Procrastination is an avoidance coping behavior that involves unnecessarily delaying or postponing something despite knowing that there could be negative consequences for doing so. It is a human experience resulting from internal stress that leads to delaying everyday chores or even putting off tasks such as attending an appointment, submitting a job report or academic assignment, or broaching a stressful issue with a partner. It is often perceived as a negative trait due to its hindering effect on one's productivity, and is associated with depression, low self-esteem, guilt, and feelings of inadequacy; however, it can also be considered part of maladaptive perfectionism or a wider stance for dealing with certain demands that could present risky or negative outcomes or require waiting for new information to arrive. For instance, procrastinating can prevent a person from acting on suicidal intent.
Etymology The word 'procrastination' originates from the Latin word procrastinare, which is composed of the prefix pro-, 'forward', and -crastinus, 'until next day', from cras, 'tomorrow'.
Perspectives From a cultural and social perspective, students from both Western and non-Western cultures are found to exhibit academic procrastination, but for different reasons. Students from Western cultures tend to procrastinate in order to avoid doing worse than they have done before or failing to learn as much as they should have, whereas students from non-Western cultures tend to procrastinate in order to avoid looking incompetent or demonstrating a lack of ability in front of their peers. Different cultural perspectives of time management can impact procrastination. For example, in cultures that have a multi-active view of time, people tend to place a higher value on making sure a job is done accurately before finishing. In cultures with a linear view of time, people tend to designate a certain amount of time on a task and stop once the allotted time has expired. A study of the behavioral patterns of pigeons through delayed gratification suggests that procrastination is not unique to humans but can also be observed in some other animals. There are experiments finding clear evidence for "procrastination" among pigeons, which show that pigeons tend to choose a complex but delayed task rather than an easy but hurry-up one. Procrastination has been studied by philosophers and psychologists, and into the 21st century also by behavioral economists.
Prevalence In a study of academic procrastination from the University of Vermont, published in 1984, 46% of the subjects reported that they "always" or "nearly always" procrastinated writing papers, while approximately 30% reported procrastinating studying for exams and reading weekly assignments (by 28% and 30% respectively). Nearly a quarter of the subjects reported that procrastination was a problem for them regarding the same tasks; however, as many as 65% indicated that they would like to reduce their procrastination when writing papers, and approximately 62% indicated the same for studying for exams and 55% for reading weekly assignments. A 1992 study showed that "52% of surveyed students indicated having a moderate to high need for help concerning procrastination." A study done in 2004 showed that 70% of university students categorized themselves as procrastinators while a 1984 study showed that 50% of the students would procrastinate consistently and considered it a major problem in their lives. In a study performed on university students, procrastination was shown to be greater with tasks that were perceived as unpleasant or as impositions than with tasks for which the student believed they lacked the required skills for accomplishing the task. Another point of relevance is that of procrastination in industry. A study from the Psychology in Russia: State of the Art journal "The Impact of Organizational and Personal Factors on Procrastination in Employees of a Modern Russian Industrial Enterprise", helped to identify the many factors that affected employees' procrastination habits. Some of which include intensity of performance evaluations, importance of their duty within a company, and their perception and opinions on management and/or upper level decisions.
Behavioral criteria of academic procrastination Gregory Schraw, Theresa Wadkins, and Lori Olafson in 2007 proposed three criteria for a behavior to be classified as academic procrastination: it must be counterproductive, needless, and delaying. Steel reviewed all previous attempts to define procrastination, and concluded in a 2007 study that procrastination is "to voluntarily delay an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay." Sabini and Silver argued that postponement and irrationality are the two key features of procrastination. Delaying a task is not deemed as procrastination, they argue, if there are rational reasons behind the delay. Moreover, in a study conducted by Pogorskiy and Beckmann, learners' procrastination is characterised by stable sequential patterns in learners' web navigation behaviour. An approach that integrates several core theories of motivation as well as meta-analytic research on procrastination is the temporal motivation theory. It summarizes key predictors of procrastination (expectancy, value, and impulsiveness) into a mathematical equation.
Psychological perspective The pleasure principle may be responsible for procrastination; one may prefer to avoid negative emotions by delaying stressful tasks. In 2019, a research conducted by Rinaldi et al. indicated that measurable cognitive impairments may play a role in procrastination. As the deadline for their target of procrastination grows closer, they are more stressed and may, thus, decide to procrastinate more to avoid this stress. Some psychologists cite such behavior as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision. Piers Steel indicated in 2010 that anxiety is just as likely to induce people to start working early as late, and that the focus of studies on procrastination should be impulsiveness. That is, anxiety will cause people to delay only if they are impulsive.
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