Why Do People Procrastinate?
Kaelyn Stephenson
Imagine that you have a presentation due in one week. Plenty of time right? So you come up with your idea the first day, and decide to push off the work for a couple days. You have sports and other homework due before the presentation that’s more important. After several days of pushing back the work, you look at your calendar and it’s the night before the presentation, but you need to watch one more episode of your favorite show because of that cliffhanger. After it’s done, the daunting size of the entire presentation causes you to hesitate starting it. You think it'll take three hours to complete it, it’s 4:00 pm, and you typically go to bed at midnight. So you have until 9:00 pm until you have to start. Before you know it, time flies and it’s already nine. But you still don’t start, your phone is too addictive to look away from. You get to a point where your phone bores you and you finally start your project at eleven. You crame all the research, script writing, and forming the presentation in a short time and frantically work to finish. It’s 2:30 am when you finish, and with 4 hours of sleep, you give the presentation and the chaos is finally over. Somehow, you managed to pull off an A, but at what cost?
A study by Darius Foroux found 88% of people in the workforce procrastinate at least one hour a day. On the more severe end, 20% of adults say they experience chronic procrastination. So why is it that so many people procrastinate when we know it needs to be done eventually? Many factors can play into people’s reasons for procrastinating --besides just being “lazy”--, and the resulting opportunity costs from this decision may be too large to justify it.
A major cause of procrastination is distractions. In the above scenario, it’s your phone and favorite tv show. Many students deal with similar issues regarding their phones and social media distracting them from school work. A study by researchers at King’s College London found almost 40% of college students aged 18 to 30 were addicted to their phones. With an addiction to phones, students would much rather spend their time scrolling through social media than finishing their math homework. Distractions aren’t just specifically the internet, but most associated with procrastination are. When a student chooses to spend time on their phone, they are creating the opportunity cost of time better spent completing homework for school or other more beneficial activities.
With the constant pressures of getting good grades in school in order to be successful in life, perfectionism is a frequent occurrence in teens. With perfectionism, completing projects and presentations can seem daunting. It needs to be perfect to earn an A, but I don’t want to start because I can’t make it perfect. With the pressures, students continue to push off and procrastinate. Additionally, there is a psychological phenomenon called temporal disjunction where people see their future self as different from their present self. For that reason, you pushed the presentation to the night before because upon learning of the assignment, you thought this was an issue for future you, therefore somebody else’s problem.
Getting a good grade on a project someone procrastinated can make them get into a worse habit of it, which is where chronic procrastination plays in. Seeing themselves get an A on it, they think, if I can get an A doing it last minute, I don’t have to worry about finishing it earlier than that, fueling the cycle of procrastinating.
Even with the decision to procrastinate, there are still opportunity costs that result from it. If you had completed the presentation even three hours before, you would’ve had three extra hours of sleep. Procrastination can cause less sleep, especially from students who have homework due in the morning and they find themselves pushing it later into the night. Less sleep can lead to being more tired that following day of school, having less focus, and a chain reaction is set off. It has also been known to cause anxiety and stress from pushing it off until the last minute, which are easily preventable if it was completely at an earlier time. Decisions like spending hours on your phone put you in that detrimental situation of procrastination. Minimizing the time with your phone may motivate you more to finish homework with your free time. In the end, these opportunity costs to procrastinating do not justify doing it and result in a larger cost than gain.
So the next time you think about pushing your homework to the last minute, think about it in terms of a trade-off, and weigh the opportunity costs and benefits to you; because with this mindset, your decision may not be the same as it was before.
Works Cited
“Procrastination: Facts and Stats 2021.” The Creatives Hour, 9 Apr. 2021, https://thecreativeshour.com/procrastination-facts-and-stats/#:~:text=%20General%20Stats%20of%20Procrastination%20%201%2020%25,including%0Apoor%20time%20management%2C%0Al
Science, London School of Economics and Political. “Students Struggles: Battling with Procrastination.” Home, https://info.lse.ac.uk/current-students/Assets/Articles/procrastination
Scipionl, Jade. “College Students ‘addiction’ to Smartphones May Affect Sleep: Study.” CNBC, 2. Mar. 2021, ihttps://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/02/college-students-addiction-to-smartphones-may-affect-sleep.html
“Teen Anxiety: How Perfectionism Fuels Anxiety in Teenagers.” Psycom.Net -Metal Health Treatment Resource Sinced 1996, https://www.psycom.net/perfectionism-teen-anxiety/
“Why People Procrastinate: The Pyschology and Causes of Procrastination - Solving Procrastination.” Solving Procrastination, https://solvingprocrastination.com/why-people-procrastinate/
I never really started procrastinating until this year, and I think that it’s because I have college and high school homework every day. I do consider the trade-offs, but nothing gets me motivated enough to just complete the work first. I do as much as I can mentally, and then after my brain gets tired, I use other things to distract myself from completing my homework. This then leads to more stress and worse grades on my quizzes, so I think I’ll start contemplating the opportunity costs associated with my actions. Instead of going on my phone for an hour, I could spend that time studying to avoid more stressful situations in the future.
ReplyDeleteI agree, I can relate to the idea of procrastination that you have in your blog. Despite sometimes being distracted from my phone, I find myself more engaged in other things. How often do you think people procrastinate because of their job or sports? I also agree that procrastination isn’t directly related to someone being lazy, but the trade-off would be really based around our priorities.
ReplyDeleteProcrastination has affected many of us on finishing our last assignment that's due tomorrow morning however pushing your body to stay up so late is bad so if you would stop procrastinating you would be in much better mental shape, you would also not be so stressed out on how you did on your homework assignments or that last project due in an hour.
ReplyDeleteI can definitely relate to this problem, and many other students as well most likely deal with this procrastinating problem. It’s pretty hard to get started on schoolwork sometimes because you think of the options you have, for example, doing your homework or hanging out with friends. When you think of that you know that you would have more fun with your friends, and you wouldn’t want to miss out on seeing them or what they’re doing outside of school, so you’re more inclined to hang out with friends other than doing school work. Which can be a huge problem because the more you procrastinate, the more homework you have to do, and then that leads to you not wanting to do it anymore because it’s too much for you to handle. It can become an endless loop sometimes.
ReplyDeleteI feel as a student most kids tend to procrastinate because they feel like they could better spend their time doing something they enjoy more than something school related. I too feel like this and have been on the mentality that its my senior year -- and last year and to not stress about school since its my last year. I know that not caring about homework or listening during classes will only cost me my grades and everything that I have worked so hard to finish high school, that I need to start getting back on track and continue to pull through my final year. I feel like other students have this issue of procrastination not selective towards just seniors but realizing how much effort needs to be put into school, grades, assignments and homework is a lot to handle. So instead of pushing it off we should learn to correct ourselves and think of the trade-offs in order to get our work done.
ReplyDeleteI think this was a very relatable topic to talk about. My procrastination got to its worst point during my junior year just because of everything going on with COVID and overall feeling unmotivated to get working. I think most of the times I procrastinated were because I was given a big project that wasn't due for another few weeks, so I always had the mentality that I would have time later to do it. With the addition of getting good grades on these projects, I never saw a need to fix the habit. Now, this year, I have a busier schedule, so making sure to stay off my phone and consider the trade-offs of procrastinating has become all the more important for me.
ReplyDeleteI have always had a slight problem with procrastination, always holding off doing homework until it’s midnight and then getting only a few hours of sleep. I know that I am going to regret not doing my homework early, but I tend to have no motivation to do it, which seems to be the case for many other teens. After reading your post and learning how procrastination affects you from sleep to the quality of your work, I will definitely try to start not procrastinating as much this year.
ReplyDeleteInteresting blog! I remember the opportunity costs I always came across in my Junior year. I procrastinated plenty, went on the xbox,phone, watched youtube, etc... However, all of the assignments I procrastinated for were completed with proficient/advanced grades, while that's nice, I ended up having less desired effects on my sleep mentality and mental health.
ReplyDeleteI would procrastinate all the time, and now I refuse to. I don't know exactly why I'm no longer procrastinating it just happened. I understand what you mean about the trade-offs but for the longest time I did think of my future self as another person, and I still do.However, the procrastination is no longer so obvious in my studying habits. I tend to get all the assignments done in class, although I do procrastinate a lot when the homework manages to come home with me. Does the environment of the procrastinator affect their habits?
ReplyDeleteEvery year that led up to this year I have procrastinated every assignment and finishing them most likely at the end of each semester not even near their due dates and it was because I either didn't know where to start because I wanted it perfect or I found other things to distract myself and end up forgetting about my homework but this year I finally have the mindset of if I get it done now I have more free time later and it has been going pretty well so far.
ReplyDeleteI really like the use of statistics to make your points. I would really like to know if procrastination is more prevalent in high school homework compared to college homework, because I personally feel a difference in my attitude towards these two options. I procrastinate more in high school than I do in college, because I see high school homework as less important than college homework, so I tend to get college homework done better than highschool homework. You did very well with the overall writing and grammar choice with your blog, and had good pace and organization as well.
ReplyDeleteProcrastination has been something that has started to plague my life, but I feel like it’s a growing problem. I’ve started to find a balance between managing my time with work, homework, and my free time, but I want to know what about the decisions that matter years ahead. Why do people procrastinate on choosing careers, what college they go to, what they want to do with their lives, etc. etc. Where does that procrastination come from? How do people go about solving that type of procrastination too?
ReplyDeleteI like the facts and statistics you used. I never knew temporal disjunction was a thing but looking back, it is probably very common to happen at school as well as chronic procrastination. Personally, I struggled with this in school especially freshman year and this led to me failing or almost failing classes and if I did complete it and get a good grade, this fueled my procrastination even more. I though it was interesting the way you explained it as a tradeoff- people would rather sit on there phone and feel "comfortable" for a small amount of time rather than doing what needs to be done right away because they simply don't feel like it even when it leads to less sleep, concentration, and more.
ReplyDeleteSome people procrastinate because they think that if they are in a time crunch that they will be more efficient in their work. If they wait until the last minute they will be extremely motivated to get their work done and will possibly get their work done faster. The biggest tradeoff of this is even though they may get their work done faster their work is going to be a ton times worse than if you took your time and made a quality presentation. So if you don’t care how your presentation is and don’t care if you get a bad grade then by all means cram a presentation in the last minutes. But if you want to get better grades people have to put down your phone and let go of all your distractions and get your work done before the last minute.
ReplyDeleteI agree with everything you said, but wouldn't the cost of stress outweigh the cost of potentially getting a failing grade? A lot of teens these days don't like the pressure of stress and as you stated before with the perfectionist, wouldn't that drive them to start the project earlier so they have more time to perfect it rather than procrastinate.
ReplyDeleteI agree, I think we all are addicted to our phones and not only does it affect time that you could’ve been sleeping or studying for other things that are more important, but long term it also affects our mental health. Is it worth the extra 3 hours that mean nothing and aren’t important later that negatively affect us in the future. It’s not just about being on your phone, it’s about what your doing on it. Is scrolling through TikTok or Instagram really worth the stress of not being as prepared as you could’ve for your project, or more ready for a test.
ReplyDeleteI agree and i think procrastinating is a relatable topic. I like the way you used statistics too to further your main idea. I would really like to know if homework in middle school through high school then to college change the amount of procrastination. I also remember the opportunity cost of last year I always procrastinated watching Netflix, snap chat, tik tok. Though i would eventually do my homework and i always got good grades on it. The Only real cost I had to pay was not being able to sleep for longer. I really like your blog i think the grammar and organization is really well put together.
ReplyDelete