National Estate Planning Awareness Week 2025: The Science of Procrastination in Estate Planning

🐌 What's really the hangup?

Estate planning—the crucial process of deciding how your assets will be managed and distributed after you pass away—is something almost everyone agrees they should do. It also involves a lesser known, yet equally, if not more important, need for incapacity planning in case of emergency. Yet, for many, it sits stubbornly at the bottom of the to-do list, year after year. Why the massive delay? It turns out, the "hangup" isn't a lack of discipline; it's a fascinating interplay of psychology and cognitive biases that makes tackling this task uniquely difficult.

🧠 Procrastination: The Cognitive Roadblocks to Estate Planning

Procrastination, in a scientific sense, is the voluntary delay of an intended course of action despite expecting negative consequences. When it comes to estate planning, several psychological phenomena conspire to fuel this delay:

1. Present Bias (Hyperbolic Discounting)

Our brains are wired for the here and now. Present bias is the tendency to value immediate rewards and costs much more heavily than future ones.

• The Problem: Estate planning requires immediate effort (finding a lawyer, gathering documents, making tough decisions) for a benefit that is distant and uncertain (peace of mind, preventing family conflict after death). Our brain chooses the easy path: avoiding the immediate, unpleasant task.

• Estate Planning Effect: The immediate 'pain' of doing the paperwork outweighs the distant 'gain' of a complete plan. We think, "I'll do it next month, nothing bad will happen in the meantime."

2. The Fear of Death (Mortality Salience)

Let's face it: estate planning is inextricably linked to thinking about your own death. Researchers call this mortality salience.

• The Problem: Directly confronting our own mortality triggers anxiety and defense mechanisms. One common mechanism is to push the thought away, to "deny" its relevance in the present moment.

• Estate Planning Effect: The act of writing a will or trust makes the abstract idea of death concrete. Procrastinating the task is, subconsciously, a way of procrastinating death itself.

3. Ambiguity Aversion (The Messy Middle)

Estate planning isn't a simple, clear-cut task; it involves complex financial and familial decisions. Ambiguity aversion describes our preference for known risks over unknown risks.

• The Problem: Many people don't know where to start, what documents they need, or how to fairly divide assets. This ambiguity creates a sense of overwhelm.

• Estate Planning Effect: Instead of diving into the "messy middle" of figuring out trusts, guardianship, and beneficiaries, we default to inaction. The brain prefers the known state (doing nothing) over the unknown process (starting the plan).

4. Planning Fallacy

We are notoriously poor at estimating how long tasks will take, especially those we've never done before. The planning fallacy is the tendency to underestimate the time and resources required to complete a future task.

• The Problem: People often think estate planning will take one quick meeting, only to realize the extent of the necessary information gathering and decision-making.

• Estate Planning Effect: We keep putting it off because we falsely believe we can knock it out in a spare weekend, and since we don't have a spare weekend right now, it waits indefinitely.

  
  

✅ How to Hack Your Brain and Beat the Delay

Understanding the science is the first step; now for the solution. You can outsmart your procrastinating brain with a few simple techniques:

Cognitive Bias	Technique to Overcome	Actionable Step
Present Bias	Temporal Chunking: Break the task into tiny, immediate, low-effort steps.	Schedule a 15-minute block to research three estate planning attorneys. That's all.
Mortality Salience	Focus on the Present Good: Reframe the purpose of the plan.	Focus on the gift of security you're giving your living family, not the act of your death.
Ambiguity Aversion	Define the First Step: Clarify the initial, smallest action.	Instead of "Do my will," make the task "Find all account passwords and asset locations."
Planning Fallacy	Schedule the Next Step: Make the task recurring, not a one-time event.	Schedule "Estate Planning Prep (30 min)" weekly until the lawyer meeting is booked.

The bottom line? You're not lazy; you're human. Your brain is trying to protect you from difficult thoughts and immediate effort. Recognize the psychological game, break the process into manageable, less threatening steps, and remember the immediate reward is the profound peace of mind that comes with knowing you've protected the people you love. Go ahead—schedule that first 15-minute task right now. Your future self (and your family) will thank you.

Legal Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. Nothing in this article or this site should be considered legal advice.