The voluntary postponement of an intended act—despite the belief that one is going to be worse off for the delay—has a long and storied history. It was in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. They mistook it for a sign of laziness, a prejudgment that has stuck throughout the ages. But what is this thing we call procrastination really? Today, it is understood as a complex interplay of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral factors. And most important for our purposes here, what does it have to teach us about self-regulation and time management?
The Psychology of Procrastination: A Psychological Perspective
Putting things off is not a sign of poor self-discipline or simple bad habits. It is a more serious struggle, exemplifying poor self-regulation and an inability to balance the competing demands of the present and the future. Procrastination, in this view, is a kind of failure to act. It is a failure not only to act in a decent and upright way (for instance, by not telling an untruth and doing what one ought to do), but also to act in a good way (by doing what one is capable of enjoying and finding satisfying).
Emotional Regulation and Avoidance
Procrastination is at its core a problem of emotional regulation. It is easy to see why that is the case. We often have to perform tasks that we find to be difficult, unpleasant, or threatening. Quite naturally, such tasks will elicit negative emotions. To manage these feelings, some people might choose to engage in indirect, or unproductive, problem-solving strategies that provide immediate relief but yield no long-term results. When these individuals indulge in this way, they are really just putting off the inevitable and trying to postpone what they know is coming.
Cognitive Factors: Present Bias and Temporal Discounting
Cognitive psychology identifies present bias as a key ingredient of procrastination. Present bias is the tendency to give immediate rewards priority over future ones, even when the future rewards are much larger. This is very similar to what psychologists mean when they talk about temporal discounting—that is, when we devalue rewards or consequences that come later.
Take a person trying to make a decision who is in a stage of prefrontal hypofunction (low activity in the prefrontal cortex). This is what happens when you’re tired, for instance. In a situation like this, the PFC is better at making advantage-seeking, long-term decisions that result in better outcomes for the decision maker. But when it comes to easy, immediate decisions, the PFC is not as good at making those kinds of decisions.
Personality and Individual Differences
Not everyone procrastinates to the same degree. Higher procrastination tendencies are associated with personality traits such as impulsivity, low conscientiousness, and high neuroticism. Additionally, perfectionism can contribute, where fear of producing imperfect work leads to avoidance.
Why Do We Procrastinate? Key Psychological Drivers
1. The inability to deal with failure and imperfection.
We all have a natural fear of failing; however, some people have a paralyzing fear of it. Perfectionists tend to have this fear, as do people who have been raised with unrealistic expectations. Quite a few of my clients have a nearly impossible standard that they must meet, and any deviation from it generates a great deal of anxiety.
2. Low Self-Efficacy
Believing in a potential to achieve and accomplish is a precondition to being motivated. If one has low self-efficacy, then one has no confidence in one’s ability to take on tasks that are challenging. Procrastination is a buffer shield. It protects one from failing when one has low self-efficacy and too many challenging tasks that one has to attempt.
3. Motivation and Interest Are Lacking
It is tough to get going when you are assigned something that lacks personal interest or meaning. Procrastination is my go-to strategy when I am unmotivated.
4. Ineffective Time Management and Poor Planning
Inability to estimate the amount of time a task will take, to prioritize tasks, or to structure work can results in disorganization and delays. This can easily become a vicious cycle that profits from your stress and leads to even more avoidance.
Psychological Models Explaining Procrastination
Integrating motivation and time perspectives, temporal motivation theory (TMT) posits that motivation decreases as delay to reward increases and increases with the value and expectancy of success. Understanding procrastination using TMT shows that when people perceive the immediate costs of working on a task to be too high and the future benefits to be too low, they will put off doing the task.
Procrastination-Emotion Regulation Model
This model sees procrastination mainly as a failure in emotion regulation. It suggests that some individuals put off tasks because they have difficulty managing the negative emotions that certain tasks evoke, such as anxiety or boredom. These individuals may prioritize short-term strategies that make them feel better (like going online or watching TV) over working on tasks that are just as important but less pleasurable.
How to Fix Procrastination: Evidence-Based Psychological Strategies
To defeat procrastination, both the emotional and cognitive roots of the problem must be dealt with. The leading techniques, endorsed by the empirical research, are these:
1. Increase Self-Awareness
To understand why you are putting things off, you need to have some idea of the kind of patterns and triggers that lead you to procrastinate. The first step is to become aware of those pesky and sometimes elusive procrastination triggers.
2. Establish Goals That Are Both Specific and Realistic, and Divide Work Into Manageable Chunks
When you set clear and attainable goals for yourself, they not only help you concentrate on what needs to be done but also eliminate feelings of being overwhelmed. I definitely used to feel overwhelmed quite a bit when facing big assignments and would wait until the last minute to get started. But when you start seeing work divided into understandable pieces with clear expectations of what needs to be done for each part, you really gain a sense of control and direction.
3. Use Implementation Intentions and Plan for Obstacles.
When making plans, formulate them in an explicit manner. An example of an explicit plan: “If I feel distracted when trying to do reading for school, then I will take 5 minutes to do a refocusing exercise and then get back to the reading.”
4. Boost Self-Efficacy
Concentrate on prior achievements and talents in order to build confidence. Mastery occurrences and positive self-dialogue depress fears and augment the staying power of individuals.
5. Mindfulness and Stress Reduction for Emotions
Practicing mindfulness helps improve emotional control by making one more aware of how they are feeling in the moment and less likely to dwell on concerns that provoke procrastination. Stress management can increase emotional intelligence.
6. Optimize Time Management
Working techniques like the Pomodoro cycle, the prioritization matrix, and the scheduled break help to prevent work fatigue and maintain focus. They do this by helping to structure the work and give the mind and body a chance to rest without losing momentum.
7. Reduce Distractions and Create a Productive Environment
Reducing outside distractions and structuring the workspace promotes concentration and reduces impulsive distractions.
8. Increase Task Meaningfulness and Intrinsic Motivation
Connect tasks to your individual values or aspirations to pump up the motivation. Seeing your work as a series of “why” instead of just a set of “what” increases engagement and decreases procrastination.
9. Use Positive Reinforcement
Strengthen habits and enhance motivation by associating task completion with rewards. This makes you more likely to complete the same task in the future—especially when you’re on the brink of generating steps/deliverables that seem hard to produce.
10. Seek Social Support and Accountability
When you share your goals with others, particularly with the kinds of people in your life who can offer motivation and support, something magical happens. You become so much more likely to achieve those goals. Why? Because when you share your goals with other people, you are telling them that you are working toward something. And once you let another person in on that secret, you suddenly feel more accountable. You now have a couple of different kinds of people in your life who are rooting for you. And you want to give them something to cheer about.
Psychological Interventions and Therapy for Procrastination
If you are suffering from chronic procrastination that is causing you a lot of unhappiness, you can do something about it. You can seek help from a psychologist, counselor, or life coach. These professionals are trained to assist individuals in gaining clarity and momentum in their lives. Although lengthy term procrastinators like me may need more than a couple of sessions, many of us have found that these types of professional interventions can act as a reset button.
- Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT): Concentrates on finding and altering unhelpful thoughts and actions linked to putting off tasks.
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): Promotes accepting difficult feelings and committing to behavior consistent with one’s values.
- Motivational Interviewing: Increases internal motivation by helping to clear up mixed feelings about making a change.
- The Role of Technology: Double-Edged Sword
Although digital tools supply productivity aids (task managers, timers), they also serve up distractions that worsen the procrastination problem. It is incumbent upon us to manage our technology use consciously. We might use helpers like website blockers and app limiters to enforce some semblance of boundaries.
Conclusion
Delaying is a complicated psychological act. It is both a cause and an effect. It makes us feel bad. What causes it to happen? The most common cause—looming deadlines, for instance—is really just another way of talking about fear. Procrastinators are good at expecting the worst. Cognitive and personality psychology both point to quite a few reasons why people are prone to delay. These cover everything from inflated optimism about the future to overthinking what’s wrong with what’s ahead of us. And when we don’t get going, it can seem all too easy to drown in a bad mood that just makes us want to hide out. Cultivating self-awareness, restructuring task engagement, and managing emotions allow people to liberate themselves from the procrastination cycle.
