In a 1978 survey, 5 percent of the population defined themselves as procrastinators. Ferrari recently completed two large studies of the behavior. "We found that between 20 and 25 percent of the population are procrastinators."

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Psychologists define procrastination as a gap between intention and action.

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Chronic procrastinators feel bad about their decisions to delay—which helps distinguish procrastination from laziness.

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Laziness involves a lack of desire; with procrastination, the desire to start that project is there, but it consistently loses out to our appetite for the delay. And this is no ordinary delay.

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Procrastination is considered a needless, often irrational delay of some important task in favor of a less important, but seemingly more rewarding, task.

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And that accompanying negative feeling—the gnawing guilt, the building anxiety—is one way we know we're not doing what we're supposed to do.

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Researchers now believe that procrastination reflects the triumph of impulsivity over the lure of future rewards.

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We're terrible at processing time.

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Because our brains were built largely when survival hinged on mastering immediate conditions, we engage in temporal discounting—that is, we misjudge the importance of a task when it lies even a short distance in the future, so we see distant rewards as smaller than they really are.

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And our impulsivity never had it so good: Modern life furnishes an abundance of endlessly reinforcing demands for our attention, such as the streams of tweets you subscribe to.

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However much procrastination reflects a mismatch between our stone-age brains and the highly sophisticated environments those same brains have created, it reaches deep into our being.

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"It is always about choice," observes Canadian psychologist Timothy Pychyl. And that makes procrastination quintessentially an existential problem.

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"We're given a certain amount of time and we have to use it," he says.

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"It's the acts of omission that lead to our biggest regrets in life. Where do we choose to invest ourselves?"

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Procrastination, he contends, bumps right up against our commitment "to who it is we are trying to be in life."

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Even indecision and inaction are really decisions and actions, Pychyl notes.

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"Your indecision, your inaction, becomes your choice, your act—perhaps your whole life."

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Unless, of course, you take deliberate steps to counteract your worst tendencies.

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Despite the plethora of modern distractions, procrastination has been a problem for about as long as humans have been keeping track of such things.

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Both the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita mention its dangers. Shakespeare made it Hamlet's folly.

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Four million years ago, when our hominid brains first emerged, there were not 500 channels beckoning us.

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The time suck known as Facebook had yet to exert its pull. But since then, our external world has lapped our internal processing capacity.

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The result is an array of impulse control issues.

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Procrastination, many psychologists believe, is a correlate of overeating, overspending, gambling addiction, and pornography addiction.

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We're increasingly short on the ability to resist temptation.

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As with many problems that arise from the fundamental human condition, procrastination has not been easy to fix.

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For nearly 40 years, psychologists have tried to identify the core foible.

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Some think perfectionism is the problem; others find anxiety at its heart.

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There are those who suspect teenage rebellion against overbearing parents and those who see it as a self-handicapping predicament resulting from a fear of failure.

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Since plenty of procrastinators claim to do their best work under pressure, thrill-seeking has been fingered as well.

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Most researchers favor one idea over another, but so much competing data has left little room for agreement on theories.

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Given the fragmented state of the literature, I’m going to give you a tip based on a hypothesis of my own—that as humans we’re evolutionarily wired for Flow and are always seeking the state.

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Procrastination seems to occur right up until it just can’t anymore.

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The deadline has finally come too close, the essay is due the next morning or your boss is haggling with you for a report.

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The other place it often shows up is when a task is just unbearably tricky—when something feels like an insurmountable obstacle.

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That seems to be the pattern.

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We procrastinate right up until we no longer can on certain tasks and we delay other tasks because of their gargantuan nature.

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I’m speculating that these tendencies are both due to the challenge skills balance (one of Flow’s most potent triggers).

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The challenge skills balance states that the sweet spot for Flow is right between boredom and anxiety where the challenge of the task we’re doing just outstrips our skill level.

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We often stop procrastinating when face to face with a deadline.

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Especially with boring or mundane tasks.

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Eventually, the stakes become too high and we just have to get it done.

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This need to crank it out super fast raises the challenge level thus driving us into Flow.

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So next time you spot this pattern with a boring or mundane task (where the challenge level is too low), create an artificial deadline for your task and force yourself to bang it out in time for that.

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This way you’ll get the same increase in the challenge without the danger of coming up against a real deadline and it should slate your procrastination.

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Counter to this, when a task is too daunting we procrastinate it because the challenge is too high. It spikes anxiety.

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So when you’re faced with this do the opposite of creating an artificial deadline—block out a big chunk of time to tackle the task.

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Ideally, more time than you need.

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This way anxiety will wane, and the challenge level will drop to meet the upper end of your skills landing you in a much more ripe position for Flow.

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So that’s it, folks, if a task is too dull, erect artificial deadlines.

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If it’s too tough, block out more time than you need.