Procrastination 2022

Hi everyone, I’m Jessica, and the topic for my presentation today is procrastination. And I’m going to explain this phenomenon from a relatively more professional perspective, which is Psychology. Before we get started, let’s look at an example that might happen in our daily life.

Lucy planned to do two TOEFL listening passages at noon, but then she decided to do it in the afternoon since it was sunny and she want to take a walk and have a rest during break time. However, when she finally decided to start the study, she was attracted to the game on her iPad and didn’t start studying until an hour later.

This is known as PROCRASTINATION. The definition of it is “putting off or delaying or deferring an action to a later time.” According to the survey, over 75% of college students think they procrastinate, and over 50% think they have always been procrastinating. This is a widespread problem.
Procrastination will not only cause laziness and make us less efficient but can also have adverse effects on our mental health. Serious procrastination can lead to self-accusation, guilty, and self-depreciation, and even result in anxiety and depression. Therefore, for our body and our study or work, procrastination is something that we should try hard to tackle.

So, why do we procrastinate?

Generally, people procrastinate because they lack time management skills. From the perspective of psychology, once people have enough time to finish something, they are more likely to slow down. As time goes on, people tend to have negative feelings about the task itself because of the feeling of procrastination and feeling wasted caused by slow work. Therefore, people start to avoid being responsible for their tasks and would not finish the assignment until the deadline.

From the perspective of behaviorism, procrastinating enables people to spend time on what they want to do or what they like to do, hence getting satisfaction immediately.

Humanistic psychology suggests that procrastination is driven by low or high self-esteem. People with low self-esteem are not confident with their abilities, and they generate avoidance since they have encountered frustration before. As a result, the mere thought of starting repels them. Contrarily, people with high self-esteem are confident with themselves and they might overestimate their efficiency and underestimate how long it will take them to complete the task. Additionally, negative perfectionists usually avoid failure by procrastinating. They will tell themselves that “the reason that I failed is not because I’m not perfect enough, but because I didn’t do that or didn’t have enough time to do it.” This allows them to protect their perfect image in their mind.

So, what are some useful solutions?Knowing the reasons for something doesn’t mean knowing how to solve the problem. As Ken Blanchard said, “There is a huge gap between knowing and doing.”

The essential reason why we procrastinate is that we don’t truly want to do something. We merely consider that doing it is right, we should do it, and we are forced to do it, which means that we don’t have real motivation. The most direct solution is to think about its value and significance deeply. Try to think about “why should I do this” “what can I gain from this” “how can this help me to achieve my goals” and so on. Thus, we have a psychological dynamic, which helps us to do these things more actively. Remember, people are more willing to spend their time on things they think are worthwhile, to be more specific, those can bring them happiness, help them achieve goals, etc.

I have mentioned that people procrastinate mainly because they have difficulty managing their time. So how can we improve our time management skills?

The first method is to set a detailed schedule and be clear about your goals, and the most important thing is, to stick to the schedule. If you find it too hard to persist, setting up a reward and punishment system might be a good idea. For instance, the reward of following the schedule for a whole week will be a chance to hang out with friends, and the punishment for not following the schedule will be fewer breaks. Furthermore, during the process, we can use a timer to help us to be more focused and improve our efficiency.

I have pointed out that the reason why some people procrastinate is that they are afraid to start. For this, we can try to break down large goals into smaller ones. For example, break down “reading a book” to “reading ten pages every day”, and break down “memorizing three thousand words” to “memorizing thirty words every day”. This means not only makes it easier for us to start and persist but also enables us to attain gratification and enhance confidence.

Last but not least, since the reason for procrastinating can be the desire for immediate satisfaction, learning to delay gratification is a big deal. “delay gratification” refers to “giving up immediate gratification for a more valuable long-term outcome, and suppressing one’s desires appropriately”. Practice focusing on the most important thing immediately, and enjoy the delayed gratification after finishing the task. This will help us to resist temptation and develop the habit of completing assignments as soon as possible, hence solving procrastination.
This is the end of my presentation, I hope it can help you or inspire you. Thanks for listening.