Procrastination is a concept whose incidence has peaked in recent years. The origin of the word has its root in Latin verbs, where, ‘pro’ refers to forwarding motion and ‘crastinus’ refers to belonging tomorrow. The word describes a situation where a person purposefully makes a voluntary delay in a task in the beginning or till the very end until the predetermined deadline, or indefinitely. (Freeman, Cox-Fuenzalida, & Stoltenberg, 2011).
The most common causes of procrastination behaviours include poor time management, lack of motivation, concentration and organizational skills, fear and anxiety of failure, negative evaluation of one’s capability, unrealistic expectations leading to feelings of being overwhelmed and perfectionism. Cognitive styles such as self-downing, low frustration tolerance and hostility are correlated with procrastination which involves unrealistic views about self, others and the world.
Gender, age, marital status, personality patterns and neurobiological basis are identified as a few of the major factors to be affecting procrastination. Men when compared to women are seen to procrastinate more due to higher levels of impulsiveness and lower self-control (Steel & Ferrari, 2013). Young people in their mid-twenties depict lower self-control and conscientiousness contributing to their increased levels of procrastination (Schubert &Stewart, 2000). Procrastination has also shown a strong relationship with the marital status of an individual as procrastinators show a high tendency of putting off starting and ending relationships (Steel & Ferrari, 2013). Procrastination is seen as a dispositional trait having a cognitive, behavioural and affective basis. Research suggests it be positively correlated with neuroticism and a strong inverse relationship with conscientiousness (Balkis & Duru, 2007); the most identified personality traits linked to procrastination include fear of failure, passive-aggression orientation, task aversiveness, and low frustration tolerance (Milgram, 1987). Lastly, the neurobiological basis of procrastination focuses on the interplay of the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex (Burka & Yuen, 2008).
Thus, procrastination is identified as a behavioural pattern that leads to consequences such as ineffective time management, reduced performance levels, delayed study behaviours, lowered levels of frustration tolerance, maintaining task avoidance, ego depletion, speed-accuracy trade-offs, and an inability to regulate negative emotions (Ferrari & Díaz-Morales, 2014; Schubert & Stewart, 2000). Procrastination behaviour can be categorized into – Academic procrastination referring to behavioural delay and personal discomfort about that delay. This has a much higher prevalence rate among college students, as they tend to focus on unproductive activities leading to lowered performance and negative emotional reactions among them. Workplace procrastination is the second category that largely affects organizational productivity (Gupta et al., 2012), including three major dimensions of interpersonal factors, situational factors and the given task characteristics. Researchers have also worked upon the effects of procrastination on group behaviours (Skowronski & Mirowska, 2013). Chronic procrastination being another category refers to the self-regulatory failure to reach the designated goal, primarily due to chronic stress leading to subjective discomfort. The other categories include life routine procrastination, decisional procrastination, neurotic procrastination, and compulsive procrastination (Balkis & Duru, 2007).
It is crucial to systematically explore and understand procrastination behavioural patterns and devise effective treatment methods to reduce their negative effects on people’s lives, due to the widely accepted prevalence and potential implications of procrastination in academic, work, and general settings. Exploring the influence of parental upbringing, personality traits, later adult delaying behaviours, food consumed by habitual procrastinators and the various environmental factors can give us insight into new preventive and treatment methods to help people develop good work habits and live enriched and meaningful lives.
– Urveez Kakalia and Annesha Datta.