What Is Procrastination and How Can We Overcome It?

What counts as procrastination?

According to Wikipedia, procrastination means to “unnecessarily and voluntarily delay something, despite knowing that there will be negative consequences for doing so.”

There are productive ways of delaying tasks, as well as inevitable delays, outside of one’s control. Those don’t typically fall under the term “procrastination”. While not all researchers draw the same lines when defining procrastination, I found Jason Wessel‘s definition and Venn diagram convincing and helpful in distinguishing procrastination from other types of delays. According to that, you are procrastination if you (1) intend to complete the task, (2) delay acting on the intention, (3) have voluntary control to do the task, and (4) an expectation of harm, or things being worse off, if you delay.

Can procrastination be a good thing?

“I do my best work under pressure!” – Anonymous Greek Philosopher

What about the claim that procrastination improves performance, because the imminent deadline creates excitement and pressure that allow for peak performance? Do you sometimes feel that you work best under pressure? I certainly hear that from a lot of people. Surprisingly enough though, one study found that chronic procrastinators actually work worse under pressure than non-procrastinators. So the popular notion of “I work best under pressure” may be true for some people, however – tragically enough – it seems to be least true for those people who would most need it to be true. Frequent procrastinators seem on the contrary to be more likely to choke than to thrive under pressure.

But of course there could still be benefits to procrastination. For example, could the enjoyment of carefree times earlier offset the stress and poor performance later on? Unfortunately, that does not usually seem to be the case either. One study found that while procrastinating students did indeed report lower stress and less illness than non-procrastinators early in the semester, they reported not only higher stress and more illness late in the term, but were overall sicker. They also received lower grades on all assignments.

Since we should always be wary about relying on individual studies, I searched for meta-analyses¹ on procrastination. I found a recent one that included at 22 studies conducted between the years 2000 and 2020, and which found a robust relationship² between more procrastination and poorer academic achievement.

Overall, it seems safe to say that procrastination comes along with long-term costs – both to wellbeing and performance – that outweigh the short-term benefits.

How can we overcome procrastination?

While we all struggle with procrastination in one way or another, the struggles come in many shapes and have many different causes. Understanding what leads you to procrastinate on any particular task can be an important first step to help you fix the problem. For example, if distractions are causing you to procrastinate, your best bet is to limit those, whereas if the task itself feels overwhelming, you need to get clarity on the task. This article gives a you a list of frequent procrastination triggers and some suggestions on how you could tackle any one of them. If you find a trigger on that list that seems to ring true, give one of those suggestions a try! Let me know how it worked out for you.

What if nothing on that list resonates and you’re not sure what’s causing you to procrastinate? Here’s a more involved method, but still one you can try by yourself. It’s a three-step intervention designed to help you self-diagnose and treat some of your most persistent procrastination habits. Heads-up: this is not an easy process to go through by yourself, so I would suggest finding a buddy to work with.

I would be excited to work with you on this. With the articles I linked here, you can already get a good sense of my coaching approach. I’d first help you figure out what keeps holding you back from doing what you really want to do. Then we’d explore together which simple and practical changes could make your life easier and better. If you’d like my help, you can schedule your first online coaching session or a brief phone call to discuss options.

I look forward to talking to you!

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

Footnotes:

¹ Meta-analyses are studies that analyze the results of a large number of studies. I generally recommend searching for meta-analyses about any topic you really care about. Google Scholar is a neat search tool if you want to find scientific papers, rather than random websites.

² All included studies were correlational, not experimental, which means we can’t truly draw any conclusions about cause vs effect. It is possible, for example, that an unidentified third variable, such as anxiety, or poor self-regulation, might be the cause of both poor performance and procrastination. However, to me, the more intuitive causal direction of procrastination directly causing poor performance does seem quite plausible in this case, for at least two reasons. First, delaying a task, especially a bigger project, can naturally affect the outcomes of the task. Second, at least for chronic procrastinators, we have seen in experiments that more pressure directly causes poorer performance. In any case, most people I talk to do seem to think of procrastination as a problem that causes poor performance and stress for them, so as a coach, it makes sense to me to go with that assumption.

References:

Akpur, U. (2020). The Effect of Procrastination on Academic Achievement: A Meta-Analysis Study. International Journal of Educational Methodology, 6(4), 681–690.
Ferrari, J. R. (2001). Procrastination as self-regulation failure of performance: Effects of cognitive load, self-awareness, and time limits on ‘working best under pressure.’ European Journal of Personality, 15(5), 391–406.
Tice, D. M., & Baumeister, R. F. (1997). Longitudinal Study of Procrastination, Performance, Stress, and Health: The Costs and Benefits of Dawdling. Psychological Science, 8(6), 454–458.
Wessel, J. (2021, July 12-13). Defining Procrastination: A Venn diagram to consider. [Conference presentation]. International Procrastination Research Workshop. Hosted online by Tim Pychyl (Carleton University) and Joel Anderson (Utrecht University).

Picture Credits:

[1] Thomas Couture (1815–1879): Les romains de la décadence, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Modified by UT.
[2] Jason Wessel, reshared with permission from https://www.unpackpsychology.com.au/post/what-is-procrastination. Wessel, J. (2021, July 12-13). Defining Procrastination: A Venn diagram to consider. [Conference presentation]. International Procratination Research Workshop.