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An excellent (in-depth) article in this month's APS Observer on the complexities of procrastination.
- “What I’ve found is that while everybody may procrastinate, not everyone is a procrastinator,” says ...Joseph Ferrari, a professor of psychology at DePaul University. He is a pioneer of modern research on the subject, and his work has found that as many as 20 percent of people may be chronic procrastinators.
- “It really has nothing to do with time-management,” he says. “As I tell people, to tell the chronic procrastinator to just do it would be like saying to a clinically depressed person, cheer up.”
Much of the article focuses on procrastination as an emotion-regulation issue:
- In general, people learn from their mistakes and reassess their approach to certain problems.
- For chronic procrastinators, that feedback loop seems continually out of service. The damage suffered as a result of delay doesn’t teach them to start earlier the next time around.
- An explanation for this behavioral paradox seems to lie in the emotional component of procrastination.
- Ironically, the very quest to relieve stress in the moment might prevent procrastinators from figuring out how to relieve it in the long run.
Read the full piece here.
