Why Do We Procrastinate? What the Research Actually Says

In the 1990s two psychologists, Dianne Tice and Roy Baumeister, followed university students through a semester. They identified which students tended to procrastinate and then tracked their stress, their health and their grades.

Early in the term, the procrastinators were doing better than everyone else. They reported less stress and less illness than their classmates. Putting things off was, for a few weeks, working beautifully.

Then the deadlines arrived. Late in the term the procrastinators reported more stress and more illness, they were sicker across the semester as a whole, and they received lower grades on all of their assignments. The researchers summed it up as a pattern of short-term benefits and long-term costs.

That trade - relief now, a bill later - is the key to understanding why intelligent, well-meaning people delay things they fully intend to do.

Laziness is the wrong diagnosis

The most thorough attempt to pin down the causes of procrastination is a 2007 review by the organisational psychologist Piers Steel. He pooled 691 correlations from earlier studies to see which factors travel together with putting things off.

Some popular suspects turned out to matter little. Neuroticism, rebelliousness and sensation seeking showed only a weak connection with procrastination. The strong and consistent predictors were different:

• Task aversiveness - how unpleasant, boring or frustrating the task feels.
• Task delay - how far away the reward or the deadline is.
• Self-efficacy - how confident you are that you can actually do it well.
• Impulsiveness - how easily you are pulled towards whatever is more tempting right now.

Conscientiousness and several of its facets, such as self-control, distractibility and organisation, also lined up strongly. Notice what is missing from that list: nothing says that procrastinators do not care, or do not know what to do. The problem is not the plan. It is the moment of starting.

The equation behind the delay

Steel argued that these findings fit what he called temporal motivation theory, a blend of older ideas from motivation research and from the study of how we discount future rewards. In plain words, your drive to do something right now goes up when you expect to succeed and when the task feels valuable or pleasant. It goes down when the payoff is far away, and it goes down even faster if you are impulsive, because distant rewards lose their pull more quickly for you.

This explains a familiar pattern. With a deadline three weeks away, the delay is large and almost anything else - email, tidying, a video - wins the comparison. As the deadline approaches, the delay shrinks, the task finally becomes more urgent than the distractions, and you work in a burst the night before. Nothing about your character changed in those three weeks. Only the arithmetic did.

A word of caution about this evidence: Steel's review is built mostly on correlations, often measured in university students. It shows which factors go together with procrastination, not that each one causes it, and people outside student populations may differ.

Procrastination as mood repair

Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl pushed the explanation one step further in 2013. They argued that procrastination is, at its core, a way of regulating emotions. Faced with a task that feels aversive - boring, confusing, or threatening to your sense of competence - you feel bad. Turning away from it makes the bad feeling stop almost immediately. That is short-term mood repair, and the relief is real.

The catch is that the cost does not disappear. It is transferred to what Sirois and Pychyl call the future self: the person who will have to do the same task later, with less time and more pressure. Their point is that procrastinators give priority to how they feel now over how their future self will feel, almost as if that later person were somebody else. Tice and Baumeister's students, relaxed in week three and ill in week twelve, are that transfer in action.

Seen this way, telling a procrastinator to try harder misses the mechanism. The avoidance is not a failure to understand the task. It is a successful, if short-sighted, strategy for managing a feeling.

The surprising role of self-forgiveness

If procrastination is driven by bad feelings, then the way you treat yourself after procrastinating should matter. Michael Wohl, Timothy Pychyl and Shannon Bennett tested this idea with university students around their exams in a study published in 2010.

The students who forgave themselves for having procrastinated while studying for one exam procrastinated less when studying for the next one. The researchers linked this to negative feelings: forgiving yourself seems to reduce the negative emotion attached to the task, which makes it less aversive to go back to.

It is a counter-intuitive result, because many of us assume that harsh self-criticism keeps us in line. The finding suggests the opposite: guilt makes the task feel even worse, which feeds the urge to avoid it. It was a single study with students, so it is best treated as a promising lead rather than a proven technique, but it fits neatly with the mood-repair view.

What this means for you

If you want to understand your own pattern, our procrastination test and our time-management test are a reasonable starting point, and the delay-of-gratification test looks at the related pull of now versus later. None of them is a diagnosis; they are ways of noticing habits.

The research also suggests some practical angles, each tied to one of Steel's predictors:

• Make the start less aversive. Shrink the first step until it is almost trivial - open the file, write one ugly sentence. You are lowering the emotional cost of beginning, not finishing the task.
• Bring the reward closer. Distant deadlines lose their pull. Set your own intermediate deadlines, ideally ones someone else will see.
• Build confidence. Low self-efficacy predicts delay. Starting with the part you know you can do well gives you evidence that the rest is manageable.
• Reduce temptation. If you are impulsive, the competing option wins more often. Moving your phone out of reach is not a character upgrade, but it changes the comparison.
• Forgive the last delay. Beating yourself up keeps the task wrapped in bad feeling. Acknowledging what happened and moving on appears to help more than guilt.

Procrastination is extremely common and usually not a sign of anything wrong with you. If, however, avoidance is tied to persistent low mood, anxiety or distress that affects your daily life, it is worth talking to a qualified professional.