It Isn’t Perfectionism. I Went and Checked.
Mind · The Reading Room, Vol. 34 · 7 min read · What 216 studies found sitting behind it, why the flattering explanation is wrong, and the one question that moves a stuck task
Based on the published research of Piers Steel, PhD — Professor, Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. Research profile
Why do I procrastinate on small tasks has an answer that removes the usual explanation entirely. In the largest review of the evidence, perfectionism barely registered.
The dental appointment. It is a phone call. It takes ninety seconds and I have known about it since the fourteenth of June.
In that time I have run two hiring rounds, sorted out my mother’s pension paperwork, and rewritten a strategy document nobody asked me to rewrite. The phone call sits there, moves to the next day’s list, and moves again, and every time it moves it gets slightly heavier.
And the story I have always told about this is a flattering one. I care too much. I want to do it properly. I am, whisper it, a bit of a perfectionist.
So, why do I procrastinate on small tasks and not on the large ones that would actually justify that story. I went looking, and the answer took the compliment away.
The short answer: the largest review of the evidence pooled 216 separate pieces of research and 691 independent correlations, and found that perfectionism has almost no relationship with procrastination at all, at a correlation of .03.¹ What did show up strongly were conscientiousness and self-control, and, among the situational factors, how unpleasant the task itself is, at .40.¹ The task being small is not the point. The task being unpleasant is.
The skim version
- The review covered 216 works and 691 independent correlations, published in a leading psychology journal.¹
- Perfectionism correlated with procrastination at .03, which is effectively nothing.¹
- Task aversiveness, meaning how unpleasant the job is, came in at .40.¹
- Distractibility (.45) and impulsiveness (.41) mattered considerably more than anxiety or neuroticism (.24).¹
- Rebelliousness, the idea that you are secretly resisting being told what to do, came in at .12.¹
Why do I procrastinate on small tasks when I can do the big ones?
Because size was never the variable. Unpleasantness was, and small tasks are often the most unpleasant things on the list.
Think about what the dental call actually contains. A hold queue. A receptionist who will ask when I was last seen, which I do not know. The implication that I have let something slide. A calendar I will have to open in front of her and negotiate against.
Now think about the strategy document. Three uninterrupted hours, a subject I am good at, and a predictable feeling of competence for the whole of it. It is four hundred times the work and it is pleasant, and the review found that pleasantness is precisely the thing that predicts whether something gets started.¹
So the pattern is not a mystery and it is not a character defect. You are not avoiding the hard things. You are avoiding the ones with an unpleasant texture, and then judging yourself using a measure, size, that has nothing to do with the mechanism.
Why the perfectionism story survives anyway
Because it is the kind version, and it has been repeated for thirty years.
This is the part I found genuinely annoying. The perfectionism explanation is everywhere. It is in every article about procrastination, it is what a well-meaning colleague will say to you at a conference, and it is what I have been telling myself since roughly 2011.
The review is unusually direct about it. It reports that perfectionists procrastinate at similar rates to everybody else, and in places at slightly lower rates, and that the clinical assumption is not supported by the accumulated data.¹ What the review does find sitting underneath procrastination is conscientiousness, at .62, and self-control, at .58, both negative, which is a technical way of saying the people who put things off are not lower in standards. They are lower, in that moment, in the thing that gets a task started.¹
And the reason the flattering story survives is that it is more comfortable than the true one. High standards is a nicer sentence than the call is unpleasant and I did not want to make it. But the second sentence is the one that leads anywhere, because you can do something about an unpleasant call. There is nothing to do about being the sort of person who cares too much.
Between us
This is one review, published in 2007, and it is the biggest one there is on the subject: 216 works, 691 correlations, in Psychological Bulletin.¹ When a finding is that consistent across that many studies, I take it seriously, and the perfectionism result is one of the cleanest null findings in the whole thing.
Being fair about it: these are correlations, which means the review can tell you what travels alongside procrastination and not what causes it. A great deal of the underlying research used students and self-report questionnaires, so it is measuring how people describe themselves rather than watching them fail to make a phone call. And the review is now some years old. What I am confident about is that the perfectionism explanation is not carrying the weight everybody puts on it. What I would not claim is that a correlation of .40 tells you why your particular Tuesday went the way it did.
If the list is mostly made of small unpleasant things that belong to other people, the list itself is the finding. The Quiet Audit is a private ten-minute pass through what is actually on it. Start here.
The two stories, side by side
| The perfectionism story | What the review found | |
|---|---|---|
| The cause | Standards too high to start | The task is unpleasant to be inside |
| The evidence | Correlation of .03 | Correlation of .40 |
| What it says about you | Something fixed in your character | Something specific about this job |
| What you can do | Very little, and feel bad | Change the unpleasant part |
The last row is the whole reason this matters. One story ends the conversation and the other one opens it. The habit of running the harsh version first has its own history, and if the smallest choices have started to feel disproportionately heavy, that is worth reading separately.
What to do instead of trying harder
Name the unpleasant part out loud, in one sentence, before you decide anything.
Not the task. The unpleasant part of the task. There is a real difference between book the dentist and I do not want to be asked when I was last seen. The first is a line on a list that has now survived eleven weeks. The second is a specific, small, entirely manageable social discomfort that lasts about four seconds.
Once it is named, one of three things is usually true. Sometimes the discomfort is so trivial when stated plainly that you just do the thing, slightly irritated at yourself, which is fine. Sometimes it points at a different route, an online booking form rather than a phone call, an email rather than a conversation. And sometimes the unpleasantness is genuinely large and the task deserved its eleven weeks, which is information rather than failure.
What this replaces is the standard move, which is to look at the list, feel the weight, promise to be better tomorrow, and carry the same six items forward. That move has a poor record. Mine is eleven weeks long and has a receptionist in it.
The source for this piece
Piers Steel, PhD
Professor at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, and sole author of the largest meta-analytic review of procrastination research to date.
What we read: Steel, P., Psychological Bulletin (2007).¹
Where to follow his work: Research profile
Who else has measured this
Steel’s review settled the perfectionism question. A second researcher has since mapped why the emotional half of procrastination matters more than the planning half.
Fuschia Sirois, PhD (faculty profile · Scholar · ResearchGate), Professor of Psychology at Durham University, has published extensively on procrastination as a problem of mood regulation rather than time management, finding that people procrastinate to escape the unpleasant feeling a task provokes — in line with the task-aversiveness finding at the centre of this piece.
A meta-analysis of 216 studies and an independent programme of mood-regulation research, both landing on the same mechanism: it is the feeling, not the size of the job.
The task being small is not the point. The task being unpleasant is.
Questions worth having an answer to
So is it just laziness after all?
No, and the review does not support that either. The strongest correlate is conscientiousness, which means people who procrastinate more tend to score lower on the trait that starts tasks, not lower on the trait that cares about them.¹ Caring and starting are two different systems.
Why does it get worse when I am tired?
Because the review found distractibility and impulsiveness among the strongest correlates, at .45 and .41.¹ Both get worse on a short night. The unpleasantness of the task has not changed. What has changed is how much pull is required to override it.
Does a deadline actually help?
It usually does, and the review explains why: as the deadline gets closer, the value of doing the task rises relative to everything else on offer.¹ This is why small tasks with no deadline are the ones that live longest. Nothing ever makes them urgent.
Should I just break it into smaller steps?
Only if the size was the obstacle, and for small tasks it obviously was not. Breaking a ninety-second phone call into three thirty-second steps produces three things you are avoiding instead of one.
The one move
Take the item that has been on your list longest. Write one sentence naming the unpleasant part, not the task. Then decide whether to do it, route around it, or leave it there on purpose.
If most of the stuck items turn out to belong to other people, that is worth seeing written down. The Quiet Audit is a private pass through what your week is actually carrying. Start here.
On the researcher. Piers Steel is an organisational psychologist, not a clinician: his meta-analysis describes correlations across the general population and cannot diagnose why any one task, on any one day, did not get done.
Sourcing, disclosure and disclaimers
This is not medical advice. Blue Leaf Journal publishes general information for a general readership. Nothing here is a diagnosis, a treatment recommendation, or a substitute for care from a clinician who knows your history.
We are not clinicians. Blue Leaf Journal is an independent publication. We read published research and translate it. The findings belong to the researchers and institutions named and linked above; the plain-English rendering is ours, and so is any error in it.
No affiliation and no endorsement. Blue Leaf Journal is not affiliated with Piers Steel, Fuschia Sirois, the University of Calgary or Durham University. None of them has reviewed, approved or endorsed this article, and none of them is responsible for it. They are cited because their published work is the evidence for what it says.
No commercial relationship. Nobody named above paid for or was paid for this coverage. There are no affiliate links, no sponsored placements and no gifted products in this article.
How this was checked. Every figure above is drawn from the primary papers, each linked in the references, and can be verified there. Sources were checked on 6 September 2026. If you find something we have got wrong, write to jobrennan@blueleafjournal.com and we will correct it and say that we did.
References
1. Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: a meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65-94. Read the review
Jo Brennan writes the Mind and Load desks at Blue Leaf Journal: the overthinking, the noticing, and the jobs that are technically nobody’s and therefore hers. She made the phone call the morning this went to the editor. It took two minutes and nobody asked her anything at all.
Written by Jo Brennan for Blue Leaf Journal. Updated: 1 September 2026.
