How Do You Actually Procrastinate?
Three different delays that get called by one name
Procrastination is not one habit. Some people cannot decide, some people decide and cannot start, and some people start and still arrive late. These three delays have different causes and different fixes, and advice aimed at one of them is useless for the other two - which is why so much productivity advice fails for so many people.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how things usually go, not about the week you were unusually organised.
What it measures
Three kinds of delay. Decisional delay is putting off the choice itself. Implemental delay is having decided and still not starting. Lateness is the visible result: deadlines missed, appointments reached at a run. The three usually correlate, but almost nobody scores the same on all three, and the highest one tells you where to intervene.
Based on: Pure Procrastination Scale (Steel, 2010) and Temporal Motivation Theory
Possible results
Decisional delay
Putting off the choice rather than the work.
Implemental delay
Having decided, and still not starting.
Lateness
The visible consequence: deadlines and arrivals.
Common questions
Is procrastination the same as laziness?
No, and the distinction is not a comforting technicality. Laziness is not wanting to act; procrastination is wanting to act and not doing it, which is why it produces guilt and laziness does not. The research treats it as a failure of self-regulation rather than of motivation - the intention is present the whole time.
What actually works against it?
Anything that shortens the distance between now and the reward, or that removes the decision from the moment. Concrete plans that name a time and place, deadlines that are external rather than self-imposed, breaking the first step down until it is almost trivial, and reducing the availability of the easy alternative. Motivation and self-criticism are the two approaches with the weakest evidence.
Why does it get worse with some tasks and not others?
Temporal motivation theory gives a usable answer: how much you want to do something rises with how likely you are to succeed and how much you value the outcome, and falls with how far away the reward is and how impulsive you are. A task that is vague, unpleasant, far from any payoff and easy to swap for something else is the exact recipe. Changing any one of those four moves the result.
Sources
- Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin.
- Steel, P. (2010). Arousal, avoidant and decisional procrastinators: Do they exist?. Personality and Individual Differences.
- Sirois, F. M., Molnar, D. S., & Hirsch, J. K. (2017). A meta-analytic and conceptual update on the associations between procrastination and multidimensional perfectionism. European Journal of Personality.
- Svartdal, F., Pfuhl, G., Nordby, K., Foschi, G., Klingsieck, K. B., Rozental, A., Carlbring, P., Lindblom-Ylanne, S., & Rebkowska, K. (2016). On the measurement of procrastination: Comparing two scales in six European countries. Frontiers in Psychology.
An honest note One finding is worth stating plainly, because it contradicts most of what gets said about procrastination. Steel's 2007 meta-analysis concluded that procrastinators are, if anything, slightly less likely to be perfectionists rather than more. A later meta-analysis refined the picture: the two halves of perfectionism pull in opposite directions, with high personal standards going alongside less procrastination while fear of failing and harsh self-criticism go alongside more. So blaming your delay on perfectionism is only accurate for one half of it, and it is the anxious half. The strongest predictors overall remain impulsiveness, low conscientiousness and how unpleasant the task is. Also worth knowing: the idea of a distinct arousal procrastinator who genuinely works better under pressure has not held up when it was tested directly.