How many times have you told yourself you just need to try harder? That never seems to work. It’s not as simple as willpower; procrastination is about the mix of distraction, disorganization, and forgetfulness.

Procrastinators avoid their work. That’s just a cold hard fact. Avoidance is the key feature of something that should be done but isn’t done, and the culprit is the person who was supposed to do it. There wasn’t a proverbial Act of God. Someone else didn’t make it impossible for the person to do their work — like when a dog eats a kid’s homework, or a boss loses their keys and can’t open the office. Rather, the work could have been done, but the would-be worker failed to do it.

This is not to say that the avoidance of work is deliberate. Not all procrastinators mean to procrastinate. They don’t all want to. They don’t all know it while it’s happening. But when all is said and done, and they look back with the clear eyes of regret, all procrastinators realize that one way or another they ended up avoiding doing what needed to be done.

But just as there are many roads to Rome, there are many routes to avoidance. Some are conscious, some are unconscious. Some are deliberate, some are accidental. Some are pleasurable, some are incredibly painful. And out of all of them, three stand out as being what we call The Three Pillars of Procrastination: forgetfulness, disorganization, and distraction.

All three crucially involve problems of attention and decision-making. If you forget to do something, you fail to pay attention to it at all. If you get distracted, despite paying attention to something important, you fail to keep your attention on it. And finally, if you are disorganized, you have trouble structuring, streamlining, and prioritizing your attention, so that even if you do notice something, you can’t figure out what to do with it or how to balance it against competing concerns.