What's bizarre about procrastination is how much it derives from irrelevant past experiences (negative ones) that, in truth, have little or nothing to do with the activity being procrastinated. Some failure or embarrassment that is hardly related to the activity at all gets dredged up, not always consciously, and becomes paralytic.
In the process of doing work, people are generally happy and can even get into a flowful state. That's even true for most people with mood problems-- if they can get themselves there. But the anticipation of work or change or even playful activity like exercise is often an anxiety-ridden negativity-fest. Cleaning an apartment isn't so bad; but the anticipation and feeling of having to do it brings forward all those negative emotions like, "how the fuck did I get to age <X> and still have to do my own cleaning? Why can't I get my goddamn shit together and take ownership of my career?" It's much easier to just do the damn cleaning: even high-status, rich people have to do it sometimes, it's not a big deal. But the mental and social prison of "having to" clean makes that menial task 10 times worse than it really deserves to be.
I think that people have to reprogram themselves to "just do" instead of fussing about how their work will be evaluated and how long it will take and what might go wrong. That kind of nonsense makes it hard to do anything.
My suspicion is that procrastination (like depression) was adaptive to our primordial existences as pack animals in hierarchies that were brutally enforced. Depression (low libido, physical lethargy) is an adaptation to low status and scarcity-- inappropriate to modern life, but it probably helped our ancestors survive periods of transient low status. Procrastination also seems to be something that we evolved to defer ambitions (especially while young, and unable to succeed in a physical fight) during periods of low status so we could survive into better times. It's the "I'm not ready to do that" reflex. It's incredibly maladaptive to modern life-- in which social status is mostly undefined and a little internal confidence can go a long way-- but given our "winner-take-all" society in which most people lose, it's not surprising that it's at epidemic levels.
But who is going to clean your apartment under an open-allocation world utopia?
I do like your idea about the origins of procrastination, but like almost all evolutionary psychology, it is too easy to make up stories to explain things. Occasionally there is something concrete from the fossil record to work from.
In the process of doing work, people are generally happy and can even get into a flowful state. That's even true for most people with mood problems-- if they can get themselves there. But the anticipation of work or change or even playful activity like exercise is often an anxiety-ridden negativity-fest. Cleaning an apartment isn't so bad; but the anticipation and feeling of having to do it brings forward all those negative emotions like, "how the fuck did I get to age <X> and still have to do my own cleaning? Why can't I get my goddamn shit together and take ownership of my career?" It's much easier to just do the damn cleaning: even high-status, rich people have to do it sometimes, it's not a big deal. But the mental and social prison of "having to" clean makes that menial task 10 times worse than it really deserves to be.
I think that people have to reprogram themselves to "just do" instead of fussing about how their work will be evaluated and how long it will take and what might go wrong. That kind of nonsense makes it hard to do anything.
My suspicion is that procrastination (like depression) was adaptive to our primordial existences as pack animals in hierarchies that were brutally enforced. Depression (low libido, physical lethargy) is an adaptation to low status and scarcity-- inappropriate to modern life, but it probably helped our ancestors survive periods of transient low status. Procrastination also seems to be something that we evolved to defer ambitions (especially while young, and unable to succeed in a physical fight) during periods of low status so we could survive into better times. It's the "I'm not ready to do that" reflex. It's incredibly maladaptive to modern life-- in which social status is mostly undefined and a little internal confidence can go a long way-- but given our "winner-take-all" society in which most people lose, it's not surprising that it's at epidemic levels.