Top Research Papers on Procrastination

Despite extensive research on procrastination, knowledge of its portrait remains limited. We integrate two perspectives in exploring the relationship between personality and procrastination: the traditional Big Five traits and the darker traits known as the Dark Triad. Through a meta-analysis of 47 independent samples with 18,839 participants, we found that most Big Five traits were negatively related to procrastination, while the Dark Triad traits were positively associated with procrastination. Moreover, the incremental variance analyses revealed that the Dark Triad captured variance in proc...

2018 Outstanding Academic Title, given by Choice Magazine How mobile devices make our in-between moments valuable to media companies while also providing a sense of control and connection In moments of downtime – waiting for a friend to arrive or commuting to work – we pull out our phones for a few minutes of distraction. Just as television reoriented the way we think about living rooms, mobile devices have taken over the interstitial spaces of our everyday lives. Ethan Tussey argues that these in-between moments have created a procrastination economy, an opportunity for entertainment companie...

We use a combination of lab and field evidence to study whether highly-impatient individuals are more likely to procrastinate. To measure impatience, we elicit individual discount rates by giving participants choices between smaller-sooner and larger-later rewards. To measure procrastination, we record how quickly participants complete three tasks: an online game, their application to the university, and a mandatory survey. We find that, consistent with the theory, impatient individuals procrastinate more, but only in tasks where there are costs to delay (the online game and university applica...

The results of an experiment using HabitLab suggest that any conservation of procrastination effect is minimal, and that behavior change designers may target individual productivity goals without causing substantial negative second-order effects.

Abstract. The short form of the General Procrastination Scale (GPS-K; Klingsieck & Fries, 2012 ; Lay, 1986 ) is a reliable self-report scale measuring general procrastination. The presumed one-dimensional factor structure of the scale, however, has never been examined. Thus, the purposes of this representative study were to examine its dimensionality and factorial invariance across age and sex, and to provide norm values of the German general population. The GPS-K was administered to a representative community sample ( N = 2,527; age range 14–95 years). A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA)...

A six-weeks trial is reported showing that persuasion adaptation strengthens persuasive power of self-monitoring and limits its attrition.

The study was designed to investigate the prevalence and reasons for academic procrastination in public university students. The sample consisted of 200 university students including 155 women and 45 men students from social and natural sciences departments. Academic procrastination and reasons for it were measured by Procrastination Assessment Scale for Students (Solomon & Rothblum, 1984a). Backward linear regression analysis has shown that risk taking, task aversiveness, and decision-making were significant predictors (reasons) for academic procrastination while task aversiveness being stron...

Procrastination is a widespread phenomenon that affects performance in various life domains including academic performance. Recently, it has been argued that procrastination can be conceptualized as a dysfunctional response to undesired affective states. Thus, we aimed to test the hypothesis that the availability of adaptive emotion regulation (ER) skills prevents procrastination. In a first study, cross-sectional analyses indicated that ER skills and procrastination were associated and that these connections were mediated by the ability to tolerate aversive emotions. In a second study, cross ...

Personal routines (Wake-up Time and Dinner Time) along with individual characteristics (General and Academic Procrastination) and beliefs (perceived importance of sleep) may affect Bedtime Procrastinations.

Procrastination has been defined in different ways. Two instruments—the Irrational Procrastination Scale (IPS) and the Pure Procrastination Scale (PPS)—focus on a core problem in procrastination—the irrational delay of intended behavior. The present paper examined the psychometric properties of the Norwegian translations of these scales. In five samples with students as well as non-students (aggregated n = 1045), standard psychometric properties of the instruments were assessed and their factor structures were compared in replication analyses. In addition, correlations between the instruments ...

Procrastination is often associated with feelings of discomfort. The current research examined the effects of decisional and academic procrastination on students' feeling of discomfort related to academic procrastination and the desire to change their procrastination habits. We assumed that academic procrastination would mediate the relationship between decisional procrastination and students' feelings toward academic procrastination. A total of 373 undergraduate social sciences students from northern Israel participated in the study. The results challenge the traditional perception that procr...

The results suggest that delay reduction theory, a theory that emphasizes the attraction to stimuli that predict reinforcement with a short delay, also may contribute to human procrastination behavior because when task completion comes just before the deadline, it may become a stronger conditioned reinforcer than if task completion came earlier.

Results showed that more Bedtime Procrastination was related to later waking time and later dinnertime hours, whereas more While-in-Bed Procrastinations was linked to being male, later desired time to sleep, and earlier dinnerime hour.

Despite a growing body of research on the consequences of procrastination for health and well-being, there is little research focused on testing or explaining the potential links between procrastination and sleep quality. Using the procrastination-health model as our guiding conceptual lens, we addressed this gap by examining how and why trait procrastination may be linked to various dimensions of sleep quality across two student samples. In Study 1, procrastination was associated with feeling unrested, but not with sleep disturbance frequency, in a sample of Greek undergraduate students (N = ...

This work identified adaptive and maladaptive procrastination styles associated with academic and alcohol outcomes in 1106 college undergraduates and identified non-procrastination and academic productive Procrastination were most adaptive overall.

This commentary connects two studies of academic procrastination, Beswick, Rothblum and Mann (1988), which studied the antecedents of academic procrastination, and Steel (2016), which focuses on the personality correlates of academic procrastination. The author identifies reasons for growth in the field of procrastination research, discusses definitions of procrastination, and then comments on the two studies of academic procrastination identified above. In assessing current status and future directions in the field of procrastination research, the author discusses the relationship between and...

Pointing to a limited set of statistics suggesting that examiners turn in much of their work product at the end of quota periods, the Commerce Department has recently raised concerns over examiner procrastination and its consequences for examination quality. End-loading of review completions alone, however, is not dispositive evidence of procrastination. In this paper, we confirm that examiners complete a substantial percentage of reviews at the end of both bi-weekly and quarterly quotas and then proceed to test for additional markers that may separate a procrastination explanation for these f...

In countries, where a substantial proportion of retirement income rests on savings, there is much concern that a sizeable fraction of the population reaches retirement with insufficient financial resources. We define saving regret as the wish in hindsight to have saved more earlier in life. We measured saving regret and possible determinants in a survey of U.S. households in which respondents were aged 60-79. We find high levels of saving regret, affirmed by some 58%. Saving regret exhibits significant and plausible correlations with personal characteristics and wealth: Married, older, healthi...

A metacognitive model of procrastination that was grounded in the Self-Regulatory Executive Function model can be used to generate novel interventions to treat this problematic behaviour.

Procrastination refers to voluntarily delay an intended course of action despite expecting that it might have negative consequences. It is usually assessed by self-reports, and the two most frequently used scales are the Pure Procrastination Scale (PPS) and the Irrational Procrastination Scale (IPS). The current study sought to investigate the reliability and validity of the two scales in Korean by translating the PPS from English and to reexamine a previous translation of the IPS. The aim is to promote further research on procrastination and to enhance a cross-cultural comprehension of the co...