In our current era, many of us suffer from different problems, either physical or mental. Our minds must be in such a blur, caused by all these ongoing world problems and analyses about various illnesses. In the last few decades, our society has examined and provided details about an uncountable amount of diseases. And that is really great because we can finally understand ourselves more.
But with every disease, there are a few aspects to consider and be aware of. And one of the most important is the number of affected people (sometimes referred to as a „base“). This number can range from only a few individuals in the whole world to millions, therefore affecting an enormous group of people. One of the examples of the second possibility & the newest ‘trend’ of our modern civilization, is procrastination.
For someone, it’s a bigger issue than for others, but our lives depend on all our actions, without exception. Procrastination is a real problem, which a wide spectrum of society is facing with. In some way, every single one of us is procrastinating.
Procrastination, meaning delaying a specific course of action, isn’t really a case of finding something new and unknown to mankind until now. It’s rather a situation, in which we found new awareness and understanding of something we already know, but couldn't give it a proper name and fully understand it in the past.
Despite this, we still don’t have much information about procrastination, and how it actually works. Numerous analyses emphasize that we still know only a part of the puzzle and more research is indeed needed. Some of the more recent studies had shown that some of the numbers and analytics in older papers could be possibly wrong or questionable, therefore affecting our whole view on procrastination.
And that’s because these numbers are based on the so-called self-report measures. These data are reported by people themselves and they may not be as accurate as we thought. Many people are saying that they procrastinate too much, but they really don’t know what is much. There hasn’t been any type of universal meter of procrastination, so scientists had to conclude from other resources and analytics
But still, thought-out time, the studying methods have drastically changed and now we have more accurate and real numbers, from which we can bounce off for further exploration. We also need to note that procrastination isn't an illness on its own. Instead, it's more of a sign that something's not exactly right and you may experience some other (but still related) mental issues.
Every person can experience different signs of procrastination or other related problems (such as anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, ADHD etc.). Everyone has different personality traits and is different from somebody else, meaning there isn’t any universal manual for procrastination and we need to look at each case individually.
Procrastination also doesn’t affect one specific group of people—it’s more of a complicated problem and there isn’t any magic pill to stop you from procrastinating. If you want to stop procrastinating, you need to want to; that’s the first step and there will be many more. It’s all about wanting.
if we look at the growth of the procrastination trend, some studies suggest that greater awareness and general popularity of procrastination (including media, academic and scientific popularity) may be one of the results of a notable growth of procrastinators over the years.
There are numerous examples of procrastinators in our history, e.g. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), who often started doodling in his notebook instead of doing the actual painting (no wonder it took him 16 years to complete the Mona Lisa) or Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who was writing letters to his fiancé instead of writing a novel—and there are many, many more examples we could talk about.
There can also be a possible effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, which at first brought people from offices to homes, and after around 2 years brought them back to offices, which may result in additional stress and anxiety. As you can see, there aren’t just one or two factors in this problem and there are still a few things unanswered: How does it work? And why do procrastinate?
The whole mechanism of procrastination is based on something called immediate rewards. People, who procrastinate, tend to skip assignments that reward them in long-term perspective (for example, studying for an exam in school, so they can get a degree, which will then help them to get a job—that’s not something in the near future) to rather get instant rewards from short-term tasks, which they essentially see as a better choice.
As for the quick rewards, most people procrastinate on social media, games or television, which gives them an opportunity to collect rewards almost instantly. This reward doesn’t need to be specifically a materialistic object, it can be a delighted feeling from finishing a movie or game—or anything else, really.
Procrastinators rather deal with the consequences of not finishing assigned tasks, instead of actually doing it. If they don’t want to do it, they will postpone it even for months, just so they won’t have to deal with it. This can extend to a point when someone is putting off important tasks, like school, work or health—which then can result in worse mental and physical health and other previously addressed medical problems.
Normally, more important tasks bring more stress and anxiety to our lives, which can then lead to a bigger chance of procrastinating. In these cases, it also depends on how much is the project unpleasant to the procrastinator, because the more stress something brings in, the more we don’t want to do it.
Procrastinators can be people with low self-efficacy and can have bigger tendencies to quit after the first problem, which can negatively influence their lives in long-term performance. When they are choosing a specific mission to do, there are four factors to consider (according to TMT, which means temporal motivation theory): the expectation of achieving an anticipated outcome, the value of that outcome, the timing of that outcome, and the sensitivity to delay referred to collectively as “the procrastination equation”.
If we look at it as a whole, procrastination isn’t really a simple topic to talk about. Despite that, there is one simple thing you have to take away from this article: You can do anything if you want. You only need to believe in yourself. Just make the first step, everything else will be in the stars.
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References
Arnold, I. (2023). The link between procrastination and graduation rates: evidence from the ALEKS learning platform. Education Economics, 31:3, 275-287. DOI: 10.1080/09645292.2022.2063796
Rozental, A. & Carlbring, P. (2014). Understanding and Treating Procrastination: A Review of a Common Self-Regulatory Failure. Psychology, 5, 1488-1502. DOI: 10.4236/psych.2014.513160.