Procrastination
Procrastination is the act of delaying or avoiding tasks that require attention, often opting instead for less important or more enjoyable activities. This behavior can lead to last-minute rushes to complete essential tasks, which often results in increased stress and diminished quality of work. While many individuals procrastinate occasionally, chronic procrastination can cause significant negative consequences, including heightened anxiety, damaged self-esteem, and strained relationships. It is particularly prevalent among students, who may find themselves overwhelmed by academic pressures, leading to harmful coping mechanisms such as academic dishonesty.
The reasons behind procrastination can vary, and misconceptions about the procrastinator's character—such as laziness or lack of ambition—can hinder support and understanding. Strategies to combat procrastination include establishing effective time management practices, setting achievable goals, and using techniques like the Pomodoro Technique to maintain focus. For children and adolescents, intervention from parents and educators can help cultivate proactive habits and improve overall achievement and self-confidence. Recognizing and addressing procrastination early can foster healthier attitudes toward responsibilities and tasks in the long run.
Procrastination
Procrastination means putting off and avoiding doing things that need to be done, often by doing other, less important or more pleasurable things instead. The result is often waiting until the last minute to do the necessary task, which can cause extra stress and degrade the quality of the final result. Pervasive procrastination can invoke negative feelings, health issues, relationship difficulties, and failure to achieve. While most people will procrastinate to some degree on occasion, there are ways to avoid the tendency and prevent it from becoming a recurring behavior.
Introduction
Procrastination is the practice or habit of completing low-priority or unimportant tasks instead of high priority, important tasks that need to be done. It means doing pleasurable things in place of less pleasurable ones. Such behavior results in putting off impending or priority tasks to a later time, sometimes to the last minute. While many people may do this from time to time, for others it can be persistent and tremendously disruptive to everyday life.
Procrastination does not mean doing nothing. It means the intentional delay of doing what needs to be done while doing preferred things instead. Such delays or mismanagement of time often comes at a great cost to the procrastinator. Waiting until the last minute and working under self-imposed pressure can result in stress, anxiety, a sense of guilt, and health problems. It can also create unrelated crises, or result in harming social relationships with others for not reliably meeting responsibilities and commitments. For children, adolescents, and adults alike, procrastination can result in many unwanted, negative consequences.
Motives for procrastination are often incorrectly assigned to the procrastinator by others, resulting in a lack of support or understanding as to the cost of procrastination to the procrastinator. For some, procrastination is thought to be due to laziness, low willpower, low ambition, low ability, lack of commitment, or being immature or manipulative. Most procrastinators would say that those labels are harmful and untrue.
Procrastination is more widespread in students than in the general population. Some studies have found that academic procrastination increases the frequency of academic misconduct, such as copying from someone else's exam, using forbidden means in an exam, plagiarizing, using fraudulent excuses, copying parts of others' homework, and fabricating or falsifying data. These studies have argued that academic misconduct is seen as a means for coping with the negative consequences of procrastination.
In most cases, procrastination is not a sign of a serious problem and can be overcome and avoided. However, if procrastination becomes so chronic that it begins to have a serious impact on a person's daily life, the underlying causes may be rooted in a problematic lifestyle. For example, when a person procrastinates in terms of paying their bills, the person may be charged additional fees for late payments or their credit score may be impacted.
Rationalizations and Justifications for Procrastination
Rationalization and justification are defense mechanisms people use to diminish their uncomfortable feelings, such as stress and anxiety, feelings of inadequacy, and depression or self-doubt, when confronted with completing tasks on time. Examples of rationalizations and justifications for procrastinating include acting like the task is unclear, claiming not to be in the mood to do the task, needing time to think about the task, waiting for the right moment to get started, and being in the habit of waiting until the last minute. Believing such excuses can keep a person stuck in a negative cycle of procrastination.
Other maladaptive coping strategies include avoiding the locale or situation surrounding the task that needs to be done, trivializing the importance of the task, and being highly satisfied with all the things one is achieving while avoiding the task that should be the priority. The pseudo-benefit of procrastination is the illusion of perfection—that when one finally decides to take on the task or tasks that have been avoided, the project will be started at exactly the right moment and the procrastinator will be in the perfect mood, have perfect ideas, will produce perfect results, and complete the task right on time.
Simply put, procrastination is an inability to self-regulate one's behavior when faced with tasks to complete by a certain deadline. Procrastination then leads to last-minute pushing to complete important tasks at a high cost to an individual.
The Cost of Procrastination
Procrastination can come at a significant cost to the procrastinator, especially if it becomes a pervasive habit. It generally makes successful completion of tasks harder and damages the quality of the final result. This can result in the failure to complete dreams and goals such as obtaining a college degree or developing one's talents as an athlete, musician, engineer, teacher, etc. Stress increases before, during, and after a task and often compounds in harmful ways, leading to putting off more and more things. Procrastination can cost someone their self-esteem and their happiness as they find themselves unable to pursue the life they envision. It can also have negative impacts on health, money, personal and professional success, and even love.
Students and Procrastination
Students who procrastinate often report that they keep putting off assignments, spend too much of their time with friends or at social activities, or just worry about assignments instead of completing them. They report having difficulty concentrating and wasting a lot of time when working on assignments in highly distracting, cluttered, noisy, or unorganized places, such as on their bed.
Not confronting one's fears about completing important tasks can lead to negative, untrue beliefs such as "I can't do this," "I don't have the skills to perform this task," "I just don't do well on tests," or "I just can't concentrate long enough to learn all that is required for this exam." Some students are unrealistic and think studying comes easy for everyone else but is just too hard for them.
Students also report personal problems with their friends, roommates, partners, or family members as well as financial difficulties as reasons for why they procrastinate. Some students report that they do not like an instructor or think an assignment is boring, blaming others for their procrastination. Unrealistic expectations and perfectionism can also be blamed for procrastination; for example, one may think they have to read everything ever written on a subject before beginning to write on that subject. Such unrealistic expectations can also result in a fear of failure and the belief that avoiding the task altogether is better than doing poorly on it.
Eliminating Procrastination Tendencies in Children
For children, putting off completing projects, homework, chores, etc., can be the start of a lifelong struggle with procrastination that can affect their level of achievement and self-confidence, their relationships with others, and their experiences at home, in school, and elsewhere. Parents and teachers can help students eliminate procrastination tendencies and avoid procrastination by teaching a proactive approach to completing tasks on or before time, regardless of distractions or negative feelings.
One method for helping children eliminate or avoid procrastination is to teach children, through positive practice, how to create and keep improving their own personal style of effective time management. Students can be taught what their best learning styles are and then can come up with creative ways to use those strengths to complete tasks productively. Students can be given unique and interesting projects and be asked to write down, draw, or explain to others how they will tackle the project. Using film or book heroes as examples of how to complete tasks can be instructional and inspiring. Each student should learn their very own personal, best way to learn and succeed at completing important things on time.
Parents and teachers can have students make a list of the steps involved in what they are going to do, gauge the amount of time they will need, acquire all materials they might need, and anticipate obstacles and how they will be handled. It may be beneficial to create a poster or checklist of the steps to be checked off when completed. Then students could be required to discuss their step-by-step process with older students and adults, in addition to their parents, with the understanding that they will keep adding to and improving their strategies as they practice completing tasks.
Such activities can teach students to set small, achievable goals, and set up breaks and rewards along the way. They demonstrate that a show of effort is often as important as the final product of a task. After students design how they will take on big or little tasks, they could be asked to close their eyes and imagine being proud of the finished result. By listening and watching how others complete their projects and by practicing project completion, students can then learn how to apply their skills in all areas of their lives.
Overcoming Procrastination
One effective technique for making good progress on work when paralyzed by procrastination is called the Pomodoro Technique. This involves choosing a task, setting a timer for twenty-five minutes, and working until the timer rings before taking a five-minute break. Each set of twenty-five minutes of on-task behavior is called a pomodoro. After the completion of four pomodoros, a longer break is taken. The length of time for each pomodoro can be increased depending on the difficulty of a subject.
Another strategy for getting started on a task requires quickly writing out everything on one's mind that is getting in the way of concentration. After completion of the list, all other distractions are eliminated. In addition to listing what will need to be done, one then assigns what will be needed for each unpacked part of the task; this can be achieved in various ways, such as writing out things on index cards, designing large posters of information to study, or assembling necessary tools. It is recommended that one consider the order in which the tasks will be approached; sometimes completing easy tasks first can help build up focused attention for more difficult tasks.
Suggestions for success in working through the tasks include challenging oneself, forgiving oneself for mistakes or difficulties, and relaxing from time to time. Energy can be renewed by eating healthy, getting enough sleep, and taking breaks. One can also make learning fun by promising oneself desirable rewards for the completion of tasks such as catching up on sleep, taking a day off, spending time with friends, purchasing a desired item, or seeing a film. It is also important to have enough awareness to recognize when something is not working and pursue better alternatives, such as a change in location.
Bibliography
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