Can £16 Fix Your Procrastination?

TLDR: For just £16 and four hours, chronic procrastinators went from procrastinating more than 90% of people to procrastinating less than 75%.

We’ve all procrastinated: scrolling social media instead of assignments, tidying to avoid difficult tasks, promising to exercise tomorrow. “Tomorrow” never comes.

More Serious Than You Think

~20% of adults are chronic procrastinators, costing them both income (tens of thousands per year) and well‑being (94% report lower happiness), and doubling their odds of unemployment.

Do Treatments Exist?

Yes, but not many, and they aren’t very practical. They usually require professional therapists, each of whom has to spend up to 10 weeks per patient, costing thousands of dollars.

Alternatively, procrastinators could dive into a lengthy self‑help guide that expects them to apply everything independently, something they neither want to do nor can do reliably.

We thought we could do better. It’s becoming clearer that regular people, given adequate training, can support others, from high school graduates in India to grandmothers in Zimbabwe. If those without a psychology background can do it, psychology graduates could do it too, maybe even better.

1. ~50% were chronic procrastinators at university, so they understand what it’s like, and it’s fresh in their memory.
2. They need experience supporting people to be competitive for jobs, and most are willing to volunteer to get that experience.
3. Their other options aren’t great, costing >£10k for years of further training, or spending hundreds of hours on irrelevant tasks before they start supporting people.

Our Study

We collaborated with a global mental health charity, Overcome, which trains psychology graduates to deliver free mental health coaching via video calls.

We designed a 4-week procrastination programme around these ideas:

We procrastinate on PANIC tasks:

• Painful
• Anxiety-provoking
• Not meaningful
• Ill-defined
• Challenging

BOSS helps us combat procrastination:

• Break down tasks
• Optimise enjoyment
• Schedule tasks
• Schedule rewards

SLAM are long-term healthy habits:

• Sleep
• Leisure
• Affect (i.e. mood)
• Mindfulness

BOSS helps people make quick progress, but without SLAM, the long‑term habits that prevent procrastination, those gains won’t last.

These simple, memorable frameworks get most of the way, but everyone’s different. That’s why we also trained our coaches in a toolkit of skills from two proven therapies to address whatever unexpected challenges arise.

How Did Your Study Work?

We recruited 117 adults from 27 countries, randomly assigning half to receive our 4-week online programme (intervention group) and the other half to wait four weeks (waitlist group). The intervention group engaged weekly with trained coaches via 1-hour video calls.

The participants reported their procrastination and life satisfaction:

• Before they started the programme or waitlist.
• After they finished the programme or waitlist.
• One month after completing the programme (intervention group only).

Did It Work?

In four weeks, participants in our programme went from being among the worst procrastinators (90th percentile) to average (50th percentile) after four weeks, improving further to the 25th percentile after another month.

And it’s not just procrastination that improved. Life satisfaction jumped from 5.7/10 to 6.9/10 post‑programme and to 7.4/10 at follow‑up.

It’s hard to say if the intervention group recovered on their own, so we compared their results against people who were just waiting for our intervention to start. Because the waitlist didn’t improve much at all, we concluded that the change in the intervention group must have been because of the intervention!  

How did this happen? 11 participants from the intervention group were interviewed to share their experiences:

• Accountability: “I have tried so many productivity apps… they haven’t worked…So actually having the coach keeping you warmly accountable was nice”
• Supportive Dialogues: “something about having a dialogue…having someone there to observe like different threads…work through different trees of your thinking in a way that’s like kind of difficult if you’re just like sitting down to type it out”
• Shifted Mindset: “I feel good about the fact that it’s something that I’m trying to manage now…I noticed the difference of not even trying versus knowing that I might fall back into those routines, but not punishing myself for it”

Money and Why It Matters

Traditional face-to-face therapy costs over £1000 per successful treatment. In 2020, global spending on health was £6.7 trillion, but only 2.1% was for mental health (~£142 billion). Assuming that we spent all on therapy, we could only help 15% of the 970 million experiencing mental health problems.

Even if we had the money, we wouldn’t have enough professionals. Even the UK doesn’t have enough (201 per 100,000). Kenya has just 15, and the rest of the world isn’t much better.

Straightforward cases like procrastination should be supported by well‑trained non‑professionals, freeing professionals to focus on severe, complex issues.

Our study brings this vision closer to reality. We showed that recent graduate volunteers, supporting others via video calls, can deliver real results for just £16 per treatment (£4 per session).

Limitations & Reflections

• We’re still collecting 40% of the follow-up data, and those who improved the least tended to finish the programme later.
• 90% of participants are under 40, so we don’t yet know how older procrastinators respond (younger participants saw the biggest boosts).

That being said, we’re still excited:

• If results wear off, adding a few £4 top-up sessions is cheap insurance.
• Even without productivity gains, a 2‑point rise on a 10‑point life‑satisfaction scale is huge. Another study found that procrastination and happiness improvements lasted a full year! While we can’t assume the same in our trial, it’s very promising.

What’s Next?

Overcome is rolling out this intervention, for free, for anyone who needs it, and to follow up with them over a longer period so we can see how the results hold up over time.

If you’re interested, you can sign up here. If you’re a psychology graduate who wants experience, learn more here.