Advice for increasing conscientiousness generally involves a set of anal-retentive genuflections: preparing for things in advance, laying your clothes out the night before, proofreading, making lists, doing chores, setting reminders, not letting the dishes “soak.” Your mother would be very pleased to hear you’re doing this. You also, probably, would struggle to do most of this unless you’re already pretty conscientious.
That’s the thing about conscientiousness: It’s hard to do it if you don’t already do it. You can wish that you were better organized or more productive and still not have the faintest idea how to get there. Many of us might be sold on the idea of personality change, but conscientiousness exemplifies how difficult it can be in practice: The very behaviors that turn you conscientious require a certain level of conscientiousness to perform. Low conscientiousness can look like a series of bad habits—procrastinating, running late, and overindulging—and as the habit guru James Clear has observed, “the task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us.”
Take timeliness, an element of conscientiousness that foils many of us, in part because estimating time is itself a complicated skill. The truth is that most people are bad at knowing exactly how long things will take. Most of us don’t time our activities, so we have little memory (or the wrong memory) of how long we spent doing them. When the boss asks whether we can get that report done in a week or a month, we don’t really know. Instead, we guess, and we tend to guess toward the shorter deadline. Who doesn’t like to be optimistic? In the end, that optimism looks like low conscientiousness when we run late.
Oddly, we are more likely to underestimate the duration of a project when it’s both a longer and more familiar task, according to Michael Roy, a psychologist at Elizabethtown College. As you become more experienced with a task, your brain tends to group its components into bigger “chunks,” and then it (wrongly) assumes that three chunks can be dispatched more quickly than ten. Even if you’ve written the same type of report dozens of times before, you’ll forget that it usually takes at least a week just to organize your notes.
Roy says the secret to combatting this underestimation problem is to time yourself as you do things. Again, this seems like a great idea. But it also seems like something only a conscientious person would remember to do.
Even famous promoters of conscientiousness rarely knew how to walk the walk. Benjamin Franklin, who wrote effusively about conscientious virtues like “order,” “cleanliness,” and “moderation” struggled in practice to maintain this level of self-discipline. In his autobiography, he laid out what he humbly called a “plan for attaining moral perfection,” including a schedule for the “twenty-four hours of a natural day”: He planned to rise at 5 a.m., wash, breakfast, and address “Powerful Goodness.” From 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., he would work. From 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., he would examine the day, and perhaps engage in “music or diversion” before going to bed. It would be the perfect, conscientious day.
However, much like people who flop into bed at 1 a.m. with a sink still full of dirty dishes, Franklin found that “my scheme of Order gave me the most trouble.” His careful schedule fell apart when he had unexpected appointments. He also, for the life of him, couldn’t keep track of his documents and belongings. (One historian noted of Franklin that “strangers who came to see him were amazed to behold papers of the greatest importance scattered in the most careless way over the table and floor.”) “I found myself incorrigible with respect to Order,” Franklin wrote ruefully. Do as Ben says, apparently, not as he does.
The very behaviors that turn you conscientious require a certain level of conscientiousness to perform.
In fact, as I perused Daily Rituals, Mason Currey’s book about the habits of creative types, I soon noticed that these weren’t routines that fostered conscientious productivity so much as strange rites performed in the throes of procrastination, between shots of alcohol and doses of amphetamines. The novelist Thomas Wolfe got in the writing spirit by fondling his genitals; Patricia Highsmith kept a bottle of vodka by her bed. Currey’s subjects would rend their garments about how little work they were getting done and then proceed to do no work whatsoever. Many of them lunged for conscientiousness and landed instead in a speed-addled panic, chain-smoking under the threat of deadlines. The eighteenth-century English writer Samuel Johnson believed that “idleness is a disease which must be combated,” but admitted that “I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together.”
A sign that you want to increase in conscientiousness might be that you’re googling “how to stop procrastinating”—possibly even while putting off some work. To some people who are low in conscientiousness, the future rewards of “good” decisions don’t matter as much as the present rewards of “bad” ones. Spending thirty minutes on social media feels good now but will probably have negative consequences later. Spending thirty minutes finishing a work presentation might feel boring now, but will be beneficial later. Guess which option a person low in conscientiousness would choose.
But a technique called episodic future thinking can help correct this cognitive error. The researchers Cristina Atance and Daniela O’Neill describe episodic future thinking as our ability to project ourselves into the future, essentially “pre-experiencing” something, much like we might recall a prior vacation or argument. But instead of remembering the past, the practice entails vividly imagining a future scenario, down to the explicit details—like what you’ll be wearing for the work presentation, who will be in the room, and from which deli you’ll order a sandwich afterward. This act turns our attention to those far-off rewards, and to what we could be doing now to make them more likely. (Clicking “new slide” on that PowerPoint, alas.)
In studies, episodic future thinking has been shown to promote a variety of conscientiousness-related behaviors, like abstaining from alcohol, nicotine, and overeating. The more frequently and specifically you imagine these futures, the better this works.
But initially, I was confused because many of the newly conscientious people I interviewed seemed to be driven to conscientiousness by fear. They weren’t imagining positive futures; they were dreading negative ones.
I took this to Donald Edmondson, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University. He clarified that episodic future thinking doesn’t mean just daydreaming about the future. It’s imagining likely different outcomes—positive or negative—that might be influenced by your choices today.
As long as the negativity doesn’t become so overwhelming as to be paralyzing, imagining a dark future can be motivating. It can make us think, What are the behaviors that I have to engage in to offset risk for this future scenario? Edmondson told me.
In fact, Edmondson added, “The episodes that I use personally are almost always the negative ones.” When we spoke, a blood test had recently revealed to Edmondson that he was prediabetic. He knew that put him at a higher risk of developing diabetes, and possibly cardiovascular disease and stroke. He could picture himself in the future, twenty or thirty pounds heavier, struggling to climb up a hill near his house. He visualized his chest tightening, running out of breath, his partner worrying. Is he having a heart attack?
Then he asked himself, “What are the changes I would have to make to keep this from happening?” This kind of thinking, though negative, makes the conscientious behaviors of eating right and exercising look more appealing.
As long as the negativity doesn’t become so overwhelming as to be paralyzing, imagining a dark future can be motivating.
On a personal level, I knew exactly what Edmondson was describing. Before I found my way to conscientiousness, I would procrastinate, eat abysmally, and amble along without any real goals. When I started to turn it all around, episodic future thinking—the negative kind—was partly responsible.
Though I made good grades, as a teen my conscientiousness often lapsed. It was like I could only make good grades; I couldn’t do anything else. In the mornings in high school, I would sleep in so late that, just as my mom was pulling out of the garage, I would slide into the car barefoot, my backpack in one hand and my Steve Madden loafers in the other. On my sprint through the kitchen, I’d shove a raw Pop-Tart in my mouth. One time I was actually late to school, and the teacher let the class vote on whether I should get a detention. They overwhelmingly voted yes.
It wasn’t just the lateness. Well into college, I had a bad habit of not opening mail or dealing with paperwork. I didn’t have a filing cabinet or anywhere else to store important papers, so I would act as though forms, letters, and the entire U.S. postal system didn’t apply to me. As a teen, I would stack documents in a corner of my room and never look at them, which is how I almost threw away the envelope that informed me of my full-tuition college scholarship. A few days before the deadline to respond, I found it stuffed between a bunch of other unsorted mail in a pile on the floor. That letter was worth $100,000.
But now, on a personality test comparing my responses to the million or so other people who had taken it, I scored “very high” on conscientiousness. What had changed?
Partly, I grew up and admitted that a fifteen-minute drive will never take eight minutes, no matter how “good” traffic seems. I learned to make checklists and to open my mail. But what really made me more punctual and organized was the possibility of having—or rather, not having—a career in journalism.
This industry is so competitive and cutthroat that conscientiousness is the baseline, the thing you need to have when your editor says your draft is merely “a good start.” And any government official is more likely to talk to a reporter who was on time than one who was late, no matter what their first drafts look like.
A few times in journalism grad school in LA, I missed interviews with experts because I failed to realistically assess traffic. I once left my expensive camera on a bus, and I was late to the first meeting of the class taught by my own graduate advisor. Eventually I recognized that these small slipups might cost me a chance at journalism, a career for which I had moved across the country and dedicated two years of my life.
I imagined having put in all this work only to fail, just because I forgot that La Cienega gets hairy after 4 p.m. I envisioned myself returning to the job I’d had before journalism school, working at a failing nonprofit where my main responsibility was assembling IKEA furniture. Once, my task for the entire day was to set up my boss’s new iPhone.
It was unthinkable. Whenever I recalled that place, I cringed. And then I started to be on time.
Excerpted from Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change by Olga Khazan. Copyright © 2025 by Olga Khazan. Reprinted by permission of Simon Element, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.
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