Need to know
At university, many people talk about their procrastination; they’ll joke: ‘Have you heard about the procrastination conference? It was postponed – again!’ In academia and beyond, procrastination is usually seen as a bad habit that many wish they could break. Notwithstanding the jokes made about it, some people genuinely suffer with their procrastination and struggle to get their lives in order, falling prey to the problem over and over again.
Procrastination can become a vicious cycle. Trying to achieve something and failing to act on your intentions can feel frustrating and depressing, and this can then lead to even more procrastination. Research on procrastination confirms that it’s related to negative outcomes – people who are inclined to more procrastination tend to have lower life satisfaction, lower achievement and poorer health.
Although people talk about procrastination a lot, there can be considerable differences in what they mean by the term. Psychologists like me who study this topic make an important distinction: procrastination is a form of delay, but not every type of delay is procrastination. Before working on ways to reduce your procrastination, it’s useful to understand this distinction and recognise times when you’re delaying a task but not actually procrastinating. For instance, you might need to delay some activities due to sudden changes in your situation or because you simply can’t get everything done at the same time. So you might delay an activity to suit your schedule better. Although these instances involve putting off something, psychologists would not consider them as procrastination.
Another particularly important distinction to make is between ‘strategic delay’ and procrastination – the two are often confused. Strategic delay entails deliberately putting off a task as a way to generate time pressure as a source of motivation. Many people defend this strategy, saying it works for them, and some even claim it’s the only way they can do things: by putting pressure on themselves, they feel stimulated to work harder. However, it’s a risky strategy because you might run out of time. It also consumes a lot of energy and can lead to a dip after a deadline in which you feel exhausted. What’s more, there isn’t much evidence to suggest it works, compared with following a plan that is more balanced over time.
Procrastination is arguably even more irrational than strategic delay because the person will often be fully aware that delaying a task will have bad consequences, yet they still choose to delay. This is puzzling from a psychological perspective. For instance, even if someone has intended many times to finally file their taxes, and they fully recognise it would be in their best interest to do so, they still don’t do it. Instead, they start to watch their favourite TV series, perhaps thinking that they might feel more like it after one episode. But when the next episode is suggested, they start watching that one. After that, they think to themselves: ‘It is really too late to start on the taxes now. Tomorrow I will feel more like it,’ and then they go to bed. Procrastination describes this type of delay, where there is a striking gap or mismatch between your intention and the actual action you take, and you feel incapable of overcoming it.
The psychological explanation for this common but irrational behaviour is that, by avoiding the emotional discomfort of engaging in the behaviour, procrastination provides a temporary relief or escape. The task might go undone, but at least the confrontation with the negative emotion is avoided. Easier and more fun things encourage us to stay away, at least momentarily, from what needs to be done. This is the main problem: procrastination is avoidance behaviour. It is the avoidance of something aversive by occupying your thoughts with something you would rather do and that is available right now, not taking into account the future. It can be seen as a conflict between what you want to do now versus what you should be doing for your future self. In short, it is a self-regulation problem.
Of course, at different times, some people might use both strategic delay and procrastination, depending on the particular activity. The key difference between them is the emotional connotations – that is, putting pressure on oneself purposefully versus irrational avoidance that runs counter to one’s intentions.
A common idea about procrastination is that it is triggered by fear of failure, but we know that it is not just fear that leads to procrastination. Anything aversive can trigger it: boredom, resentment, difficulty, disgust, practically anything that is negative in your mind. Almost everyone has experienced needing to do something they would rather avoid. Some examples that cause emotional discomfort: studying for an exam, telling bad news, paying taxes, or cleaning something that had just been cleaned. Instead of doing these tasks, you might scroll through a timeline on your phone, and your thoughts are pleasingly occupied with something else and, from one page to the next, you have delayed what you needed to do.
Unfortunately, avoidance does not make the obligation or necessary action go away; it is still there, of course. So procrastination is a way of coping that might help you feel better for a while, but it is no solution. The activities that were done instead of the intended one mostly do not make you feel better in the long run. They were just temporary and easy distractions, often not a productive activity or something that makes you feel proud, accomplished, or at least worthwhile spending time on. Some might brush this off, but for others this can then prompt further angst – now they feel they wasted time. And therefore, procrastination can lead to many negative emotions, such as feeling guilty, ashamed, nervous or depressed. The realisation of not having completed a vital task might get worse over time and, at some point, the barriers to completing the task might seem unsurmountable (for instance, after a deadline has passed).
If you are prone to procrastination and you recognise yourself in these descriptions, the good news is there are practical, effective ways to start making a change, and this Guide will show you how.
