From the author: Specially for the magazine "HR Service and Personnel". How often in life have we made the decision that tomorrow, or rather, from Monday, our whole life will go differently: in the morning - jogging, dinner - enemy, three times a week - the gym, and on weekends - general cleaning and order on the bookshelves. Well, there’s nothing to say about the New Year: plans with their scope surprise not only our loved ones, but also ourselves... But Monday passes, the next year is already coming, and instead of fulfilling the adopted plan, time is spent on unnecessary little things. Why is that?! Procrastination. Another super-scientific word that is actively being introduced into our vocabulary following the fashionable frustration, adaptation, phobia and other borrowings from English. Literally translated, procrastination means putting off, not starting, and explains why people put off important things “for later” and take up time with unnecessary things, on which they spend twice as much time as on the actual work. Moreover, they suffer from this disease equally men and women, managers and subordinates, adults and children. Irina Khakamada, with her amazing talent for summarizing and classifying information, noticed that each time corresponds not only to fashion, but also to secular diagnoses that reflect the mood of the majority of members of society. So, the 19th century, with its lazy approach to the industrial era, lived with hippochondria, influenza and migraine. The 20th century - aggressively bloody and large-scale industrial - killed the fashion for subtle play with medical and psychological terms and we entered the 21st century, the century of excessive individualism and post-industrial stress, with trends towards autism, dyslexia and procrastination. Although fashion passes, but the life experience of any of us shows that the problem, whatever you call it, remains. And now, more than ever before, we are increasingly turning from active figures in our lives into passive consumers of it, swallowing what the oversaturated information environment offers with its traps in the form of television series, YouTube, Yandex, LiveJournal, etc. We are constantly busy and at the same time We don’t have time to do the main thing. And the most offensive thing is that this phenomenon cannot even be called laziness, because we work from morning until late at night. Sociologists have found that all over the world, regardless of nationality, 20% of the population suffers from the problem of accumulating work “for later”. Don’t think, that all these people hope to avoid the consequences of “procrastination” and simply do not want to change, since they are satisfied with everything in life. This is far from true! Each of them suffers from this state of affairs, is worried, but cannot mobilize in any way. And the calls of others to him, such as “stop suffering with nonsense!” or “get to work!” have zero effect, just like asking someone to “smile and stay calm” to someone experiencing deep depression. It’s not for nothing that chronic procrastination is defined by experts as a mechanism for combating anxiety. It is caused by a hidden psychological and physiological illness. There are two forms in its course: active and passive. The active type simply waits until the last minute when he has the desire or inspiration to do the necessary work. He may swear that he just didn't have the right idea or impulse to start doing it before. The passive type justifies his non-fulfillment or unimportant performance of the task by the fact that there was little time, the deadlines were running out (without actually saying who delayed these deadlines?!), repeating: “Now, if initially they had given me more time, then I...” Psychologists have been studying this problem for a long time, trying to find out what criteria provoke the development of procrastination and how they can help cope with it. Thus, a researcher from the University of Chicago, Joe Ferrari, found that ordinary time management does not help overcome procrastination, because putting things off until tomorrow arises not from inability to manage one’s time, but from a tendency to avoid long-term projects and... the basic habit of procrastination.