The reporting call sits on your to-do list for three days. You’ve drafted the email to request it, deleted the draft, re-drafted it, and then opened Twitter instead. This isn’t poor time management. It’s emotional avoidance, and the research on procrastination explains exactly why it happens.
Journalists delay the reporting calls that actually matter because those calls trigger genuine psychological discomfort: fear of rejection, self-doubt about whether you’ll ask the right questions, anxiety about what you might find. Your brain treats that discomfort as a threat and steers you toward safer, easier tasks. Understanding that mechanism is the first step to overriding it.
Why do journalists procrastinate on interviews specifically?
Not all tasks trigger procrastination equally. Research shows that tasks perceived as aversive produce significantly higher procrastination rates than neutral or enjoyable ones, according to Piers Steel’s landmark meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin (2007). Reporting calls and interviews sit near the top of the aversive task list for many journalists.
Think about what an interview actually requires. You have to cold-contact a stranger or a difficult source, risk being told no, perform competence in real time, and potentially hear something that complicates your entire story angle. Each of those elements activates a different flavour of anxiety.
Avoiding reporting feels safer in the moment. Rewriting your lede, reorganising your notes, or doing another round of background reading all feel productive. They look like journalism. But they’re often displacement activity, chosen precisely because they don’t carry the same emotional weight as picking up the phone.
The discomfort isn’t imaginary, either. It’s a real neurological response to perceived social threat. Your brain doesn’t distinguish well between “this call might go badly” and “something bad is about to happen.” Both activate the same avoidance circuitry.
Is putting off legwork really an emotion problem, not a scheduling problem?
The most useful reframe in procrastination research is also the most counterintuitive: procrastination has almost nothing to do with time. Timothy A. Pychyl, founder of the Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University, states this directly in his 2013 book Solving the Procrastination Puzzle: “Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem, not a time management problem.”
This matters for journalists because the entire professional culture around deadlines frames procrastination as a scheduling failure. You should have started earlier. You need a better system. Block out time for reporting calls in your calendar.
Those interventions don’t work, not sustainably, because they target the wrong thing. Pychyl’s research group has found that approximately 95% of procrastinators report the problem as emotion-driven rather than time-driven. His work shows that we procrastinate to regulate negative emotions like anxiety, self-doubt, and task aversion, and that the task we’re avoiding triggers negative feelings we want to escape, so we delay.
A better calendar won’t fix that. It’ll just give you a more neatly organised list of calls you’re still avoiding.
The broader pattern is consistent across populations. Pychyl and Fuschia Sirois, writing in their 2016 paper “Procrastination, Emotion Regulation, and Well-Being,” found that 20-25% of the general population identifies as chronic procrastinators. Among knowledge workers doing complex, ambiguous, socially charged work, the rate is almost certainly higher.
Journalism qualifies on all three counts.
What does delaying interviews actually cost a story?
The practical cost of procrastinating on research calls is easy to understate because the damage is often invisible. You don’t always know what the interview would have produced. The source you didn’t call might have redirected your entire investigation. The expert quote you kept putting off might have been the credibility anchor your editor needed.
Putting off legwork tends to produce one of three outcomes. The story gets filed without its best material. The story gets filed late, under pressure, with a rushed version of the reporting you should have done two weeks earlier. Or the story doesn’t get filed at all because you ran out of time to do it properly and quietly abandoned it.
All three outcomes are more common than journalists like to admit. And all three trace back to avoiding reporting at the moment it mattered most.
There’s also a compounding effect. Every day you delay a key interview, the story’s window can close. Sources move on, news cycles shift, access disappears. Delaying interviews isn’t just emotionally costly; it’s editorially costly in ways that can’t be recovered.
How does ACT explain why willpower-based advice fails reporters?
Most advice aimed at procrastinating journalists is willpower-based: just start, set a timer, commit publicly to a deadline. This advice fails people, not because it’s wrong exactly, but because it skips the step that actually matters.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) offers a more honest framework. Russ Harris, one of ACT’s leading practitioners and author of ACT Made Simple (2009), describes the core problem clearly: our minds generate difficult thoughts and feelings, and we often try to escape them through avoidance behaviours like procrastination.
The journalist who keeps delaying interviews isn’t lazy. They’re running a very effective short-term emotional management strategy. Every time they avoid the call, they get a small hit of relief. That relief reinforces the avoidance. The call becomes more loaded with each passing day.
Harris, drawing on ACT principles in The Reality Slap (2012), frames the alternative directly: the more we struggle against discomfort, the more power we give it, and acceptance is the alternative to avoidance.
Acceptance, in ACT terms, doesn’t mean liking the discomfort or pretending it isn’t there. It means noticing it without letting it control your behaviour. The anxiety about the call is real. The call can still happen anyway.
This is the move that willpower advice skips. It tells you to override the discomfort. ACT tells you to stop fighting it, because the fight is what’s keeping you stuck.
How can journalists actually start the reporting work they keep avoiding?
The practical application of this framework isn’t complicated, though it does require some honest self-examination.
First, name what you’re actually avoiding. “I haven’t scheduled the interview” is a task description. “I’m anxious that this source will say no and I’ll have to rebuild the story” is the real thing. The second version gives you something to work with.
Second, separate the discomfort from the danger. The anxiety triggered by a difficult reporting call is real but not dangerous. Pychyl’s research is consistent on this point: the negative feelings that trigger procrastination are almost always disproportionate to the actual risk of the task. The call is unlikely to go as badly as your nervous system is predicting.
Third, shrink the first action to the point where the emotional barrier drops. Not “do the interview” but “open the contact’s LinkedIn page.” Not “call the source” but “write the two questions you most need answered.” Procrastinating on research calls often persists because the task feels monolithic. It isn’t.
Fourth, and most importantly: do the reporting with the anxiety present, not after it disappears. It won’t disappear first. That’s not how emotion regulation works. The discomfort is the price of the work, not a signal that the work should wait.
This is the part that no productivity app will tell you, because it’s uncomfortable to say: the only way out of avoidance is through the thing you’re avoiding. The story is on the other side of the call you keep not making.
FAQ
Is procrastinating on reporting calls a sign of poor professional discipline?
No. Research is consistent that procrastination reflects emotional avoidance, not laziness or poor discipline. Journalists who delay interviews are usually managing real anxiety about rejection, performance, or story disruption. Recognising the emotional mechanism is more useful than self-criticism.
Why do background research and rewriting feel easier than reporting calls?
Because they carry lower social and emotional stakes. Piers Steel’s 2007 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin found that task aversiveness is one of the strongest predictors of procrastination. Calls and interviews involve live social performance and unpredictable outcomes, which makes them feel more threatening than desk-based tasks.
Does better time management actually help with avoiding reporting?
Only at the margins. Timothy Pychyl’s work at Carleton University is clear that procrastination is primarily an emotion regulation problem. Scheduling tools can create structure, but they don’t address the underlying anxiety that drives avoidance. Emotional awareness is more durable than a better calendar system.
How is ACT different from just telling yourself to push through?
ACT doesn’t ask you to suppress or override discomfort. It asks you to notice discomfort, accept that it’s present, and act in line with your values anyway. The difference matters: suppression tends to rebound, while acceptance reduces the emotional resistance over time. Russ Harris covers this distinction in ACT Made Simple (2009).
How long does it take to stop procrastinating on difficult reporting tasks?
There’s no universal timeline. The emotion regulation habits that drive procrastination are ingrained, and changing them takes repeated practice rather than a single insight. What research does support is that journalists who identify the emotional function of their avoidance, rather than treating it as a scheduling problem, report more consistent progress.