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Before you do though, maybe you should check your e-mail. You should head over to Facebook too, just to get it out of the way. A cup of coffee would probably get you going; it won’t take long to go grab one.

Maybe just a few episodes of that show you like.

You can try to fight it back. You can buy a daily planner and a to-do list application for your phone. You can write yourself notes and fill out schedules. You can become a productivity junkie surrounded by instruments to make life more efficient, but these tools alone will not help, because the problem isn’t you are a bad manager of your time—you are a bad tactician in the war inside your brain.

Procrastination is such a pervasive element of the human experience there are more than 600 books for sale promising to snap you out of your bad habits, and this year alone 120 new books on the topic were published. Obviously this is a problem everyone admits to, so why is it so hard to defeat?

To explain, consider the power of marshmallows.

Walter Mischel conducted experiments at Stanford University throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s in which he and his researchers offered a bargain to children. The kids sat at a table in front of a bell and some treats. They could pick a pretzel, a cookie, or a giant marshmallow. They told the little boys and girls they could either eat the treat right away or wait a few minutes. If they waited, they would double their payoff and get two treats. If they couldn’t wait, they had to ring the bell, after which the researcher would end the experiment.

Some made no attempt at self-control and just ate right away. Others stared intensely at the object of their desire until they gave in to temptation. Many writhed in agony, twisting their hands and feet while looking away. Some made silly noises. In the end, one third couldn’t resist. What started as an experiment about delayed gratification has now, decades later, yielded a far more interesting set of revelations about metacognition—thinking about thinking.

Mischel has followed the lives of all his subjects through high school, college, and into adulthood, where they accumulated children, mortgages, and jobs. The revelation from this research is kids who were able to overcome their desire for short-term reward in favor of a better outcome later weren’t smarter than the other kids, nor were they less gluttonous. They just had a better grasp of how to trick themselves into doing what was best for them. They watched the wall instead of looking at the food. They tapped their feet instead of smelling the confection. The wait was torture for all, but some knew it was going to be impossible to just sit there and stare at the delicious, gigantic marshmallow without giving in. The ones who were better at holding off their desire to snatch the marshmallow used that same power to squeeze more out of life. The ones who rang the bell quickly showed a higher incidence of behavioral problems. The ones who could hold out ended up with SAT scores that were on average more than two hundred points higher than scores for the ones who ate the marshmallow.

Thinking about thinking—this is the key. In the struggle between should versus want, some people have figured out something crucial: Want never goes away. Procrastination is all about choosing want over should because you don’t have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted. You are really bad at predicting your future mental states. In addition, you are terrible at choosing between now and later.

Later is a murky place where anything could go wrong.

If I were to offer you $50 now or $100 in a year, which would you take? Clearly, you’ll take the $50 now.

After all, who knows what could happen in a year, right? OK, so what if I instead offered you $50 in five years or $100 in six years? Nothing has changed other than adding a delay, but now it feels just as natural to wait for the $100. After all, you already have to wait a long time. A being of pure logic would think, more is more, and pick the higher amount every time, but you aren’t a being of pure logic. Faced with two possible rewards, you are more likely to take the one that you can enjoy now over one you will enjoy later—even if the later reward is far greater. In the moment, rearranging the folders on your computer seems a lot more rewarding than some task due in a month which might cost you your job or your diploma, so you wait until the night before. If you considered which would be more valuable in a month—continuing to get your paycheck or having an immaculate desktop—you would pick the greater reward. The tendency to get more rational when you are forced to wait is called hyperbolic discounting, because your dismissal of the better payoff later diminishes over time and makes a nice slope on a graph.

Evolutionarily it makes sense to always go for the sure bet now; your ancestors didn’t have to think about retirement or heart disease. Your brain evolved in a world where you probably wouldn’t live to meet your grandchildren. The stupid monkey part of your brain wants to gobble up candy bars and go deeply into debt.

Hyperbolic discounting makes later an easy place to throw all the things you don’t want to deal with, but you also overcommit to future plans for the same reason. You run out of time to get things done because you think in the future, that mysterious fantastical realm of possibilities, you’ll have more free time than you do now.

One of the best ways to see how bad you are at coping with procrastination is to notice how you deal with deadlines. Let’s imagine you are in a class where you must complete three research papers in three weeks, and the instructor is willing to allow you to set your own due dates. You can choose to turn in your papers once a week, or two in the first week and one in the second. You can turn them all in on the last day, or you can spread them out. You could even choose to turn in all three at the end of the first week and be done. It’s up to you, but once you pick you have to stick with your choice. If you miss your deadlines, you get a big fat