IS AI ACCELERATING PROCRASTINATION MORE THAN TRANSFORMATION?

(SPOILER: YES. HERE'S WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT.)

Eight in ten of us respond to uncertainty with some form of procrastination. That was already true before most people had heard of ChatGPT.

Some of that delay is doing real work: moderate pauses are linked to more creative output than starting immediately or leaving it to the last minute. The difference isn't who procrastinates, it's whether the pause has a boundary and a way back in.

Five years of research with UCL across thousands of professionals and multiple organisations: 62% of professionals had put off an AI tool they believed would help them, and three quarters said their organisation made it easy to experiment. Permission was never the barrier.

On 13 October we're presenting the four-stage tool that tells the difference, live, for the first time.

Save my place → 60 minutes · free · live online

Sam Conniff & Katherine Templar Lewis

WHEN WE'RE UNCERTAIN, WE DON'T ALWAYS STOP. WE GET BUSY.

It feels productive. But sometimes it's just procrastination in a better outfit.

We tend to think of procrastination as something to fix. Manage your time better. Be more disciplined. Just get started. But what if we're missing something?

Sometimes it looks like thinking. Sometimes it looks like preparation. And sometimes it actually is useful — a pause can give us space to think, experiment and find a better answer.

But it can also become a way of avoiding something we don't know how to deal with. So how do you tell the difference?

THAT'S WHERE IT GETS INTERESTING.

The research, the extra meeting, the perfect plan, the prompt you rewrite for the ninth time. All of it defensible. None of it the decision you're avoiding.

WHEN BUSY ISN'T THE SAME AS MOVING

When uncertainty hits, people don't necessarily resist

They become incredibly productive at everything except the thing they're uncertain about.

In this masterclass, we'll look at what's happening underneath that behaviour — and what organisations can do differently.

Sixty minutes, five moves, and some research findings you probably won't have seen before.

01 Why uncertainty makes us procrastinateWhat happens when we don't know what will happen, what the right answer is, or whether we're making the right call.

02 When procrastination is actually usefulWhy not all delay is avoidance — and why trying to eliminate procrastination altogether may be missing the point.

03 The work that looks like progressHow research, planning, meetings, admin and other work-shaped behaviours can give procrastination somewhere to hide.

04 Why AI changes the gameHow AI can create new opportunities for both action and avoidance — and what that means for adoption and transformation.

05 How to help people move forwardPractical ways to create the conditions for experimentation, action and better decisions when people don't have all the answers.

You're an HR, People, L&D or Transformation leader — and you're seeing some of this.

YOU DON'T NEED ANOTHER PRODUCTIVITY HACK. YOU NEED A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT'S HAPPENING WHEN PEOPLE HESITATE.

And some research findings you probably won't have seen before.

Sometimes it's the space we need to think. The trick is knowing when to pause — and when to move.

PROCRASTINATION NATION

Spaces are limited