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Why Wait? The Science Behind Procrastination

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Believe it or not, the Internet did not give rise to procrastination. People have struggled with habitual hesitation going back to ancient civilizations. The Greek poet Hesiod, writing around 800 B.C., cautioned not to “put your work off till tomorrow and the day after.” The Roman consul Cicero called procrastination “hateful” in the conduct of affairs. (He was looking at you, Marcus Antonius.) And those are just examples from recorded history. For all we know, the dinosaurs saw the meteorite coming and went back to their game of Angry Pterodactyls.

What’s become quite clear since the days of Cicero is that procrastination isn’t just hateful, it’s downright harmful. In research settings, people who procrastinate have higher levels of stress and lower well-being. In the real world, undesired delay is often associated with inadequate retirement savings and missed medical visits. Considering the season, it would be remiss not to mention past surveys by H&R Block, which found that people cost themselves hundreds of dollars by rushing to prepare income taxes near the April 15 deadline.

In the past 20 years, the peculiar behavior of procrastination has received a burst of empirical interest. With apologies to Hesiod, psychological researchers now recognize that there’s far more to it than simply putting something off until tomorrow. True procrastination is a complicated failure of self-regulation: experts define it as the voluntary delay of some important task that we intend to do, despite knowing that we’ll suffer as a result. A poor concept of time may exacerbate the problem, but an inability to manage emotions seems to be its very foundation.

“What I’ve found is that while everybody may procrastinate, not everyone is a procrastinator,” says APS Fellow Joseph Ferrari, a professor of psychology at DePaul University. He is a pioneer of modern research on the subject, and his work has found that as many as 20 percent of people may be chronic procrastinators.

“It really has nothing to do with time-management,” he says. “As I tell people, to tell the chronic procrastinator to just do it would be like saying to a clinically depressed person, cheer up.”

Suffering More, Performing Worse

A major misperception about procrastination is that it’s an innocuous habit at worst, and maybe even a helpful one at best. Sympathizers of procrastination often say it doesn’t matter when a task gets done, so long as it’s eventually finished. Some even believe they work best under pressure. Stanford philosopher John Perry, author of the book The Art of Procrastination, has argued that people can dawdle to their advantage by restructuring their to-do lists so that they’re always accomplishing something of value. Psychological scientists have a serious problem with this view. They argue that it conflates beneficial, proactive behaviors like pondering (which attempts to solve a problem) or prioritizing (which organizes a series of problems) with the detrimental, self-defeating habit of genuine procrastination. If progress on a task can take many forms, procrastination is the absence of progress.

“If I have a dozen things to do, obviously #10, #11, and #12 have to wait,” says Ferrari. “The real procrastinator has those  12 things, maybe does one or two of them, then rewrites the list, then shuffles it around, then makes an extra copy of it. That’s procrastinating. That’s different.”

One of the first studies to document the pernicious nature of procrastination was published in Psychological Science back in 1997. APS Fellow Dianne Tice and APS William James Fellow Roy Baumeister, then at Case Western Reserve University, rated college students on an established scale of procrastination, then tracked their academic performance, stress, and general health throughout the semester. Initially there seemed to be a benefit to procrastination, as these students had lower levels of stress compared to others, presumably as a result of putting off their work to pursue more pleasurable activities. In the end, however, the costs of procrastination far outweighed the temporary benefits. Procrastinators earned lower grades than other students and reported higher cumulative amounts of stress and illness. True procrastinators didn’t just finish their work later — the quality of it suffered, as did their own well-being.

“Thus, despite its apologists and its short-term benefits, procrastination cannot be regarded as either adaptive or innocuous,” concluded Tice and Baumeister (now both at Florida State University). “Procrastinators end up suffering more and performing worse than other people.”

A little later, Tice and Ferrari teamed up to do a study that put the ill effects of procrastination into context. They brought students into a lab and told them at the end of the session they’d be engaging in a math puzzle. Some were told the task was a meaningful test of their cognitive abilities, while others were told that it was designed to be meaningless and fun. Before doing the puzzle, the students had an interim period during which they could prepare for the task or mess around with games like Tetris. As it happened, chronic procrastinators only delayed practice on the puzzle when it was described as a cognitive evaluation. When it was described as fun, they behaved no differently from non-procrastinators. In an issue of the Journal of Research in Personality from 2000, Tice and Ferrari concluded that procrastination is really a self-defeating behavior — with procrastinators trying to undermine their own best efforts.

“The chronic procrastinator, the person who does this as a lifestyle, would rather have other people think that they lack effort than lacking ability,” says Ferrari. “It’s a maladaptive lifestyle.”

A Gap Between Intention and Action

There’s no single type of procrastinator, but several general impressions have emerged over years of research. Chronic procrastinators have perpetual problems finishing tasks, while situational ones delay based on the task itself. A perfect storm of procrastination occurs when an unpleasant task meets a person who’s high in impulsivity and low in self-discipline. (The behavior is strongly linked with the Big Five personality trait of conscientiousness.) Most delayers betray a tendency for self-defeat, but they can arrive at this point from either a negative state (fear of failure, for instance, or perfectionism) or a positive one (the joy of temptation). All told, these qualities have led researchers to call procrastination the “quintessential” breakdown of self-control.

“I think the basic notion of procrastination as self-regulation failure is pretty clear,” says Timothy Pychyl of Carleton University, in Canada. “You know what you ought to do and you’re not able to bring yourself to do it. It’s that gap between intention and action.”

Social scientists debate whether the existence of this gap can be better explained by the inability to manage time or the inability to regulate moods and emotions. Generally speaking, economists tend to favor the former theory. Many espouse a formula for procrastination put forth in a paper published by the business scholar Piers Steel, a professor at the University of Calgary, in a 2007 issue of Psychological Bulletin. The idea is that procrastinators calculate the fluctuating utility of certain activities: pleasurable ones have more value early on, and tough tasks become more important as a deadline approaches.

Psychologists like Ferrari and Pychyl, on the other hand, see flaws in such a strictly temporal view of procrastination. For one thing, if delay were really as rational as this utility equation suggests, there would be no need to call the behavior procrastination — on the contrary, time-management would fit better. Beyond that, studies have found that procrastinators carry accompanying feelings of guilt, shame, or anxiety with their decision to delay. This emotional element suggests there’s much more to the story than time-management alone. Pychyl noticed the role of mood and emotions on procrastination with his very first work on the subject, back in the mid-1990s, and solidified that concept with a study published in the Journal of Social Behavior and Personality in 2000. His research team gave 45 students a pager and tracked them for five days leading up to a school deadline. Eight times a day, when beeped, the test participants reported their level of procrastination as well as their emotional state. As the preparatory tasks became more difficult and stressful, the students put them off for more pleasant activities. When they did so, however, they reported high levels of guilt — a sign that beneath the veneer of relief there was a lingering dread about the work set aside. The result made Pychyl realize that procrastinators recognize the temporal harm in what they’re doing, but can’t overcome the emotional urge toward a diversion.

A subsequent study, led by Tice, reinforced the dominant role played by mood in procrastination. In a 2001 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Tice and colleagues reported that students didn’t procrastinate before an intelligence test when primed to believe their mood was fixed. In contrast, when they thought their mood could change (and particularly when they were in a bad mood), they delayed practice until about the final minute. The findings suggested that self-control only succumbs to temptation when present emotions can be improved as a result.

“Emotional regulation, to me, is the real story around procrastination, because to the extent that I can deal with my emotions, I can stay on task,” says Pychyl. “When you say task-aversiveness, that’s another word for lack of enjoyment. Those are feeling states — those aren’t states of which [task] has more utility.”

Frustrating the Future Self

In general, people learn from their mistakes and reassess their approach to certain problems. For chronic procrastinators, that feedback loop seems continually out of service. The damage suffered as a result of delay doesn’t teach them to start earlier the next time around. An explanation for this behavioral paradox seems to lie in the emotional component of procrastination. Ironically, the very quest to relieve stress in the moment might prevent procrastinators from figuring out how to relieve it in the long run.

“I think the mood regulation piece is a huge part of procrastination,” says Fuschia Sirois of Bishop’s University, in Canada. “If you’re focused just on trying to get yourself to feel good now, there’s a lot you can miss out on in terms of learning how to correct behavior and avoiding similar problems in the future.”

A few years ago, Sirois recruited about 80 students and assessed them for procrastination. The participants then read descriptions of stressful events, with some of the anxiety caused by unnecessary delay. In one scenario, a person returned from a sunny vacation to notice a suspicious mole, but put off going to the doctor for a long time, creating a worrisome situation.

Afterward, Sirois asked the test participants what they thought about the scenario. She found that procrastinators tended to say things like, “At least I went to the doctor before it really got worse.” This response, known as a downward counterfactual, reflects a desire to improve mood in the short term. At the same time, the procrastinators rarely made statements like, “If only I had gone to the doctor sooner.” That type of response, known as an upward counterfactual, embraces the tension of the moment in an attempt to learn something for the future. Simply put, procrastinators focused on how to make themselves feel better at the expense of drawing insight from what made them feel bad.

Recently, Sirois and Pychyl tried to unify the emotional side of procrastination with the temporal side that isn’t so satisfying on its own. In the February issue of Social and Personality Psychology Compass, they propose a two-part theory on procrastination that braids short-term, mood-related improvements with long-term, time-related damage. The idea is that procrastinators comfort themselves in the present with the false belief that they’ll be more emotionally equipped to handle a task in the future.

“The future self becomes the beast of burden for procrastination,” says Sirois. “We’re trying to regulate our current mood and thinking our future self will be in a better state. They’ll be better able to handle feelings of insecurity or frustration with the task. That somehow we’ll develop these miraculous coping skills to deal with these emotions that we just can’t deal with right now.”

The Neuropsychology of Procrastination

Recently the behavioral research into procrastination has ventured beyond cognition, emotion, and personality, into the realm of neuropsychology. The frontal systems of the brain are known to be involved in a number of processes that overlap with self-regulation. These behaviors — problem-solving, planning, self-control, and the like — fall under the domain of executive functioning. Oddly enough, no one had ever examined a connection between this part of the brain and procrastination, says Laura Rabin of Brooklyn College.

“Given the role of executive functioning in the initiation and completion of complex behaviors, it was surprising to me that previous research had not systematically examined the relationship between aspects of executive functioning and academic procrastination — a behavior I see regularly in students but have yet to fully understand, and by extension help remediate,” says Rabin.

To address this gap in the literature, Rabin and colleagues gathered a sample of 212 students and assessed them first for procrastination, then on the nine clinical subscales of executive functioning: impulsivity, self-monitoring, planning and organization, activity shifting, task initiation, task monitoring, emotional control, working memory, and general orderliness. The researchers expected to find a link between procrastination and a few of the subscales (namely, the first four in the list above). As it happened, procrastinators showed significant associations with all nine, Rabin’s team reported in a 2011 issue of the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology.

Rabin stresses the limitations of the work. For one thing, the findings were correlative, meaning it’s not quite clear those elements of executive functioning caused procrastination directly. The assessments also relied on self-reports; in the future, functional imaging might be used to confirm or expand the brain’s delay centers in real time. Still, says Rabin, the study suggests that procrastination might be an “expression of subtle executive dysfunction” in people who are otherwise neuropsychologically healthy.

“This has direct implications for how we understand the behavior and possibly intervene,” she says.

Possible Interventions

As the basic understanding of procrastination advances, many researchers hope to see a payoff in better interventions. Rabin’s work on executive functioning suggests a number of remedies for unwanted delay. Procrastinators might chop up tasks into smaller pieces so they can work through a more manageable series of assignments. Counseling might help them recognize that they’re compromising long-term aims for quick bursts of pleasure. The idea of setting personal deadlines harmonizes with previous work done by behavioral researchers Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch on “precommitment.” In a 2002 issue of Psychological Science, Ariely and Wertenbroch reported that procrastinators were willing to set meaningful deadlines for themselves, and that the deadlines did in fact improve their ability to complete a task. These self-imposed deadlines aren’t as effective as external ones, but they’re better than nothing.

The emotional aspects of procrastination pose a tougher problem. Direct strategies to counter temptation include blocking access to desirable distraction, but to a large extent that effort requires the type of self-regulation procrastinators lack in the first place. Sirois believes the best way to eliminate the need for short-term mood fixes is to find something positive or worthwhile about the task itself. “You’ve got to dig a little deeper and find some personal meaning in that task,” she says. “That’s what our data is suggesting.”

Ferrari, who offers a number of interventions in his 2010 book Still Procrastinating? The No Regrets Guide to Getting It Done, would like to see a general cultural shift from punishing lateness to rewarding the early bird. He’s proposed, among other things, that the federal government incentivize early tax filing by giving people a small break if they file by, say, February or March 15. He also suggests we stop enabling procrastination in our personal relationships.

“Let the dishes pile up, let the fridge go empty, let the car stall out,” says Ferrari. “Don’t bail them out.” (Recent work suggests he’s onto something. In a 2011 paper in Psychological Science, Gráinne Fitzsimons and Eli Finkel report that people who think their relationship partner will help them with a task are more likely to procrastinate on it.)

But while the tough love approach might work for couples, the best personal remedy for procrastination might actually be self-forgiveness. A couple years ago, Pychyl joined two Carleton University colleagues and surveyed 119 students on procrastination before their midterm exams. The research team, led by Michael Wohl, reported in a 2010 issue of Personality and Individual Differences that students who forgave themselves after procrastinating on the first exam were less likely to delay studying for the second one.

Pychyl says he likes to close talks and chapters with that hopeful prospect of forgiveness. He sees the study as a reminder that procrastination is really a self-inflicted wound that gradually chips away at the most valuable resource in the world: time.

“It’s an existentially relevant problem, because it’s not getting on with life itself,” he says. “You only get a certain number of years. What are you doing?”

Comments

I am writing my seventh speech for my Toastsmasters meeting and I am speaking about procrastination. This article provided me with great research and information about this subject. Thanks.

I too am writing my 7th speech for Toastmasters on the same subject. Hope yours went well. Mine is due tomorrow!

Me too! 7th ToastMaster Speech. I’ve procrastinated over every speech topic so far, so decided to research into the meaning of my procrastination to overcome the problem. Hence, it has become the topic for my speech!This article has been very informative.

mis hijos lo padecen. Como ayudar a mis hijos esta de pormedio su vida.

this could be a great article to use for one of my classes.

As a counselor, this article is powerful. I don’t think I will ever be stuck with a client who presents procastination as a distress issue.

Thanks Eric for publishing this

I’m currently researching an apt second show topic behind the science of procrastination and this has been quite helpful.

I’ll be sure to send my listeners this way.

People say that procrastination reduces the productivity. But scientifically it actually increases the productivity. People tend to work more and try to be more productive in the last few hours before the deadline. On the other hand, it also increases the internal stress. So it is better to avoid procrastination for a perfect work-life balance. To avoid procrastination, I chose Habiliss virtual assistant services, which really helped me in increasing my productivity.

it helped me so much to write my essay and it has so many information, thanks.

My daughter belongs to the type of people who will procrastinate or avoid anything that implies making an effort. Or she will start something and leave it unfinished to do something else. I don’t know what to do, rowing just makes things worse.

tell her this steps:
1. Chop the whole task in small pieces.
2. Observe the small task very deeply.
4. make a mind map of how you are going to do it.
3. make an expected and meaningful deadline’
4. and most importantly try to visualize the small tasks you are completing before the deadline.

Interesting that no procrastinators have posted. Does that demonstrate the guilt and shame they feel for wasting their lives?

Hello Christina,
I’ve been waiting a year to reply to you comment in order to maximize my creativity in doing so.
Uhm wait, Catfish just came on and it’s a really good episode! I’ll get back to you about the gilt and shame another day, hope you understand.

Comments from a procrastinator; I don’t know what to say. It is so stressful to always feel like you are behind the eight ball. I have always taken on a little more than most sensible people would. So, I set myself up from the get go. I have a long history of depression, so when I get depressed, my chores, projects, whatever seem to be too heavy to deal with. I have a totally unrealistic sense of time. I am chronically late. As I have gotten older, this has gotten worse.My career was mostly in nursing management, which worked out for me because I didn’t have an exact time to be at work unless I had meetings. I often stayed late to finish projects when everyone was gone for the day and I could focus in total peace and quiet. Of course, when I worked late, I felt the inner guilt of neglecting my family.
I am almost 70, raising 2 grandchildren and unable to find the peace and quiet or the time to work on the projects I saved for retirement. This was voluntary and I really felt I could give them the best environment for their special needs. So, maybe I have given myself an acceptable, selfless reason to procrastinate. But, it only makes me feel more stressed. I really want to be relaxed, happy and unstressed.

I’m right there with you, Elyse. I wonder if anyone has ever studied procrastination from the perspective of someone who just perpetually takes on more than they can handle. I’m so sick of it. I’m a PhD student and I see peers turning things in early and I’m always last. It’s a horrible feeling. My work is usually very good, but almost always late. I empathize with you and hope that we can both beat this problem soon.

Well…Sometimes thing come into my life to make my nightmares a bit more manageable.
This article showed me the STRONG effect that emotions have on procrastination.
I identified with every single thing in it and I am grateful I came across it.

Finally, I begin to understand the psychology behind my chronic procrastination. My levels of distraction are such that I rarely get through an article without feeling like I must be doing something else. Not this one. Words and phrases that leaped off the page (screen) to me were “self-defeating behavior”, “intention” vs. “action”, “self-regulating”. True. True. True. Now I must delve into my belief system to pull out the reasons why these negative behaviors take precedence over those that are far more positive. Clearly, I feel I am getting some benefit out of my self-defeating behavior or else why repeat it? I’ll have to be careful when attempting to reason this out though. I AM a ponder-er by nature which means I tend to over-think to the degree that by the time I believe I understand my ‘whys’, the opportunity for action has already passed. The irony in this is that my pondering IS procrastinating.

Countless times I have wanted desperately to attach my inability to move forward in my tasks, projects, etc. to the fact that I’m just lousy at managing my time. And then I read this:

“It really has nothing to do with time-management,” he says. “As I tell people, to tell the chronic procrastinator to just do it would be like saying to a clinically depressed person, cheer up.”

THANK YOU! This explains why every single Day Planner I’ve ever attempted to use failed so miserably. Bullet Journals? Ha! Nope. Productivity Apps? Not for me. I confess to being inadequate at anything that requires planning. Planning, then, requires taking the time to sit quietly and write out some kind of an action plan. Action plans require lists. Lists become my number one enemy. It’s at times like this that I feel It’s an almost physical reaction that comes over me when I force myself to think through to the natural end of an action. This snowballs into an overwhelming sense of confusion. My thoughts begin to scramble which triggers my impulse to get up and distract myself with something that will return an immediate sense of accomplishment. “I need to water my plants”.

Has anyone else experienced this? Does all this mean I am now officially becoming OCD? ADD?

I work full-time in a position that requires intense focus (which I love) but also requires that I am organized enough to prioritize my daily workload. It’s as though I recognize the importance of this but I feel I constantly fall short due to that sense of confusion that distracts me (remember that list thing?) and I end up just ‘winging’ it in order to complete the task. I’ve been known to work overtime (w/o pay) just to feel I’ve accomplished what I should have done all day. I have been known to work 10-12 hour workdays which, I realize, is simply ridiculous. And then begins that cycle of negative feelings: unproductive, inadequate, guilt, shame…etc. To say it is exhausting on all levels would be a gross understatement.

Perhaps you can point me (us) to articles that will help me begin to better understand — and help to end — such cycles of negative patterns.

Thank you for addressing the psychology of procrastination. It’s as though my name was written all over it.

I’m similar, I think, since I’ve wanted to only get things done perfectly or I’d see myself as a total failure. Avoiding trying to take care of this test, etc., means my not wanting to face seeing myself as a failure. I never expected to do anything as good as it should be. I’ve always suffered from a strong fear of rejection… I have been linked with AvPD, DPD, OCD, GAD, depression, bulimia, perf ectionism, agoraphobia… According to a psychiatrist, I saw things only in extremes, i.e. all or nothing, good or bad, black or white… I now have to believe, that according to tests run by this current psychiatrist that I suffer from Asperger’s Syndrome… I have been put under the 1% of the population with memory but I do not remember any of my growing up years… Only faced accepting someone as a friend at the age of 28. I saw her as a guardian angel…

Ditto. I wrote a post I aim to publish on the subject. I was the worst procrastinator. When I ceased depriving myself of all the things I love to do. It made it easier to tackle any task I dreaded. Try to strike a balance between work and play. Familiarise yourself with prioritizing important and urgent tasks. And getting them done. Focus a little more on the future, of where you’d like to see yourself. It’ll help you get past the immediate feeling of anxiety. The emotion that underlies the prolonged periods of procrastination the chronic procrastinator is prone to feeling.

Good luck.

Wow this was great how they took this one concept that sometimes cripples most of us, and turned it into a science! Wonderful and highly informative reading! I even posted this to Facebook!

Amazing article, lot of research and efforts, thanks for sharing this abundance of information

WOW!! This was an extremely helpful AND educational article! And I think I can speak for many! And I thank all the contributors to this piece who offered there insight along with case studies that actually break down this human nemesis that has plagued the human race since man learned to walk upright!
But there is one thing that I do that most other people do and maybe you could do an article on this subject also. And that is impulsivity. Before I finish one task I jump to do something else! I am just now learning to recognize mine, and am making a strong effort to an alias and correct it.

WOW! This was quite an article! Never before have I read anything so descriptive about a long time human nemesis such as this, what it actually is and how it can be dealt with. I certainly did not know that this is an issue that dates back hundred of years before Jesus Christ was born! But not until now has this problem been looked at and broken down. I will definitely apply these principles! Thank you!

This article is more helpful than others I have read, but my own reasons for procrastination are still elusive to me. Sometimes I will work on a project for a little while, which relieves anxiety. Then I set it aside, saying that I want to see it with fresh eyes a day or two later. Other times I have had the experience of doing something too early, like prepping a presentation, and when I go to make it, I have lost the train of thought. Some tasks are just boring, like many household chores, or present a knotty problem which I just don’t feel like dealing with. Oddly enough, I have no trouble downloading bank and credit card statements and balancing the checkbook. I think it’s the short term pleasure of knowing my finances are in order, even if I still owe money on something, at least the numbers are going down.

Very interesting and educating article with so much research. Thanks for putting this together

I really liked this article. I’ve been going thru a mid life crisis because of a battle I have with chronic procrastination. Like many of the others I read above it’s not one thing it’s many different emotions one has to deal with while h in turn leads one to live one very stressful life. I have a deadline at midnight tonight for something I’ve been wanting/needing to do for a couple months now. Just by reading this article and seeing that I am not alone in this fight has given me the desire to get it done! I pray that everyone that struggles with this nemesis gets closer to defeating our life long enemy. Never give up!

Whoa. I’m writing a speech for school on procrastination, since I have been a chronic procrastinator for pretty much as long as I can remember. I hit an all time low at one point, where I basically never did my homework. For many years, I tried and failed to come up with a reason for that. I very much enjoyed school and my work, I was more than capable of completing the work, and I did have enough time on my hands. I have concluded that the only plausible reason is that, like now, there is something in my brain that simply cannot get work done. When I read the comparison between telling a chronic procrastinator to “get it done” and a clinically depressed person to “cheer up” I was shocked. People never seemed to understand how much I desperately want to be able to just get it done. Even the act of procrastinating is not enjoyable in the slightest – I feel too guilty and self-loathing. I have looked at a number of resources for my speech regarding why we procrastinate, and have disagreed with every one, knowing that I did not fall under those reasons. I agreed with Every. Single. Thing. mentioned in this article. Whoa. Where has this been all my life.

P.S. – if you, like me, are a chronic procrastinator I would very much recommend a brief TedTalk entitled “Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator”. Blew me away.

Thank you so so much for your work. Reading this article helps me feel that I’m not alone. Procrastination is a thief, a liar, a destroyer. I’m in midlife now and I’m seeing how much procrastination has stolen from me, I’ve let it and now I live with the consequences of dreams unfulfilled and shattered. My quilt literally leaves me in a state of numbness and it’s like I’m frozen and not moving forward. Slowly, through prayer and acceptance through my faith, I’m realizing that, and this is key: that forgiving myself and knowing that God loves me unconditionally that I can move forward. I thank God for people like you that are able to gather info and better help all of us.

Everything is coming together now, I now know why I am the way that I am. Thank you so much for this article

I just turned 60. Since my 30s I’ve not been able to keep table surfaces clean of piled up mail, papers, etc. I clean it off and slowly over time it magically piles up again. I want my home to be clutter free but can’t keep up with it, or am I putting off cleaning? I’m always too busy and find activities to do that keep me from taking care of my home. Setting aside time, marking days on the calendar don’t always work either. Am I just lazy? I work better at keeping my home cleaned up when someone is there helping me. Anyone else feel this way?

its a wakeup call for me,such an eye opener

It’s really frustrating, this procrastination thing. My procrastination started to get worse from the day I began doing my practical research. I am unsure but it felt overwhelming (because researches are usually long, I think that is why) and because of that, I.. procrastinated. I watched youtube most of the time when I get home even though I’m aware that I should be doing my research. I tried to fight it off for several months. I’ve won over my procrastination stuff but it keeps coming back. It’s been a little over a year now and getting worse. I try to find my way out of this because it severely affects my academic performance and my social life. I am still finding my way out of this by doing research on procrastination.. (kind of ironic considering that my procrastination habits kicked off due to practical research).. Anyway, I wish the very best for anyone who is struggling with procrastination.. I wish the best for myself too…

Mind-blowing! I am finally able to understand a big part of why I procrastinate and I now feel there is hope. For example, I felt immensely relieved when I read the comparison between a chronic procrastinator and a depressed person; a heavy weight was lifted off my chest -which is pretty much always in agony because of all the tasks and projects postponed. So there is hope.

Dianne, I feel you. Your pain is my pain. Let’s hope this insightful article will help us get better. In my case, the positive emotions clearly help me stay on task, so, when I catch myself procrastinating out of control, I engage in a lifting and energizing short activity to change my mood. At the end of it, and without stopping for anything, I’ll get started on the task/project. I find myself immersed in the task (I am doing it, yeay!), and I feel happy for what I accomplished. That positive loop can keep me going for a little while….until I see a fly on the wall and my mind gets lost on something else.
Thanks to this ‘technique’ I have accomplished diminishing the paralysing effects of the guilt. I have accomplished accepting the reality of the time lost and the work not done. I am accepting that whatever feeling I am feeling about procrastinating, THAT WILL ALSO PASS. I am accepting that I can change my emotional apporach to the task and that allows me to start on the positive loop all over. Slowly, yes, I am learning that I am not exactly repeating the same behaviour over and over. It’s taken me 30 years of adult life to get here but I’m improving and now I’m understanding more. Id say this is good.

Thank you for this article. I’ll read it later.


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