Why do we procrastinate when it’s time to work and study?

Are you the kind of person who will guiltily binge-watch an entire TV series when you know you’ve got work to do? Sounds like you might be a procrastinator. Don’t worry, you’re not alone.

Procrastination is a common issue. Professor David Mellor, Associate Dean in Deakin University’s Faculty of Health, says procrastination has been ‘associated with elevated levels of stress, guilt and severe loss of personal productivity, as well social disapproval for not meeting responsibilities or commitments’. Procrastination also accounts for lower levels of academic success, he says.

When preparing to take on a remote arrangement like working from home or studying online, it’s common to worry about whether you’ll have the self-motivation to cope – especially if you’re a self-identified procrastinator. If you took the quiz about what type of online student you’d be and got ‘procrastinator’, you probably relate to this. The good news is, there are ways to tackle your vices and avoid letting procrastination get the better of you.

The procrastination personality

Procrastination may depend on the kind of person you are. If you’re a perfectionist, it’s likely you’re a procrastinator, putting things off for fear of an imperfect result. Or you might not be the most conscientiousness person, and your goals are out of control because you lack self-discipline.

According to Prof. Mellor, ‘research indicates that a positive relationship exists between an individual’s tendency to procrastinate and specific traits such as identity style, perfectionism and self-consciousness’.

Once you know you have a procrastinator personality, you’ll want to get to a place where you can be self-conscious, self-aware and more in control of your goals. ‘Setting up a work and break schedule and committing to adhere to it may be helpful, or creating a set of rewards for task completion might reinforce the resistance to procrastinate,’ Prof. Mellor advises.

The procrastination situation

Surprisingly, it might actually be the situation you’re in, not your personality, which leads you to procrastinate. If you’re studying, it might just not be a high priority for you if you’re also juggling work and family commitments. It might even be that you simply avoid the task to delay dealing with it at all.

Prof. Mellor suggests that ‘procrastination is fostered by context-specific factors that promote negative emotions such as fear of failure, evaluation and test anxiety, and feelings of incompetence or task aversiveness’.

Your situation could mean you want to escape these emotions, so you put the task off in order to avoid it. And if you’re under the illusion that you perform better under stress, Prof. Mellor says that ‘psychologists believe that, while stress can be a positive motivator, there is a point at which stress has a negative impact too’.