Procrastinating is simply a lack of prioritization and this can really go to huge proportions. Sometimes one keeps delaying a task even if one knows that the task is already delayed a lot and is important and urgent. To work on such a task, one must first accept that one has already delayed the task and failed in completing it on time. Since one doesn’t want to own that delay, one avoids the ownership of the failure by totally running away from the task and delaying it further. This eventually increases the cost of not doing or doing the task.

Commitment leads to a duty -> Failure to adhere to the commitment leads to guilt -> The guilt makes you delay more -> This happens until you cannot delay any further or you find an embarassing excuse for the total delay

Typically, the mind ropes in some other activity or task that is not so important or urgent and it creates or brings out an emotion towards doing that task. It makes you feel that the stop-gap task is a very important task and it will help you to be better. This is how your mind cheats you. To test if this is actually true, always do the earlier pending task and now check how do you feel about the stop-gap task. Usually, the earlier emotion present to work on the stop-gap task is no more.

Hope this is useful, thank you.