All people, at least once in their life, have gone through the tense, stressful experience of rushing to finish something at the last minute. Procrastination: why do we do it when our better judgement tells us it’s a bad idea? The tendency to procrastinate seems to be an unavoidable part of human behavior, so I explored this topic in order to find out why we procrastinate and how we can avoid it.

Procrastination is often synonymous with “undesirable” traits such as laziness and lack of motivation. However, as a procrastinator myself, who is also very motivated and sometimes even anxious when it comes to schoolwork, I wondered why someone like me has the tendency to procrastinate. In a study involving 342 college students, it was found that the factors Fearness of Failure and Aversiveness to the Task accounted for much of the students’ procrastination habits. This makes sense when you consider the fact that students prone to anxiety over schoolwork may become so nervous over their performance on a certain assignment that they keep putting it off so as to relieve themselves of that stress temporarily. In short, as this study suggests, procrastination is often used as a coping mechanism for anxiety over an assignment. Another study exploring “perfectionist” tendencies in humans also found a correlation between perfectionism and procrastination. Again, logically this makes sense because someone who puts a great deal of pressure on herself to maintain an exemplary level of performance on a task would worry more about the outcome of the assignment than someone who does not care as much, and therefore, she would put it off to overcome this pressure.

In contrast, this analysis of the possible causes and effects of procrastination found there to be a weak correlation between procrastination and neuroticism. Meanwhile, it found there to be strong correlations between procrastination and task delay, self-efficacy, and impulsiveness, which is more in line with society’s stereotypes regarding procrastination. Thus, considering the results of this analysis along with the studies I previously mentioned, I believe we can conclude that the evidence suggests that both types of people (lazy and perfectionist) can fall victim to the habit of procrastination. Therefore, how to cope with procrastination depends on which category of people one falls into, since each person must resolve whatever is holding them back from doing his or her work. Another interesting point to think about is that procrastination might not be such a detrimental habit, depending on what type of a person you are. Research regarding the facets of procrastination states that active procrastination, or the deliberate act of procrastinating out of belief that one works better under time pressure, actually does work for some people. Interestingly enough, this study also found that, in terms of several factors like time management habits and academic performance, active procrastinators are actually more similar to non-procrastinators than to passive procrastinators (who fail to complete work on time due to indecision).

In conclusion, procrastination is very prevalent in our society, especially among college students (70% of college students procrastinate, according to this study). Therefore, the tendency to procrastinate is a trait shared by many different people with different qualities. Research has shown that lazy, unmotivated people are likely to procrastinate, as are neurotic perfectionists. In order for one to understand his own procrastination, he must understand what qualities he possesses that cause him to procrastinate, and try to overcome them. We may never fully eliminate the tendency to procrastinate, but perhaps we can better understand why we engage in this habit, and what we can do to overcome it.