take a breath and get it done. To the outside observer that might seem unremarkable, but to me it was revolutionary. I felt like I had found a cheat code to life. 

On the back of that experience, I immersed myself in understanding the mechanics of overcoming procrastination. For the last 328 days and counting, I have intentionally overcome procrastination to get something important done. Each day I complete guided exercises that I created for myself to ensure I make progress on things that matter. The tasks I’ve completed while overcoming procrastination allowed me to accomplish several life long goals.

Along the way I roped my good friend and colleague Kemble into this obsession with procrastination. We started to wonder if we could build something to help other people overcome procrastination.

This got me extremely excited. In large part because I was excited to work with Kemble on something outside of our day jobs. Kemble is an unflappable weapon. A skilled software engineer and natural leader. Over the years, we’ve come to realise that we produce our best work when working together. Our strengths and weaknesses complement each other. Now we’re pushing the limits together with this project.

We’re working towards deleting procrastination. More on that later. 

The problem

The root cause of many human problems is a failure to manage discomfort. Procrastination and addictive habits perpetuate because people never learn to manage sudden, often unconscious flashes of discomfort. The diagram below outlines a basic model of procrastination.

For me, this looked like:

Open inbox and read email ⇒ flash of dread, feeling overwhelmed and lethargic ⇒ Think: “this message is going to take 30 minutes to respond to” ⇒ Create rationalisation: “I need to be more alert to write a good response, I’ll only waste time trying to respond now” ⇒ move onto another task ⇒ instant relief, feeling of overwhelm goes away ⇒ The belief that I need high energy to work is strengthened ⇒ procrastination habit reinforced.  

This is an extremely common and harmful pattern. Around 20% of people suffer from chronic procrastination (source). The tasks people procrastinate and the underlying causes for their initial discomfort vary from person to person. However, this basic reinforcement mechanism remains the same.

In its extremes, procrastination destroys lives. Great works of art, cures for diseases and entire companies don’t exist because people never learned to overcome this reinforcement loop. 

Ubiquitous internet access has made this problem worse. The option to escape discomfort is ever present. Discomfort avoidance is reinforced literally 100s of times a day. Just look at your average number of ‘phone unlocks’ per day for further evidence. 

Our best mechanism for combatting this problem is fairly intensive cognitive-behaviour therapy (source). Therapists train their clients to recognise a flash of distress and teach them alternative responses. This creates a new reinforcement loop to combat the maladaptive one. 

The problem is that Tik Tok and PornHub are always in your pocket. For every therapy session, there are hundreds of phone pickups. The ratio of reinforcement loops is massively skewed towards unhelpful mechanisms for coping with distress. It just isn’t a fair fight. 

While CBT interventions are effective, they are prohibitively expensive and difficult to scale. Additionally, the effect size for these interventions has not improved since the 1980s (source). We want to break this 40-year stagnation in treatment outcomes. 

We're building dramatically more effective treatment for procrastination with zero marginal cost! This could have a massive societal impact. Not only would it reduce unnecessary emotional suffering, it would unblock potential. On the margin, more projects would get completed – be it term papers, works of art or cures for diseases.

Our solution

We’re creating more engaging and user-friendly approaches to retraining discomfort aversion (e.g., chronic procrastination and pornography addiction). Doer is a mobile app designed to do this. It’s a science-based, interactive guide to overcoming procrastination. 

The app’s interactive content uses CBT principles to help people get things done. Adding daily tasks helps users uncover the root causes of their procrastination. Rather than a mounting to-do list, the app provides evidence-based guidance to make progress one task at a time.

The core experience involves training people to click a button whenever they have the urge to switch tasks, look-up porn or whatever their vise is. Initially, we don’t need to intervene. Just click the button and then go on with your procrastination. 

Crucially building this new habit brings awareness to the moment that discomfort arises. The habit of clicking the button creates a wedge between discomfort and the behavior that follows. We can use that wedge to gradually introduce replacement behaviors. There are a myriad of strategies that can help a person approach rather than avoid tasks. For example self-compassionate talk, lowering standards and breaking down tasks. We’re agnostic as to which of these will be most effective. In fact, we expect there will be individual differences in which interventions are most effective. 

As we collect data on people’s procrastination habits, we can give them unique insights about their own behavior. We help them understand which strategies are most effective at helping them overcome procrastination. Overtime we train the meta-skill of managing discomfort and getting things done.

It’s a simple idea with the potential for massive impact.

Help us make a dent in the universe. Download the app, share constructive feedback, connect us with funders or share words of encouragement!