I Know What I Should Do, So Why Don’t I Do It?

Last night, I made it partway through doing the dishes. Well, not partway through washing them, exactly.

I filled the kitchen sink with hot, soapy water and put the dishes in to soak. I don’t have a dishwasher, so this is usually the sensible first move: let the water loosen everything up and make the actual washing easier.

Then I got on my laptop and decided the dishes could wait until tomorrow.

That thought has become very familiar to me over the past year. Dusting can wait until tomorrow, sweeping can wait, the clothes that need to be hung up can wait.

Almost anything involving cleaning seems to successfully survive one more day without my intervention.

I trace this change in myself back to a 4-year span of several loved ones' deaths: my grandpa, my dog, my cousin, and then my stepdad. I don’t bring these up to serve as a diagnosis or a complete explanation for every dish I leave in the sink; it’s simply where I notice a before and after in my own life. Since then, procrastination has become much more of a default mindset, and “I’ll do it tomorrow” has become easier to believe.

The frustrating part is that I know better.

I know a kitchen full of dirty dishes is not the environment I want to wake up to. I know I feel better when my home is clean. More importantly, I know perfectly well how to do all of these things.

I also know plenty of productivity tricks.

I have bought and created planners…many planners. I’ve set timers on my phone, broken larger jobs into smaller steps, grouped similar tasks together, and talked about procrastination in therapy.

So, the problem is clearly not a shortage of information.

Sometimes I know what I want to do, know how to do it, intend to do it, and even begin to do it.

Yet, I still stop.

Knowing and doing are different problems

Psychologists have a name for the broader problem underneath this: the intention-behavior gap.

Thomas Webb and Paschal Sheeran examined 47 experimental tests in which researchers successfully changed people’s intentions and then measured what happened to their actual behavior. The interventions produced a medium-to-large change in intentions, with an average effect size of d = 0.66. The resulting change in behavior was smaller, d = 0.36.

That study was not specifically about dirty dishes or procrastination, but its central finding is useful here: making an intention stronger does not produce an equally large change in behavior.

That sounds almost embarrassingly obvious when I look at my kitchen.

Last night, I had enough intention to fill the sink. I even made the task easier by letting the dishes soak.

Then my laptop became more appealing.

Procrastination research offers one possible explanation for why that moment is important. Piers Steel’s large meta-analysis found that task aversiveness, along with factors such as self-efficacy and impulsivity, was among the consistent predictors of procrastination.

Another influential account, from Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl, argues that procrastination can function as a form of short-term mood repair. If doing a task feels boring, frustrating, stressful, or otherwise unpleasant, postponing it can make the present moment feel better, even when doing so creates a problem for our future selves.

That describes my experience much better than “lazy” does.

Calling myself lazy would also require me to ignore contradictory evidence from my own life. I have a history of high achievement, I know what sustained effort feels like, and I know I am capable of accomplishing difficult things.

That doesn’t mean my past accomplishments should somehow compel me to wash tonight’s dishes, but it does make me wary of turning a behavior into a verdict about my character.

“I am procrastinating” describes something I am doing; “I am lazy” claims to explain what or who I am.

I would rather frame it as the first.

And then there’s perfectionism

Perfectionism complicates things for me because a household task rarely stays small in my head. “Do the dishes” can very quickly become dishes, counters, microwave, refrigerator, floors, dusting, clothes, organizing, and every other unfinished thing I can see.

Suddenly I am not washing a few plates; I am confronting the entire state of the house.

There is research connecting some forms of perfectionism with procrastination, but the relationship is more complicated than the familiar idea that “perfectionists procrastinate.”

A 2017 meta-analysis by Sirois, Danielle Molnar, and Jameson Hirsch separated two broad dimensions of perfectionism:

• Perfectionistic concerns were positively associated with trait procrastination, with an average correlation of r = .23. 
• Perfectionistic strivings, by contrast, were negatively associated with procrastination, r = -.22.

In other words, high standards themselves are not the whole story. The more troublesome side appears to involve the concerns that can accompany perfectionism rather than simply wanting to do something well.

I can’t conclude from a meta-analysis that perfectionism is causing my cleaning problem, but I recognize the mental pattern. When my implicit standard becomes “get everything under control,” washing one sinkful of dishes can feel almost pointless.

So I wait for motivation.

Or energy.

Or the right mood.

Some future version of me, apparently, is going to wake up deeply enthusiastic about housework, but she has yet to arrive.

Aristotle had a version of this problem

The fact that humans can understand one course of action and still do something else bothered philosophers long before psychologists started measuring it.

Book VII of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics examines what is often discussed under the Greek term akrasia, usually translated as something like weakness of will, lack of self-control, or incontinence.

Aristotle is responding in part to an old philosophical problem: if someone genuinely knows what the better course of action is, how can that person act against it?

His answer is more complicated than saying that knowledge simply loses a fight with desire. He distinguishes between possessing knowledge and actually exercising it in the moment of action. He also examines how appetite and emotion can affect the way knowledge functions when we act.

I am not suggesting that neglecting my dishes is some profound Aristotelian moral failure, but his ideas are useful.

There is an enormous difference between knowing, in the abstract, that I want a clean kitchen and acting on that knowledge when I am standing in front of the sink and would rather mess around on my laptop or scroll on my phone.

My abstract self has excellent judgment; she wants an orderly home, she appreciates consistency, and she understands that postponing tasks tends to leave them waiting for her later.

The person standing in the kitchen has to make the decision in real time.

And that person is tired of the dishes.

Philosophy makes the conflict more interesting because it prevents me from assuming that knowledge should automatically control behavior. Psychology reaches a similar conclusion from a very different direction.

If knowing were enough, I probably would not own so many planners.

Technology is both the escape route and, sometimes, the scaffolding

Cleaning also exposes an interesting limit of technology: my phone can remind me that the kitchen needs cleaning, a digital calendar can tell me when I intended to do it, AI can help me break the job into smaller steps.

None of those things can pick up the sponge for me.

Technology does, however, offer plenty of alternatives to picking it up myself. My phone and laptop are much more appealing than cleaning most (okay, all) of the time.

But recently, technology helped in a way I wasn’t expecting.

A week or two ago, I came across a TikTok livestream from a woman who streams herself completing tasks as a way of staying accountable. Yesterday, I cast her livestream to my TV while I cleaned the dining room and kitchen.

And, believe it or not, I actually cleaned.

What I stumbled onto resembles a practice commonly described as "body doubling," which involved using another person’s presence as support while trying to initiate or complete a task.

Researchers have investigated the practice particularly among neurodivergent participants. A 2024 study by Tessa Eagle, Leya Breanna Baltaxe-Admony, and Kathryn Ringland found that people described body doubling in several forms, including being physically near another person or connected remotely while working. And, the other person does not necessarily have to be doing the same task.

The evidence here deserves restraint, however. Much of this research has been exploratory and survey-based, which can tell us how people use and experience body doubling, but it cannot establish that it reliably causes better task performance. More recent experimental work is beginning to test it, but researchers still describe the broader evidence as limited or mixed.

So, no, I have not discovered the cure for my cleaning problem because one TikTok livestream helped me clear off the dining room table.

Still, something about the experience is worth noticing: the task had not changed; the conditions around the task had.

Maybe motivation isn’t the first step

There is another piece of goal-setting research that interests me for the same reason.

Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer developed the idea of implementation intentions, plans that connect a specific situation with a specific action. Instead of saying only, “I intend to do the dishes,” the plan takes an if-then form: when a particular cue occurs, I will perform a particular behavior.

A 2006 meta-analysis by Gollwitzer and Sheeran examined 94 independent tests and found a medium-to-large average effect on goal attainment, d = 0.65.

There is an important limitation for my purposes, though. Those studies covered goal pursuit broadly; they were not primarily trials of treatments for procrastination. A later systematic review of procrastination interventions specifically warned against assuming that the implementation-intention findings automatically translate into an established procrastination treatment.

Still, the underlying premise gives me something testable.

Instead of waiting until I “feel like cleaning,” I could decide in advance what happens when a particular moment arrives.

For example: If I finish eating dinner, I will wash the dishes before I get on my laptop.

Maybe that helps. Maybe it doesn’t.

But it poses a better question than, “How do I make myself want to wash dishes?”

What I’m reconsidering

For a long time, I have behaved as though motivation should arrive before action: first, I will feel ready; then, I will begin.

The problem is that this gives a temporary feeling an enormous amount of authority over what happens next, and I am starting to wonder whether I have been waiting for an emotional starting gun that may never fire.

That does not mean motivation is irrelevant; it means I may need to stop treating it as a prerequisite.

Sometimes music helps.

Sometimes another person’s presence helps.

Sometimes making the task smaller helps.

None of that is as satisfying as imagining that I will eventually revert back to someone who has more discipline. Honestly, there is something appealing about the idea of fixing the problem at the level of personality.

But, perhaps I don’t need a new personality.

Maybe I just need better conditions for action based on who I am now.

Giving myself grace does not require pretending the dishes will wash themselves. Tomorrow still arrives, and yesterday’s dishes tend to be there when it does.

At the same time, turning every unfinished chore into evidence of some moral failure has not made me more eager to pick up a sponge.

Yesterday, something much less dramatic worked: someone else was doing her tasks, and I was doing mine. And, for a little while, the distance between intending to act and actually acting became smaller.

I want to pay attention to that distance, and not just because I want a cleaner kitchen (although I do), but because I want to understand why a person can sincerely want something, understand how to get it, and still keep choosing “tomorrow.” 

I suspect there are a lot of things in life for which knowing the answer is the easy part.

When you already know what you should do but still don’t do it, what are you actually waiting for? 

Sources & References

• Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Book VII. The Internet Classics Archive, trans. W. D. Ross.
• Eagle, T., Baltaxe-Admony, L. B., & Ringland, K. E. (2024). “It Was Something I Naturally Found Worked and Heard About Later”: An Investigation of Body Doubling with Neurodivergent Participants. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing, 17(3).
• Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). “Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of Effects and Processes.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119.
• Rozental, A., et al. (2018). “Targeting Procrastination Using Psychological Treatments: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1588.
• Sirois, F. M., Molnar, D. S., & Hirsch, J. K. (2017). “A Meta-Analytic and Conceptual Update on the Associations Between Procrastination and Multidimensional Perfectionism.” European Journal of Personality, 31(2), 137–159.
• Sirois, F. M., & Pychyl, T. A. (2013). “Procrastination and the Priority of Short-Term Mood Regulation: Consequences for Future Self.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(2), 115–127.
• Steel, P. (2007). “The Nature of Procrastination: A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review of Quintessential Self-Regulatory Failure.” Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65–94.
• Webb, T. L., & Sheeran, P. (2006). “Does Changing Behavioral Intentions Engender Behavior Change? A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence.” Psychological Bulletin, 132(2), 249–268.