Kevin Systrom, the billionaire founder of photo-sharing app Instagram, has revealed his ultimate life-hack to beat procrastination.
In an interview with news website Axios this week, the 33-year-old - who sold Instagram to Facebook in 2012 for US$1 billion - said he was a fan of the "five-minute rule".
"If you don't want to do something, make a deal with yourself to do at least five minutes of it," he said. "After five minutes, you'll end up doing the whole thing."
As psychologist Andrea Bonior explains, among all the various forms of self-sabotage, procrastination stands out as "a favourite modus operandi for making ourselves miserable".
"We procrastinate for a variety of reasons - anxiety, perfectionism, lack of motivation, guilt, poor decision-making skills - and some of us wear our procrastination like a badge of honour," she writes in Psychology Today. "It's not always a bad thing, of course, especially if you work well under pressure and you always end up meeting your deadlines in the end."