Procrastination Essay Examples and Papers

Procrastination usually described as a harmful behavior and mentality in previous studies, it had been defined as “the act of needlessly delaying tasks to the point of experiencing subjective discomfort” (Solomon & Rothblum, 1984), “self-control problems arise when preferences are inconsistent across time or context” (Ainslie, 1975; Loewenstein, 1996, as cited in Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002), “a prevalent and pernicious form of self-regulatory failure that is not entirely understood” (Steel, 2007). It was estimate that 95% of university students engage in procrastination (Ellis and Knaus, 1977, as cited in Solomon & Rothblum, 1984).

Solomon & Rothblum (1984) found that procrastination was not correlated with anxiety or assertion, but correlated with depression, irrational cognitions, low self-esteem, and delayed study behavior. Steel (2007) found that neuroticism, rebelliousness, and sensation seeking show weak correlation with procrastination. Strong and consistent predictors of procrastination were task aversiveness, task delay, self-efficacy, impulsiveness, as well as conscientiousness and its facets of self-control, distractibility, organization, and achievement motivation.

Johnson and Bloom (1995) used the five-factor model of personality to conduct research, found that procrastination positively correlated with Neuroticism, and negatively correlated with Conscientiousness. Onwuegbuzie (2004) found that procrastination related significantly to worth of statistics, interpretation anxiety, test and class anxiety, computational self-concept, fear of asking for help, and fear. We can find some of the factors above were mutually conflicted, this may due to the contamination of self-report measures. Steel, Brothen & Wambach (1999) study found that, using self-report to measure procrastination would likely reflects a self-assessment influenced by actual behavior but also significantly contaminated by self-concept. Therefore, we are hard to determine which factors really have correlation with procrastination. However, even we cannot determine the factors of procrastination, the behavioral and psychological influences can be tracked and changed in the previous studies. Ferrari and Tice (2000) found that, if a task was identified as a fun or pleasurable activity, procrastination will happen.

Procrastination only generate when the task was identified as evaluative. Tice and Baumeister (1997) found that procrastinators reported lower stress than non-procrastinators early in the semester, but they reported higher stress late in the term. O’Donoghue and Rabin (2001) found that people will give up completing an attractive option and plan to complete a more attractive option even it will never be completed. Therefore, providing additional options to a non-procrastinator can produce procrastination, a person may procrastinate the important goals rather than unimportant ones. According to these studies, we can see the techniques to measure procrastination and the methods to manipulate procrastination are mature and effective.