Why do people procrastinate?
October 22, 2019
Procrastination is one of the least understood human behaviors, yet everyone has experienced it at one point in their lives, especially during their school years. There are a multitude of disadvantages to procrastinating—higher stress levels, ineffective time management, reduced performance levels, an inability to manage negative emotions, and inability to tolerate feelings of frustration. Overall, you will feel less happy and more stress that gets worse as the inability to effectively manage time becomes a bigger problem. Despite these disadvantages, a survey conducted by San Jose University found that nearly 95% of American college students and up to 70% of high school students procrastinate. That’s a lot of people! So if there are so many disadvantages to this, why do people do it every day?
There are many causes to procrastination: some are internal factors and others are external factors. These internal factors include the inability to concentrate, fear of failure, anxiety, and the belief that you are incapable of completing a task (or the exact opposite).
The exact opposite of this is that they think that they will be able to do the assignment at a later date, so they feel they don’t have to do it right now. It doesn’t even have to be a different day that they feel that it can be completed, they may think that they can complete it later that same day. Thus, they will keep putting it off until the very little amount of time left to complete the task provides the necessary motivation to do so. Other factors include a lack of motivation, poor organizational skills, and a feeling of being overwhelmed. An aspect of poor organizational skills is that people tend to set goals for themselves that are either not clearly defined or a goal that they perceive as unattainable.
However, it gets a little bit complicated when talking about lack of motivation. This is because there are many factors that affect someone’s motivation— demotivating and hindering factors. One demotivating factor is a fear of failure and the belief that you are incapable of completing a task. This is why a fear of failure leads to procrastination—because it makes you less motivated to do work and makes you less willing to exercise self control to get a task done. Hindering factors include mental exhaustion and payoff that is far in the future. People tend to prefer short-term satisfaction over long-term satisfaction that stems from completing a task in the moment so that there is even more time to do whatever you want. This long-term satisfaction as a result of a reward that seems far in the future can make the reward seem less valuable, making people less motivated to complete the task to get the reward.
An example of this is getting your essay done right now so that you have more time to edit it, and make sure that it is well written. The reward that is far off in the future would be the good grade once it is graded. Short-term satisfaction would be satisfaction from procrastinating the essay so that you could watch some more of your favorite show, giving you happiness in the moment but regret in the future.
External factors that affect procrastination is the type of environment you are exposed to. The most influential aspect of your environment are your parents. According to research done by West-Kentucky University, parents can have a significant effect on whether you have a higher or lower tendency to procrastinate. They found that when fathers act very authoritarian-like (they expect unwavering obedience, set strict rules, detached treatment of their children) their children are more likely to procrastinate. However, when mothers act in between a very permissive (let kids do whatever they want) and authoritarian, procrastination tends to be less prevalent.
To more clearly define this in-between method of parenting, they have strict rules that have reasonable flexibility and they are very warm towards their children. It is important to note that parenting style only affects procrastination in adolescents, but their tendency to procrastinate is no longer influenced by their parents once they reach adulthood. Also, this parenting style is how their children perceive it, not based on actually observed behaviors. This means that the parent might actually be at that in between method of parenting but the child may perceive it as very authoritarian.
Now that the causes of procrastination have been determined, how can people limit the amount that they procrastinate? Well, the most important thing is to get to the root of why you are procrastinating and determine the best course of action to fix that problem. This could be setting more realistic goals and expectations or obtaining a more objective view of your ability to get work done or both. It is also important to re-evaluate your work/study methods to fix organizational problems and to break assignments down into smaller tasks so that it seem less daunting. Overall, just make sure that you don’t push yourself too hard by putting things off or put yourself under too much pressure to get things done and make sure to get to the root of why you procrastinate!
Sources:
https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2516&context=theses
https://solvingprocrastination.com/why-people-procrastinate/
