...I think it's missing something, and that's digging deeper into the reasons why people procrastinate.

(Disclaimer: I'm going by your summary, and have not seen the video at this time.)

See, yes, sure, let's run with the rational decision maker versus the...instant gratification monkey. Man, what a term (and with unfortunate associations to a common "today's generation's problem" claim, though using it to talk about procrastination is definitely valid). The thing this talk appears to be missing is why instant gratification winds up in control.

Sometimes it likely is just down to "the other thing is boring, so I would rather do just about anything else"...but that's already getting into reasons, isn't it?

Quite frequently, there's a reason why a procrastinator begins to avoid something. In some cases, it's boring; sometimes it's difficult, or similar to something that has been difficult in the past despite this one being easier; sometimes the task itself would be fine, but it's connected to something the procrastinator doesn't want to be doing anymore, and, being now in an environment where distractions are "allowed", it becomes harder to focus on.

Sometimes it's a case of fear. "I don't know how to do this", or "what if I get it wrong", or "I've never done this before, or "this is connected to something serious and I don't want to think about it and oh no I should have done this ages ago aaah"...

The "instant gratification monkey" wins out over the rational decision maker in a lot of these scenarios purely because fear (even indirectly/unrealized) keeps the latter from from taking over right away and redirects actions to the former as a form of avoidance. That's the point at which Ted Urban's "dark playground" shows up: avoidance doesn't exactly lessen fear, and can both heighten it and add in guilt, anxiety, and further dread.

Or at least, that's my theory. Procrastinators don't wind up in the "dark playground" (...I'm sorry, this is starting to sound like something from Partially Kissed Hero, given all the "Dark Ravenclaw" and "Dark Muggle" stuff going on) because their pursuit of instant gratification takes over at random; instead, they wind up there because some negative emotion attached to the task at hand is sending them into avoidance (or, sometimes, it's just become a habit, or, alternatively, seems to have done so because the negative emotion is harder to identify). In the case of pursuing the good things, the ones without deadlines, it may be habit and expectations mixed with guilt: "I couldn't get this other thing done, so obviously this isn't going to work out either, even though it should", or even, "I keep making a mess of important things, why do I deserve for it to be any different with something that's mainly just important to me?"

I think, working with what Neo's said (and bits of past reading/research/talking to people, which have informed a fair bit of this post, actually), that the key (or one of them) to changing procrastination habits is to find ways to disrupt the habit and put the "rational decision maker" back in charge (or back in charge more quickly). Targeted pep talks or analysis of the procrastination process, having another person in the room with the idea that both people are working, taking advantage of a school/work environment to promote focus, setting an evening cut-off time after which the to do list is off limits...they may not work for everyone (heck, I doubt much of anything in this post is universal), or work perfectly or every time, but in the search for ways to overcome procrastination quicker and more frequently, there are definitely worse places to start.

~Z