By: Misha Meyer (she/her/hers), Peer Success Leader, 2022-2023
Everyone procrastinates at some point, but not everyone is a procrastinator. According to research from the American Psychological Association, 20% of people are classified as chronic procrastinators. And for those of us who are, procrastination might not necessarily prevent our success but certainly hinders us from reaching our full potential. In order to stop the cycle of procrastination, we must first examine the reasons one might procrastinate.
I will be operating on the definition that procrastination is the action of delaying or postponing an obligation when given sufficient opportunity to complete it. I make this clarification because procrastination is not the only possible reason that you wait until the last second. Alternatively, you simply might not have enough time to complete everything on your plate—this is an entirely different issue and I will instead refer you to my other blog post: Rationalizing Turning Down Opportunities.
So, what are some reasons you might procrastinate?
- It’s an ego booster - if you succeed, you impress yourself with your success in less-than-ideal circumstances and know that you’re capable of even more!
- It’s an ego safety net - if you do fail due to the impossible time constraint, it speaks to a lack of time management skills but not to a lack of intelligence. We often perform this type of self-sabotage if we fear that we’re not intelligent enough, so we don’t even give ourselves the opportunity to exercise our full intellect.
- It reduces net-time used to complete a task by kicking you into survival mode and preventing overthinking.
- You feel overwhelmed, don’t know where to start, or can’t muster the motivation to begin. If this is the case for you, it might help to set a timer to do just ten minutes of the task. Often the hardest part is simply starting.
- You employ an absolutist perspective. This might look like:
- Either doing all of your work at once or doing nothing at all
- Feeling unable to start your work unless you are confident that you have all the knowledge and resources to be able to complete it all at once
- Feeling like your work has to be perfect the first time around
- “Oh, well I’ve waited this long to start… might as well wait until the absolute last second at this point.”
This is why some of the most perfectionistic people are procrastinators. Cramming all your work right before the due date may be one of the only things you’ve found that curbs your academic anxiety and prevents you from overthinking!
And because a lot of us are perfectionists with high standards of work, we may continue to get good grades even when we are putting in minimal effort due to procrastination. Because there are seemingly no repercussions to our behavior and it never gets corrected, we always continue to slide by “successfully.” So, what’s so wrong with procrastination, then?
As I mentioned at the start of this article, procrastination may not prevent success, but it prevents us from reaching our full potential.
If we can accomplish so much in an unreasonably small amount of time, can you imagine what we could do with more?
Completing tasks in advance enables us to ask for feedback, revise our work at a different time with fresh eyes, and promote long-term learning outcomes because sleep strengthens new information encoded during the day.
Academic performance aside, the most important implication of procrastination is how it affects your stress level. On the days when you are cramming to get everything done, you are likely not sleeping enough or making time to eat and rest. The true value in spreading out your work is then being able to create reliable self-care routines. Remember that conquering procrastination is a journey. If you're a procrastinator, you likely employ absolutist thinking, which will serve as an obstacle to building new habits at first. You will be tempted to give up after a failure because you might view the world in a success-failure binary.
Although I’ve begun to curb my chronic procrastination with self-knowledge, it still gets the best of me from time to time (I, in fact, procrastinated on writing this blog post). And that’s okay! It’s important to honor progress even after minor setbacks.
