"Procrastinator" isn’t a personality type

“I’m a procrastinator” is such a common thing to say about oneself. And there’s a lot of evidence for that believe, like maybe:

You put “do taxes” on your to do list in Jan and then not do them until April.

Or it took you 2 months to spend 11 minutes sending out thank you notes for your holiday gifts.

Or you have 3 home improvement projects you’ve started and not finished yet.

But I bet you could find at least three examples of things you didn’t procrastinate on. Things you did as soon as you could. Things that might have been hard or took a ton of time and energy but you did them quickly and without hesitation or dilly-dallying. 

Does that mean you are not a procrastinator? 

Our brains like to be right about the way the world is. It's a cognitive bias that that we adopted early on in our brain evolution and it served us well. While good for survival, it's not necessarily helpful for adulting. But that's how we end up identifying as a procrastinator, finding easy evidence to support that believe, and ignoring evidence to the contrary. 

How might it serve you to drop “procrastinator” as a personality type? What if you are someone who sometimes procrastinates and sometimes does things on or ahead of time? Could you separate your identity from what you do and when?