Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: Am I postponing something, or avoiding it? Dr. Yasemin Yazan, Marc, Jürgen and Raphael dig into the razor-thin but crucial line between harmless postponement and true procrastination — knowingly, willingly accepting a real disadvantage against your own better judgment. Marc shares the cold-calling breakthrough that landed him a billion-euro client after five straight rejections, Jürgen makes the case that reason’s two real enemies are expectation and emotion, and together they ask whether “precrastination” — suddenly trying to do everything at once — might be procrastination’s stressed-out evil twin.
Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.
Yasemin opened with today’s topic: Action and Procrastination. What are possible reasons for procrastination, and what helps — that’s the question they wanted to explore. She noted upfront that, similar to depression, there’s a pathological/clinical diagnosis around this too, but they wouldn’t be looking at it medically today — just at the everyday experience of setting out to do something and never quite getting around to it. She reminded everyone this built directly on the previous day’s room on Action and Motivation, invited everyone to join and bring examples, reminded newcomers the room was recorded and would be published, and repeated the three room rules: a recognizable profile photo, first and last name, and at least one sentence in the bio — or, alternatively, contributing via chat.
Marc opened, joking that Jürgen would be thrilled, since this is one of his favorite topics, and asked Yasemin to keep the room on track given how complex the subject is. He’d jotted down a chain of related words beforehand: education, unconscious bias, belief systems, reflection, self-dialogue (not quite a monologue, since he answers himself honestly), and, depending on how that inner conversation goes, potentially seeking outside support — either arriving at answers himself or getting help from a coach to return to a sense of self-efficacy. He mentioned that while preparing the day before, he’d reread that the rational mind supposedly only accounts for about 5% of our behavior (with the usual caveat about percentages) — meaning education and unconscious bias matter precisely because you can’t expect a single session, or five sentences on paper, to change deeply ingrained behavior; we’re emotional beings, and these things are far too complex for a one-time read to produce lasting behavioral change. Turning to today’s specific topic, he found it useful to first distinguish: am I postponing something, or am I avoiding it? If I’m postponing, I’m already in a kind of inner dialogue, consciously deciding to do it later — ideally even setting a specific time for it. But if I notice I’m avoiding something, that’s where it gets dangerous, tying into education, unconscious bias, belief systems — because avoidance carries a real risk of never getting done at all, today, tomorrow, or ever. Avoidance, he noted, is itself a protective function, which makes it more complex and deeper — and raises the question of whether one can resolve it alone through self-dialogue, or whether outside help is needed, along with genuinely understanding why the avoidance is happening in the first place, since without that understanding, real change becomes unlikely.
Yasemin thanked him and suggested starting with his two framings — am I postponing, or am I avoiding — treating the other concepts he’d listed (education, unconscious bias, reflection, self-dialogue, support, self-efficacy) more as outcome variables they could connect to as insights emerged, especially since the following day would dive specifically into action competence. She invited Marc to look more closely at the two distinctions together.
Marc agreed, admitting that despite having this knowledge himself, and reading a lot because he genuinely enjoys it and wants to keep growing (he recalled the German song about life beginning at 66, meaning you’re never really “finished”), both processes happen to him. Sometimes he postpones things simply because they’re not fun, telling himself he’ll have plenty of time later — in those cases, he asks himself what his inaction actually costs him, whether in lost revenue or otherwise. Things he postpones tend to be more private in nature, like clearing out half of what’s sitting in his basement — not doing it has no real impact, since he never even sees the basement; he postpones that kind of thing onto bad weather, or good weather, whenever it’s convenient, since it makes no real difference either way. But then there are things he avoids, which is trickier — tied to fear or belief systems, requiring real self-dialogue to return to a sense of self-efficacy and develop strategies: once he’s recognized what’s going on, which tools does he use to tackle the things that scare him or make him uncomfortable. Both patterns, he stressed, still occur despite knowing all this — it would be silly to claim otherwise just because he’s aware of it intellectually. But recognizing which one it is — postponement or avoidance, a protective function — is the crucial first step, and once identified, gives him the first real lever to work with.
Yasemin thanked him, noting that postponing something could also reflect a kind of prioritization — is it important, urgent, and so on, tied to one’s own chosen sense of priority, which naturally shifts over time (as with his weather example). Avoidance, by contrast, can stem from many different backgrounds — he’d mentioned fear or discomfort, and that it can serve a protective function — so it’s worth first consciously distinguishing which one is actually happening, and if it’s avoidance, exploring where that might come from, even if the underlying cause isn’t immediately obvious.
She welcomed Jürgen. Jürgen said he found it excellent to start with these definitions, and that Marc’s pairing of postponement and avoidance had opened the topic up nicely — but he wanted to stay close to the standard definition of procrastination as commonly found in most reference sources. One component, he felt, hadn’t yet been sufficiently addressed: procrastination, by definition, involves knowingly and willingly accepting harm or a disadvantage. Their last two contributions had already indirectly gestured at the distinction between the two concepts, acknowledging it can genuinely make sense to postpone or avoid something. But the defining characteristic of procrastination, in his view, is avoiding action despite recognizing — through one’s own thinking and reflection — that it’s actually necessary or advantageous, and postponing anyway, fully aware that this incurs a real disadvantage or even harm. Taking that characteristic into account, he felt, opens up a much clearer explanatory path toward understanding postponement specifically.
Marc agreed, adding one more term he’d found and could confirm from his own experience: procrastination means postponing, and, he laughed, it’s often extended through substitute activities. He recognizes it in himself when he postpones something — he’s well aware of it and does it anyway, which leaves him with a bad feeling, followed by substitute activities (sometimes called displacement behavior) that end up eating an enormous amount of time. Then, sitting on the couch in the evening, or eating dinner, he thinks: wow, what a day, did a lot of work, got a lot done — except much of it was stuff he probably didn’t need to do at all, like tidying the basement or cleaning the car. Being able to recognize, through reflection, whether something genuinely needed doing or was simply a substitute activity — an escape, an avoidance of the thing he should actually have tackled — is key.
Yasemin thanked him, noting that when this becomes a recurring pattern rather than a one-off, it also becomes noticeable from the outside — which brings back the idea of support, sometimes professional, but also simply people around us observing the behavior and giving feedback when it keeps recurring. She offered an example many self-employed entrepreneurs, especially in German-speaking countries, recognize: a certain discomfort around the word “sales,” leading people to get stuck endlessly in preparation — logo design, website design, then redoing the logo and website again, developing products, then a new product, always working in the backend, conceptualizing, without ever actually entering the sales process itself. She suggested everyone check whether this pattern applies to themselves, and noted that once it becomes recurring, it’s often noticeable to others too — sometimes leading well-meaning people in one’s environment to raise it directly.
Jürgen picked this up, connecting it to his earlier point: if I do something, or fail to act, despite recognizing the disadvantage, the obvious question becomes: why on earth am I doing this? He suggested one key factor is dependency on evaluation — dependency on external judgment, from one’s environment, but also self-evaluation, judging oneself. That, alongside the topic of evaluation itself, is the second major cause of procrastination he sees: the method, knowledge, and competence to have properly prepared that action through thinking and reflection. If one has a sufficiently developed toolkit for thinking, has genuinely learned to think things through and draw the appropriate consequences, one stands firm in one’s decisions and doesn’t become dependent on evaluations from people who, taken to the extreme, may not even understand the depth of the matter at hand. But we do make ourselves dependent on those evaluations. He connected this, without straying into the pathological/psychological territory Yasemin had flagged earlier, to self-worth and self-determination — and, echoing Marc’s opening point, to education. In summary: two central causes of procrastination, in his view — the weakness (he used the word deliberately) of consciously or unconsciously making oneself dependent on others’ evaluations, and the flip side, not feeling secure or settled in how one moves from thinking to acting.
Marc picked this up with a concrete, honest example from his own life as an entrepreneur relying heavily on new client acquisition. Beyond stage fright, cold-calling brings up thoughts like “my company is too small to approach company A or B, they surely already have a partner, or work with a full-service provider, they’re certainly not waiting for my call because they’re already well set up.” After a few calls confirming exactly that expectation, confirmation bias kicks in, and the brain says “see, I knew it.” He said he was genuinely grateful this year, thanks in part to these very rooms, for having engaged with unconscious bias, belief systems, and reflection — leading him to call a company with a billion in revenue and 3,600 employees, a huge operation. After five confirming “no” responses elsewhere, he decided to try a different approach entirely: simply asking questions. He asked potential partners whether it made sense to talk, whether working together could benefit them, whether they were price-driven or quality-driven, or whether price mattered at all to a company their size. Once you remember that, however large or well-known a company is, you’re still dealing with people, they tend to respond kindly and explain that, depending on their organizational philosophy, collaboration could well make sense — and he ended up landing that billion-revenue client. That, he said, was a genuine breakthrough moment, reinforcing that the biggest mistake in entrepreneurship is trying something five or six times, getting an undesired but understandable response each time, and giving up — leading to wrong strategies and giving up on entire client segments or industries simply because of five confirming “no” responses, even though five or ten confirmations of an assumption still don’t make it universally true; it only takes one different outcome to break the pattern, and the brain reinforces “good thing you didn’t give up, keep going.” He shared this because it illustrated exactly why procrastination and avoidance strategies persist — fear reinforcing itself through confirmation — “my company is too small, this path doesn’t make sense, I’ll focus elsewhere” — even though the underlying truth can always shift, which is what makes this topic so complex. He hoped his brain would gradually reprogram itself for the future based on this experience.
Yasemin picked up his example, distinguishing between repeatedly approaching the same company versus approaching many different companies once each — the latter often framed as a “numbers game” in sales, where out of, say, 100 approached companies, a certain percentage (often cited around 10%, sometimes higher depending on whether the contact is warm or cold) will say yes. She drew a parallel to email marketing: research shows significantly more touchpoints are needed today than in the past, given the sheer volume of information competing for attention — commonly cited as at least seven touchpoints, not necessarily all via email, but if you know that, you can design your email marketing to cover a meaningful share of those seven-plus touchpoints, since your prospect might not need your service at first contact but likely will later, and if you’re not maintaining relevance through repeated touchpoints, they simply won’t have you in mind when the need arises, potentially choosing a competitor instead. But if your message lands right when they’re already considering it, you have a real shot at winning the business. Yet, she noted, even though these are perfectly rational, reason-based arguments that most people would nod along to, the actual follow-through often doesn’t happen — that uncomfortable feeling of not wanting to bother the other person, not wanting to send too many messages, creeps in during execution, meaning that despite rational, reason-based knowledge, our actual behavior diverges from it.
Jürgen responded warmly, thanking Yasemin and admitting he’d mentally started drifting away from the discussion, since, as Marc noted, the topic has so many facets — but her closing point had brought his focus right back. He returned to his earlier point: a defining feature of procrastination is knowingly and willingly accepting harm. Lifting this to a higher level, he said we act, or refrain from acting, against our own reason. That’s why he’d embraced Yasemin’s use of the word “reason” so warmly — he’d tried, the day before, to plant this concept within their broader theme of thinking, and this is exactly where it belongs: if you trace procrastination back to its root cause, it’s fundamentally a behavior (rather than strictly an “action”) that runs against reason — we act, or fail to act, against our own reason and insight, knowingly accepting the resulting harm. The next question this raises: if I’m acting against my own reason, what’s actually stronger than reason? He recapped his earlier point: two positions. First, strong dependency on external evaluation — more broadly, expectations placed on me — where what I’ve worked out as the reasonable, goal-oriented solution might not match how others expect to see me. Second, the classic counterpart to reason: emotions — specifically, as Marc’s business examples illustrated, fear and dread of consequences. Fear, for him, is the anticipated moment itself; dread is an intensified fear specifically of the consequences following that moment. These two — emotions and expectation — are, for him, reason’s enemies when it comes to procrastination.
Yasemin thanked him, noting that the kind of prioritized postponement they’d discussed earlier (weighing importance, urgency, and so on) probably wouldn’t even count as procrastination in the strict sense — procrastination applies specifically when I want something yet don’t do it, behaving contrary to my own reason. Having covered expectation and emotion as forces stronger than reason, she wondered whether other factors might play a role too — Marc had mentioned unconscious bias earlier, which quickly leads into belief systems: beliefs about success (am I allowed to be successful, more successful than my parents or my environment?), how I judge success, my personal relationship with money, and so on — all fascinating additional layers worth examining.
Before drawing further connections, she welcomed Raphael, then invited Marc back in, with Jürgen able to continue afterward. Raphael congratulated Marc on his story, noting that asking questions is the most powerful tool there is, applicable across all areas. He then addressed Yasemin: whoever procrastinates in sales is essentially cutting off the fuel keeping the engine running — or, given how electric mobility is trending, letting the battery run flat; if you don’t recharge it, you’ve got a serious problem. Sales, he said, is one of the most vital and exciting things there is. He then raised a question: procrastination has been framed purely negatively so far — could it not also, at times, be a legitimate, deliberately chosen approach? He connected it to competition and decision-making: acting now versus deciding, or speaking up, later, postponing deliberately — and suggested experience plays a role too: how many procrastinated matters eventually resolved themselves without requiring action at all? Sure, the basement doesn’t tidy itself, but it doesn’t care when it gets tidied either — that’s more a matter of personal wellbeing. His question to Yasemin, as a neuroscience-trained expert: could procrastination not sometimes be a deliberately chosen strategy?
Yasemin said she’d let Marc and Jürgen weigh in first before addressing that directly.
Marc said he’d also love to get to the practical question of what one can actually do about it. He offered a quick recap to check he’d understood Jürgen correctly: starting from the point that the rational mind supposedly has only about 5% influence on behavior, meaning most of it sits in the unconscious — Jürgen had said we make many things dependent on evaluation and expectation, which Marc agreed with, adding that much of it also ties into feelings and fears, since it’s not just about others’ judgment or expectation. Many things we postpone or avoid — quitting smoking, quitting drinking — involve dependency too, whether on substances or on pleasure itself, tying into what Raphael had just raised. His takeaway so far: if the rational mind really only accounts for 5% of behavior, it genuinely makes sense to look closely at unconscious bias. He praised Raphael’s question about what to actually ask oneself when noticing this postponement-or-avoidance pattern recurring, and shared his own approach: asking himself, with brutal honesty, what it actually costs him not to act — taking responsibility for what happens in the future if he doesn’t act now. In sales, that might eventually mean no new clients at all, risking his business, his home, his lifestyle. He has to ask himself that brutal question, then return to evaluation again — back to unconscious bias — can I evaluate things differently, am I making myself dependent on others’ judgments, how do I handle reactions from business or personal partners. Which, he noted, shows again just how complex this all is — and suggested that beyond just discussing what procrastination is, it might be worth exploring concrete techniques for actually counteracting it once recognized.
Jürgen picked this up, thanking Raphael, and reiterating the importance of being precise about terminology: they’d already established a key difference between postponement that genuinely makes sense and the specific definition of procrastination — knowingly, willingly accepting a disadvantage. Once the sense-making process concludes that postponing makes sense, even while accepting a resulting disadvantage, that’s the defining marker. He added a further nuance: in its extreme form, procrastination can flip into its opposite — “precrastination,” where, out of that same postponement pattern, one suddenly swings into stress and tries to do everything at once. Procrastination, he felt, often carries the potential to flip into its opposite entirely. But both, he stressed, work against reason, and against reason’s greatest opponent: emotion. Returning to unconscious bias, he cited a classic phrase tied to expectation: “you’ll never amount to anything” — something that, in his view, ultimately prevents someone from having the self-respect and self-determined will to say “I’m seeing this through, and I won’t make myself dependent on someone else’s judgment or expectation.”
Yasemin thanked him, and connected back to Marc, noting that today’s question of “what helps” wouldn’t go into full detail yet, but that awareness itself — clearly recognizing the distinctions they’d drawn today between procrastination and action — was already one of the first answers. She previewed that the following day would begin a deep dive into action competence, spanning many dedicated rooms exploring its various specific facets, where they’d likely uncover plenty of practical answers, a kind of toolkit to draw from. Returning to Raphael’s question in different words, she said she fully agreed with Jürgen: if something is postponed out of genuine enjoyment — because whatever you did instead was actually fun — that wouldn’t typically be called procrastination; you might chuckle about having put something off again, without any real bad feeling attached, since the alternative was enjoyable. Procrastination, by contrast, tends to bring on something like suffering, frustration, or dissatisfaction — acting against one’s own reason, noticing something is off, and being unable to break out of it or pinpoint the underlying cause. She offered an everyday example: she’s not tidy by nature at all, but has her own sense of order within her mess, and whenever she does tidy up, she can no longer find things. Her sister, from the same family, is the polar opposite — extremely orderly, flagging the tiniest things Yasemin wouldn’t even register as clutter. Whenever her sister implies she should tidy up, and Yasemin does so just to avoid people being shocked by visitors, she often regrets it afterward because she can’t find things anymore, reminding herself that’s what happens when you do something purely because of someone else’s judgment, without genuinely seeing a reason to do it herself.
She noticed Raphael wanted to jump back in and invited him to continue. Raphael reframed his earlier question: is it procrastination if you tidy up and then can’t find things afterward, given that you didn’t feel particularly bad about it at the time, maybe only briefly when something went missing? He tied this back to unconscious bias, our limited 5% cortical influence versus the limbic system, and our constant internal profit-and-loss calculation trying to keep us feeling reasonably good — meaning that whenever we procrastinate something, we tend to rationalize it to ourselves, even if it involves some kind of loss (of things, of language, of whatever). He suggested pleasure isn’t only about joy — it can also be about power, a kind of “no, you’re not getting this from me today or tomorrow, I’ll postpone this” — there are many possible angles here.
Yasemin responded that, yes, our brain naturally operates energy-efficiently, meaning we have countless everyday moments where we sidestep one thing or another simply because we’d rather do something else — and this doesn’t bother us much. It becomes an issue specifically once it triggers suffering, frustration, or dissatisfaction — the feeling that we really ought to do something, yet still can’t manage it. In classic procrastination cases, even attaching a clear sense of benefit sometimes still fails to break the loop — the underlying suffering can persist for days, weeks, or years without resolution, compounding the frustration and dissatisfaction, since we know not only that others expect something from us, but that we ourselves are suffering a real disadvantage, and yet still can’t find a way out of the pattern, because something deeper than a simple reward-at-the-end mechanism (which would just reintroduce the “joy” angle) is at play. This, she suggested, may explain why procrastination, especially when it persists across areas over years, can intensify to the point of becoming genuinely pathological, requiring therapy or similar support — a pattern so entrenched it interferes with daily functioning. She noted they were deliberately setting that extreme case aside today, since in most everyday uses of the term, the pattern hasn’t solidified to that degree — but the underlying dynamic, crucially, still remains one of acting against reason: genuinely wanting to handle things differently, yet being unable to break the loop.
She invited Marc and Jürgen to continue. Jürgen thanked her for that framing, saying it rounded today’s topic out perfectly for him: tracing the root cause, and factoring in the unconscious bias he’d cited earlier in its extreme form (“you’ll never amount to anything”), the pendulum swings toward two potential underlying causes: either a deficit in one’s competence to act, or a deficit in how one prepares that action — in one’s thinking. That, he said, was nearly his closing thought, and his key takeaway from today’s room — with heartfelt thanks for it.
Yasemin thanked him and moved into the closing round, inviting Raphael first, then Marc last.
Raphael said her explanation had been excellent — exactly the clarification he’d needed, along with Jürgen’s earlier explanation. He reiterated that, once again, the most important tool today had proven to be simply asking questions. Picking up on Marc’s sales example, he shared his own insight: in a cold-outreach sales process, wondering whether it’s too soon to call again, two or four weeks later, asking how often you can reasonably follow up — he’d found that simply calling and directly asking “how often can I check in with you about your decision” helps enormously. He thanked everyone for a room that moved him forward.
Yasemin thanked him and invited Marc to close, noting Jürgen had already delivered his closing thought earlier. Marc thanked Jürgen, Yasemin, and Raphael for the clarification specifically around the difference between avoidance and knowingly accepting a real disadvantage. He reflected that not tidying his basement is purely a matter of judgment — there’s no actual disadvantage, just an untidy basement, and that’s fine either way. But knowingly accepting a disadvantage would mean endangering his business, his health, or his relationship, with real consequences. Once he understands that distinction, he realizes he’s genuinely risking something significant, and his life would change drastically as a result. That, he said, is where evaluation comes in — something that had just become clear to him, and he thanked Jürgen and Yasemin for drawing out that distinction: on one hand, there’s pure judgment (someone might call his space untidy, but it’s tidy enough for him since he can find his things), and on the other, there’s the case where he consciously knows he feels genuinely unwell, that avoiding something creates real frustration and unhappiness — that’s procrastination, and he thanked her again for that distinction.
Yasemin thanked him, and noted a chat comment from Heike that she wanted to pick up on: a lovely topic, with the observation that we likely have far less conscious control than we think, and that we mostly do whatever our subconscious allows — tying back into unconscious bias and emotions — and asking whether the way out of this loop might be similar to how we learn to accept other things about ourselves in order to live a happy life, like being unathletic, too thin, too tall, too loud, too lazy, too whatever. Yasemin said they’d definitely revisit that angle in the coming days. She previewed that, starting the following day, they’d begin a deeper dive specifically into action competence and its many facets — first exploring what action competence actually is and how it’s built, then digging into its individual components, which are quite varied, almost like a toolkit with distinct compartments worth examining closely. She said this would let them differentiate between concrete strategies and methodologies (like the SMART framework, for instance) on one hand, and the ongoing role of unconscious bias, emotions, and awareness on the other — making clear that action competence isn’t just a matter of applying formulaic techniques and getting a guaranteed result; when it comes to something like procrastination, where the underlying cause runs deeper, classic tools alone will often hit their limits, and it’s important to stay sensitive to that. She noted today had already surfaced several relevant keywords — education, unconscious bias, learning in connection with action, self-dialogue, outside support — all pointing toward the ultimate goal of self-efficacy. She said she was looking forward to exploring all these facets over the coming days and seeing what conclusions they could collectively draw, since getting genuinely clear and aligned on terminology and shared understanding, as they’d done again today, lays the groundwork for going deeper in the days ahead. She invited everyone warmly to keep joining whenever they had time, so they could keep drawing insights together that ultimately move them into action. With that, she wished everyone well and said she was looking forward to 8am tomorrow, back here on Deep Talk. Until then.
