Procrastination: Types and Ways to Eliminate

Have you ever put off an important project or task until the very last minute?

If this sounds like something your familiar with then you may be suffering from chronic procrastination. According to Dr. John Riddle, an author of several books whose byline has appeared in major publications in the US. “Nearly 20 percent of US men and women are chronic procrastinators” (Riddle). Chronic procrastination can be known for many people to prolong their daily tasks in everyday life. Procrastination is an increasing problem for many members of society. Procrastination can take control of our lives and for most people, they don't know how to stop it. Before discussing learning how to stop procrastination, it's important to first identify why procrastination happens to begin with. Some negative effects of procrastination are sleep deprivation, developing chronic procrastination habits, and not being able to manage our feelings and emotions.

Many people believe the misconception that procrastination is stemmed by a time management issue when procrastination actually has to do with your emotions and the way you feel. Procrastination is an ongoing vicious habit of putting off tasks and challenges for a later time. According to MD, Chris Heath, a psychiatrist who practices in Texas, “Usually, procrastination happens because the task seems too difficult’. Sometimes the procrastinator thinks he or she won’t do a good job. This is really a self-esteem issue as if the person is not equipped to carry out the task. Often the person carries some degree of shame or guilt, and they may not even be aware of it. With just enough shame, that it makes that already difficult task seem near impossible” (Heath). Based on the information from Chris Heath, you can really see that emotions and feelings play a big part in procrastination. Low self-esteem can be caused by a number of pessimistic emotions that you may be feeling towards a certain project or task. You may become anxious because you are afraid that you won't be able to complete a task, or out of fear that you could fail. These emotions are then interpreted by your brain, and your mind uses procrastination as a defense mechanism. Procrastination then gives your mind some temporary relief towards your work. It gives you a chance to forget about all the negative feelings you had. Then, you postpone doing your work until you feel up to it. Your brain thinks it's helping you by taking your mind off those negative emotions, but really it's just hurting you in the long run (Heath).

But it’s not only emotions that cause procrastination. Choice and the ability to choose have us keeping our options open. Choice is a slippery slope in which we are given flexibility around a certain task. People are then given the option to put off the task because they may be waiting for a better option or for something to work out in their favor (Kenny). For example, the other week my mom told me I needed a new pair of shoes and she asked me what kind I wanted. I then realized that this is not always an easy question to answer. Since there are so many different brands of shoes, styles, types, colors, sizes, and prices, there is a lot more that goes into making the decision than you think. I then procrastinated deciding on the shoes I wanted because there were too many different options. This caused me stress knowing that the choices were almost infinite in what I could get and I was afraid of making the wrong decision. I then tried to compare the different options and I still had trouble deciding exactly what I wanted. So, I then avoided the idea of picking out a pair of shoes yet again. This is a perfect example of how choice affects our ability to complete a task. For picking out a pair of shoes, the number of options made it harder for me to complete. So my brain then told me to put it off and worry about it some other time because my emotions were very negative towards the task.

Now that you know a little bit more about why we procrastinate, we can talk about why procrastination is hurting today's society. By a show of hands, how many of you would say you don't get enough sleep each night and you wish you got more? As you can see, many of us are deprived of sleep. Yes, that could be because you get a lot of homework or your very involved in extra activities outside of school but it could also mean that you have some form of procrastination in your life. Procrastination can negatively impact a person in many ways. Although not much is known as to why people delay their times of sleep, procrastination is a relevant cause of sleep deprivation.

Sanee Nauts is a medical researcher specialist for The Royal Philips medical research team, The Royal Phillips team a research entity for Phillips technology company, The research team also consists of Bart A. Kamphorst a computer scientist, Wim Stuta who is a medical researcher like Nautz , Denise T. D. De Ridderc part of the social and health department of Psychology , and Joel H. Andersond a philosophy and religion researcher. Together they based a study that focused on the research subjects self-reported categories of procrastination which are all concerned with the idea of a delayed time of sleep. Seventeen members participated in this study who were considered to often procrastinate at their time of sleep. However, it is important to consider that all seventeen of these participants had no other research conflicting sleep disorders or conditions. The majority of the research study was executed in the form of halfway structured interviews. From the interviews, the most important information was from the numbers that the team found from the three categories procrastinating classified as most prominent in regards to the study.

It was found that procrastination was most often seen here as deliberate, mindless, or strategic delay. The research participants enlisted under deliberate procrastinators described that they intentionally delayed their bedtime for the purpose of acquiring some time for themselves. For the category enlisted as mindless procrastination, those participants lost track of time. This was stemmed from their involvement in their after school activities. Lastly, the participants who resembled the category of strategic delay described themselves going to bed late because they perceived it was necessary for them to fall asleep quicker (Nauts et al.). This study proves that procrastination has a direct correlation to delaying bedtimes. Procrastination is taking away too much time from the people of our society like students and workers. Not only does procrastination deprive you of sleep, but it's also a lethal effort that is provoking a repetitive pattern of failure towards things like school, work, practice, savings, first aid, and much more (Swanson). These examples are important tasks that should never be put off. Unfortunately, they are very often, put off to do at a later time. Usually, that time being the last minute. Specific tasks like the examples given can cause people serious amounts of stress and anxiety.

It’s important to discover what type of procrastinator you are to help avoid those specific behaviors and tendencies that lead to procrastination. As researched by Dr. Ellen Hendriksen, who is a psychologist working with research on anxiety as well as other similar disorders at Boston University, there are only three separate kinds of procrastinators, one being the Avoider (Thibodeaux). This is someone who has trouble dealing with tasks that make them experience negative emotional feelings. People feel the pressure of negative emotions when they have shorter time periods to complete tasks (Thibodeaux). An example of this type of procrastination would be, not raising your hand in class when you have questions or don't understand how to do something. This example demonstrates that we avoid things that don't make us feel emotions that have a positive association. Some people may feel extremely uncomfortable expressing that they lack knowledge, and or don't understand something in front of their peers or the classroom.

Second, being an Optimist. This is someone who sets unrealistic expectations and timelines for themselves. This type of person doesn't fully think things through before they start them; rather than being realistic with what can be done with the given constraints. Optimists continue to not see the negative results caused by their repeated pattern of procrastination. A typical optimist may press the snooze button several times before waking up because they fail to realize how much time they realistically need. As a result of this scenario, the optimist may repeatedly be late or often forget things as a result of their procrastination.

The third and final type of procrastination is known as the pleasure seeker. This form of procrastination is when you purposely don't complete a job or task because you simply don't feel up to it. When participating in this type of procrastination, you may be seen as lazy or selfish by others around you. Most people have a least favorite subject. This subject can lack effort and enthusiasm because it’s clearly something that you don't enjoy doing. This behavior is known to be a pleasure seeker, someone who only wants to do things they enjoy (Thibodeaux).

Now that you know a little bit more about the three types of procrastination reported by Dr. Ellen Hendriksen, let me inform you about different possible ways to put a stop to them. Having the right mindset is one of the first keys to staying on task. Having a good outlook towards your work will help you complete your task more efficiently, but having a bad outlook towards what you’re trying to accomplish will then take control over you. Another key way to help you stop procrastinating is to break your job down into little pieces of work. This is more efficient than telling yourself you need to finish a task that you know is going to take a really long time (Riddle). Another alternative is to forgive yourself when you began to procrastinate (Lieberman). According to Charlotte Lieberman a New York-based journalist, “In a 2010 study researchers found that students who were able to forgive themselves for procrastinating when studying for a first exam ended up procrastinating less when studying for their next exam” (Lieberman). This idea of forgiveness allowed the students to get past their dysfunctional work habits and center their attention around the next exam (Lieberman).

Another tactic is to overlook your emotions and just start the task. Realize that it is not necessary to have good feelings towards something to get it done. We often think that our mood is dependent on our ability to do work or not. We have to understand that we’re not always going to want to do something, but we can’t always let our emotions get the best of us (Swanson). We want to make things as effortless as possible when doing our work so we don’t quit and get frustrated. One way to do that is to eliminate every possible roadblock that could be preventing us from finishing the work. That way you will be more motivated to do your work because it’s not as complicated (Lieberman).

The final way for eliminating procrastination would be to have a reward set out for when you’re done. Having something to look forward to after accomplishing your work can be a great motivation to keep going (Riddle). The other day I came home from school realizing that I had a lot of homework to do. One of my biggest assignments being to finish writing my English paper. I had a lot of resentment towards finishing the paper but I knew I only had limited time to do so. I then decided to break down the work into four different parts to make it seem easier. I then allowed myself to watch 5 minutes of Netflix after I completed each part. This made writing my paper a lot more enjoyable because I had something to look forward to.

Overall, some bad results of procrastination are loss of sleep, establishing long term procrastination, and poor regulation of emotions. These results affect more people than you might realize on a daily basis. Any of these bad results can be seen in all three of the different types of procrastinators that were discussed by Dr. Ellen Hendriksen. The three types of procrastinators discussed were the avoider, the optimist, and the pleasure seeker. There are many different ways in which people can stop procrastinating. All in all, procrastination is a growing problem in today’s society. There is so much more that everyone could be doing to educate the public about the dangers of procrastination and ways to prevent those bad habits from starting. So really think about this the next time you feel like procrastinating.