The Science Behind Procrastination

Procrastination Harms Academic Performance and Health

Procrastination is the act of unnecessarily delaying or postponing tasks, often resulting in a lengthened timeframe for their completion. A 1997 study by Tice and Baumeister published in the Psychological Science Journal found that procrastination leads to lower academic performance, increased stress and health issues, and reduced quality of work. The study tracked college students over a semester and the procrastinators received lower grades on average on both assignments and exams compared to non-procrastinating students. It was also noted that at the start of the semester, the procrastinating students reported lower stress and less illness compared to their counterparts. This proves that delaying tasks initially feels rewarding and less stressful. But, as the semester progressed, the procrastinators experienced significantly higher levels of stress and illness, ending the semester with more health problems than students who did not procrastinate. Procrastinating can often start a negative cycle where the stress and health problems caused by procrastinating further hinder productivity, thus causing a bigger delay of work.

Solutions to Reducing and Eliminating Procrastination

There are many solutions to reducing amount of procrastination and even fully eliminating it. What it means to never procrastinate is that you do an assignment during the time you planned to do it. Although that might sound simple, countless students have difficulty initiating a task on time and staying on task until the end.

Setting Early Deadlines to Boost Productivity

It is often that procrastinators have a period of intense focus right before a deadline. This effect of having a deadline can be taken advantage of. Setting earlier deadlines for yourself gives you that boost of productivity without the reduction in quality of work. For example, when writing a paper you can separate each task that needs to be done for the paper into different deadlines. In continuation of the example, you can make your outline due by Friday, you body paragraphs due Tuesday, your introduction and conclusion due Thursday, and do peer editing over the weekend. Blocking your time in this manner makes it so even if you procrastinate each task individually, you don’t end up writing your whole paper on Sunday.

Eliminating Distractions to Maintain Focus

Eliminating distractions makes it so once you start doing a task, you continue doing it until completion. This practice makes it so you only procrastinate once, before the task, and not many other times during the task. The main way to eliminate distractions is to put away technology, silence your phone, and to not have any other applications open at the same time. A notification whilst in the middle of a hard task is detrimental to your focus. Another way to eliminate distraction is to work in a private space. Public spaces have a lot more noise and motion than a private room, all new stimuli to take you away from your task.

Citations

How to Cure Deep Procrastination

how to make yourself to do something?

Tice, D.M. and Baumeister, R.F. (1997) Longitudinal Study of Procrastination, Performance, Stress, and Health: The Costs and Benefits of Dawdling. Psychological Science, 8, 454-458.