Time Takes Time
- Alexandra Bruma Hilițanu
- 2 days ago
- 12 min read
“Ancient Greeks depicted Cronus as a Titan, son of Uranus and Rhea, who devoured his own children because he had been foretold that one of them would dethrone him. One of his heirs would repeat the act of rebellion that had led him to castrate his father and take his place. Since his children were divine beings, Cronus could not kill them; so, to neutralize them, he devoured them. A terrible metaphor for our deepest anxieties: that time consumes and destroys not only ourselves, but also all our offspring and, with them, the work we imagine to be the most enduring. Only Zeus managed to escape his fate because Cronus, tricked by his wife-sister Rhea, swallowed a stone instead of the newborn. Thus, by poisoning his father, Zeus fulfilled the prophecy and took his place as lord of creation.
Since then, the dream of killing Cronus has resurfaced in human communities as the desire to stop time, or the illusion of being able to dethrone it from the central place it occupies in nature. But can we ever truly free ourselves from Cronus?”
It has been my concern to begin with this wonderful excerpt from Guido Tonelli’s essay entitled “Time: the Dream of Killing Cronus”: starting from the origins is always a good thing; they are a matrix and a narrative that speaks to us about ourselves, about the images embroidered on the canvas behind which we look at the world. Myths have much to teach us and many truths to make us recognize, among them the struggle against time: a struggle that has always existed and that, over time, has become harsher. Time upon time, stealing time from time, up to modern society, where time is relative but the hands of the clock run ever faster than our thoughts, than our desires: a time that takes time, that leaves no time for time, in which understanding and opinion are wiped out by speed; quality, both physical and moral, becomes a luxury, and time a kind of wealth that only a few can afford. In times like these it is important to recognize the space to slow down and to have the stubbornness to look around and to engage with small things, those glanced at sideways and judged poorly with hurried superficiality, like those we will talk about shortly. It is in neglected matter that we find the greatest answers, and therefore I want to begin my research here: from the underbelly of our battle against time.
Delay and procrastination are often interpreted as motivational or moral failures. “Being late” (failure to set off / arrive within a target time) and “procrastination” (voluntary postponement despite anticipating worse outcomes) overlap in everyday life but are not interchangeable. Procrastination is defined by a volitional delay despite a known cost, whereas delay can also occur without volitional postponement.
Empirical evidence supports multi-mechanism explanations spanning cognition, neuroscience, circadian biology, and biases. This narrative review synthesizes findings suggesting that chronic delay often reflects limitations in time-based prospective memory (TBPM), in executive control (planning, switching, inhibition), and in interval timing (estimating/monitoring time), together with a circadian misalignment linked to chronotype that increases risk under early social schedules. Procrastination overlaps with these pathways but is also characterized by present-biased evaluation and short-term mood regulation, with converging evidence from meta-analytic work in psychology and from emerging neurocomputational approaches linking intertemporal choice processes to procrastinatory behavior.
PROSPECTIVE MEMORY
Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to encode an intention, maintain it while attention is occupied by other activities, and then retrieve and carry out that intention at the appropriate moment in the future. A particularly demanding subtype is time-based prospective memory (TBPM), in which the trigger is not an external event but a time criterion (“leave at 8:10,” “take the medicines at noon”). Because time rarely “announces itself” TBPM typically relies on self-initiated control: people must monitor time, often by checking the clock, and decide when to interrupt the task in progress. Strategic clock-checking (understood as increasing checks as the target time approaches) can significantly increase success in TBPM; however, higher working-memory demands reduce time monitoring and impair TBPM performance.
The Attention to Delayed Intention (AtoDI) model explains these behavioral demands by
proposing a neural dissociation across phases: maintaining/monitoring the intention relies mainly on a dorsal fronto-parietal control network that supports top-down attention (directed outward to scan for cues and inward to keep the intention active) whereas intention retrieval relies more on a ventral fronto-parietal network that supports bottom-up capture and reorienting when a relevant cue (or the intention itself) becomes salient, with additional involvement of the anterior prefrontal cortex (BA10) in coordinating attention between internal goals and external input, and of regions such as the insula and posterior cingulate cortex in cue detection and spontaneous retrieval.
Arriving on time, leaving when planned are requirements of everyday life, and consequently so is TBPM. Being late can therefore be reframed as a mode of neurocognitive failure of delayed action that arises from constraints in control, attention, and timing systems. If BA10 and the dorsal fronto-parietal network (including dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal cortex) do not sustain the intention strongly enough under distraction or cognitive load, time monitoring becomes weak or poorly timed, so the intention is retrieved only when the deadline is already imminent, leaving insufficient time for efficient disengagement from the task and for task switching. TBPM also depends on neural mechanisms that represent elapsed time: interval-timing research links timing from seconds to hours to thalamo-cortico-striatal circuits involving the basal ganglia/striatum, thalamus, and prefrontal and parietal cortices, with additional contributions from the supplementary motor area and the cerebellum in more automatic or motor-constrained timing contexts; noise or bias in these systems can make subjective time “drift,” shifting action onset later than expected even when the goal is “remembered.” Finally,delay is often amplified even before TBPM begins: the planning fallacy shows that people systematically underestimate completion times because they rely on plan-based scenarios and underweight distributional/base-rate information from previous delays, reducing the safety margin available for TBPM to succeed.
Several further neural layers help explain why delayed intentions are often carried out late even when they are properly formed. Mnemonic binding and contextual reinstatement supported by the hippocampus and the broader medial temporal lobe can determine whether the intention-cue association is reactivated at the right moment. Converting a retrieved intention into behavior depends on action selection and gating within fronto-striatal circuits: the basal ganglia regulate whether an intended action is released (“go”) or postponed again in favor of the ongoing activity, interfacing with pre-SMA/SMA and premotor cortex for initiation. Neuromodulatory systems further shape both timing and prioritization: dopaminergic signals guide valuation and “act now vs. later” decisions via ventral striatum and vmPFC/OFC, while noradrenergic arousal from the locus coeruleus and cholinergic inputs from the basal forebrain influence vigilance and cue detection, affecting whether time thresholds are noticed early enough to switch. Delayed action also reflects the efficiency of control reconfiguration: the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) supports conflict/error monitoring (“I’m off schedule”), and together with the anterior insula (salience network) helps shift processing between default-mode and executive-control states when an interruption is required. Taken together, these interacting systems predict a common pathway to lateness: optimistic planning narrows time margins, while constraints in prefrontal-parietal control, fronto-striatal gating, and interval-timing circuits reduce effective monitoring and slow disengagement from the current task, so the delayed intention is carried out, but iscarried out late.
CIRCADIAN CYCLE AND CHRONOTYPES
Rhythm can be found at different levels of organization, from single cells to social behavior, in fact, almost all physiological and psychological functions vary periodically. Chronotype and social jet lag offer a plausible biological pathway toward procrastination and delayed action, especially when people have to follow early schedules that clash with their internal timing. The central human circadian clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the hypothalamus coordinates 24-hour behavioral and hormonal rhythms by integrating retinal light-dark input and synchronizing peripheral cellular clocks; one of its most visible outputs is the timing of sleep.
Although the biochemical foundations are not completely understood, individuals differ markedly in their preferred sleep-wake timing along a morningness-eveningness continuum: “larks” prefer earlier sleep and wake times, “owls” later ones, with intermediate types in between. Because social obligations (e.g., early start times for work and school) often force later chronotypes to wake earlier than their biologically preferred schedule, their actual sleep-wakepattern can diverge from their endogenous preference, producing a circadian misalignment conceptually similar to jet lag as a mismatch between internal clocks and external time cues, with phase shifts (including in endogenous melatonin secretion) linked to sleep disturbance and impaired functioning. This misalignment is common and meaningful, and it can burden self-regulation: studies have shown that chronotype-related differences in biologically preferred rhythms are associated with self-regulation and therefore play a role in procrastination. In particular, later chronotypes may require greater daily self-regulatory effort to “live against” their biological rhythm and thus become especially dependent on high-quality sleep to inhibit impulses and resist temptations. Consistent with this, findings indicate that people who experience greater circadian misalignment procrastinate more the next day when sleep quality is low, supporting the idea that chronotype may moderate the relationship between night-specific sleep quality and next-day procrastination, with the negative impact of poor sleep on procrastination being stronger for evening types than for morning types.
INTERTEMPORAL CHOICE, PRESENT-FOCUSED PREFERENCES, PRESENT BIAS, AND NAÏVETÉ
A unifying family of models explains procrastination through present-focused preferences: people choose more impatiently for the present than when all consequences are shifted equally into the future.
Procrastination can be read as a case of intertemporal choice in which the individual compares the immediate costs of starting (effort, boredom, emotional discomfort, risk of failing) with future benefits (outcome, relief, reward, avoidance of negative consequences), and in which the observed outcome often turns out “suboptimal” relative to declared goals. A central mechanism, discussed in the literature on time preferences, is present bias.
Present bias is the tendency to overweight rewards that are available now and to discount (treat as less valuable) the same rewards when they are delayed, even if waiting would be better overall. In practice it shows up as choices like “I’ll start tomorrow”: the immediate option exerts a stronger pull than a larger but future gain, leading to “time-inconsistent” decisions (what you plan for the future changes when the future becomes the present). Neuroscience studies link this pattern to an interaction between reward/valuation circuits, especially the ventral striatum (including the nucleus accumbens) and medial valuation regions such as the medial/ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the orbitofrontal cortex, which track the subjective value of options and often respond more strongly when a reward is immediate, together with control networks in the lateral prefrontal cortex (including the dorsolateral PFC) that support self-control and can curb impulsive choices; disrupting lateral PFC function increases preference for immediate rewards, suggesting a causal role in resisting present bias.
In the “Intertemporal Choice” framework proposed by Ericson & Laibson, a broader category is considered: present-focused preferences, meant to capture all families of models in which the present has “special priority” and the difference between present-focused preferences and present bias is emphasized: the former does not always imply a demand for commitment or dynamic inconsistency, whereas the latter is a specific case within a larger set that also includes temptation models, planner-doer / dual-self conflict, and mechanisms tied to forecasting errors about the future self and limits of attention/memory that can sustain postponement without reducing everything to a single parameter. According to Ericson & Laibson, procrastination is often associated with naïvety about one’s self-control, a mistaken prediction of how strongly immediate temptation/aversion will influence future choices, so “I’ll do it tomorrow” becomes a repeated cycle. They also stress that procrastination is not explained by present bias alone: limited attention/memory and other psychological mechanisms can produce delay and can interact with present focus in non-obvious ways.
The strongest interpretation is an interaction model: procrastination emerges when immediate valuation/affect cues dominate and control systems fail to stabilize long-term goals sufficiently, rather than from a fixed “impulsive module” on its own.
PSYCHOLOGY AND EMOTIONS
Now let’s take a moment to go deeper and touch the most human and fragile side of the topic. Alongside the strictly physiological mechanisms we have just seen, psychological and social nuances are at work; procrastination, in fact, also has its roots in emotional self-regulation strategies. Procrastination is much more than a “lack of organization”: it is an attempt to feel better right away. But what does that mean? When a task activates unpleasant internal states (such as evaluation anxiety, frustration, boredom, shame, or self-doubt), postponing it produces immediate relief; that very relief, however, reinforces avoidance and increases the likelihood of procrastinating the next time as well. This view was formalized by Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl, who described procrastination as giving priority to short-term mood regulation at the expense of future goals. A widely cited empirical finding comes from the longitudinal study by Dianne Tice and Roy Baumeister, published in 1997 in Psychological Science, showing that procrastinators tend to experience less stress at the beginning (consistent with the “repairing” effect of avoidance), but more stress and worse outcomes later on as deadlines approach. That this is not just a correlation is also supported by experimental evidence: Marcus Eckert and colleagues showed, in a randomized controlled trial published in Personality and Individual Differences in 2016, that training aimed at tolerating and modifying task-related adverse emotions reduces procrastination, indicating that intervening on emotion regulation can weaken the “avoidance → relief → reinforcement” cycle. An fMRI study in Cerebral Cortex showed that task aversiveness increases activation of the anterior insula and can promote procrastination throughan amygdala-insula pathway, while the value of the outcome engages striatal circuits (such as the caudate) and can reduce postponement: in practice, the decision to delay emerges when the immediate emotional benefit of relief weighs more than the future value of the result, and the second phase, made of accumulated stress, guilt, self-criticism, and worsening performance, makes subsequent tasks even more threatening and aversive, highlighting the relief of avoidance and weighing down the sphere of negative emotions orbiting around the task to be done.
HOW TO FIGHT CRONUS
The most robust solutions for reducing procrastination are those that shift behavior by acting on three concrete neuro-psychological levers: (1) automating action initiation, (2) defusing emotional avoidance, (3) protecting control resources (sleep/circadian).
First: the daily intervention with the highest “payoff” is to turn a generic intention into an If–Then operating rule (“If X happens, then I do Y”), that is, implementation intentions, studied by Peter M. Gollwitzer and meta-analyzed with Paschal Sheeran: across experimental studies, this kind of planning reliably increases the likelihood of starting and carrying through with action because it creates an almost automatic link between cue and response, reducing dependence on willpower in the moment.
Second: when procrastination is maintained by avoidance (anxiety, boredom, fear of failing, perfectionism), the best-supported strategy is a brief but structured combination of mental contrasting plus implementation intentions (MCII): you define the desired outcome, identify the most likely internal obstacle (“when anxiety/perfectionism rises…”), and tie it to a precise response (“…then I do 5 ‘ugly’ minutes of drafting / I send a version 0 / I open the file and write three bullet points”), a technique meta-analyzed by Wang, Wang, and Gai (2021) as an effective intervention (though with small-to-moderate effects) for increasing goal attainment.
Third: treat evening procrastination as a clinical target. A randomized trial by Jeoung, Jeon, Yang, An, and Suh (2023) shows that a behavioral intervention can reduce bedtime procrastination, and this matters because stabilizing sleep and schedules protects executive control and lowers the probability of postponing the next day.
Finally, for those who procrastinate in a marked and recurring way, the most supported line is to use CBT-type (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) protocols, which intervene both on behaviors and on the thoughts that feed postponement (for example, breaking the task into progressive steps, training initiation despite discomfort, restructuring dysfunctional beliefs such as perfectionism, and managing distractions and triggers). A meta-analysis of interventions by W. van Eerde K.B. Klingsieck (2018) concludes that interventions reduce procrastination and that CBT emerges as particularly promising compared to other families of interventions, while the review/meta-analysis by Rozental and colleagues (2018) finds an overall benefit of psychological treatmentsand a moderate advantage for CBT, while stressing the need for further RCTs (Randomized Controlled Trials) to strengthen the causal robustness of these results.
CONCLUSION
Along with these mechanisms, infinitely many others follow, which get to work, cling, and
intertwine in dynamics and movements, opening doors and little doors onto another myriads of information, answers, and causes. This short piece aimed to bring the reader, and myself, closer to the vast world of the relationship between time, perception, mind, and body, touching on some relevant information amid the sea of studies and knowledge still in development regarding the theme approached, in the hope of having opened a small window of curiosity.
“Time is out of joint. O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
Nay, come, let’s go together”
Hamlet, Shakespeare
Bibliography/ Sitography
Meta-Analysis of Present-Bias Estimation Using Convex Time Budgets | Working Paper | ifo |
Cona, G., Scarpazza, C., Sartori, G., Moscovitch, M., & Bisiacchi, P. S. (2015). Neural bases of prospective memory: A meta-analysis and the “Attention to Delayed Intention” (AtoDI) model. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 52, 21–37
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Intuitive prediction: Biases and corrective procedures. Kahneman, P. Slovic, & A. Tversky (Eds.), In Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Cambridge University Press.
Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the “planning fallacy”: Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Tonelli, G. (2024). Tempo. Il sogno di uccidere Chrónos. Feltrinelli.
Ericson, K. M. M., & Laibson, D. (2019). Intertemporal choice.
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.
Tice, D. M., & Baumeister, R. F. (1997). Longitudinal study of procrastination, performance, stress, and health: The costs and benefits of dawdling. Psychological Science.
Eckert, M., Ebert, D. D., Lehr, D., Sieland, B., & Berking, M. (2016). Overcome procrastination:
Enhancing emotion regulation skills reduce procrastination. Personality and Individual Differences.
Zhang, S., Verguts, T., Zhang, C., Feng, P., Chen, Q., & Feng, T. (2021). Outcome value and task aversiveness impact task procrastination through separate neural pathways. Cerebral Cortex.
Wang, G., Wang, Y., & Gai, X. (2021). A meta-analysis of the effects of mental contrasting with implementation intentions on goal attainment. Frontiers in Psychology.
Jeoung, S., Jeon, H., Yang, H.-C., An, H., & Suh, S. (2023). A randomized controlled trial of a behavioral intervention for decreasing bedtime procrastination using a wait-list control group in a non-clinical sample of young adults. Sleep Medicine.
van Eerde, W., & Klingsieck, K. B. (2018). Overcoming procrastination? A meta-analysis of
intervention studies.
Rozental, A., Forsell, E., Svensson, A., Forsström, D., Andersson, G., & Carlbring, P. (2018).
Targeting procrastination using psychological treatments: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology.
Comments