Those of you who know me know that I am a huge fan of The Big Bang Theory. It got me thinking, what can physics teach us about procrastination?

Newton’s Laws apply. An object in motion will stay in motion. An object at rest will stay at rest. So, the greatest danger in trying to accomplish a series of tasks is breaking your momentum. If you keep rolling, you’ll be able to finish, probably very quickly. But if you sit down to rest “just for a few seconds,” it’s over. Inertia takes over. You’ll find reason after reason to put off what you know you need to do.

Gravity wins. If you leave things in piles rather than putting them away, their gravitational field will start attracting more stuff, helping the pile grow ever larger and making you delay dealing with it longer, allowing it to grow larger. You see where this is going. My personal experiments have confirmed this effect in dirty dishes. craft suplies, paperwork, and laundry.

Finally, the theory of relatively comes into play. The time spent trying to avoid doing a task is relatively longer than the time it would actually take to complete the task, but it doesn’t seem so from your perspective. I blame Einstein.