What Is Procrastination?

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Procrastination is a very common behavior that negatively affects both academic and everyday functioning.

While not technically a disorder, procrastination may reflect maladaptive personality processes.

Perfectionism paradoxically leads to procrastination from fear of not meeting high standards.

Procrastination, from the Latin word for “tomorrow” (as in, “I’ll get to it tomorrow”), is perhaps the most common behavioral affliction in the modern world. As example, around 90% of college students report some procrastination tendencies and around 25% have procrastination tendencies severe enough to make it very difficult for them to ever attain a degree. In the everyday (as opposed to academic) world, an almost universal form of procrastination involves inability to get rid of clutter, with the most severe manifestation qualifying as hoarding. Other everyday forms of procrastination involve such things as putting off potentially difficult conversations, delaying paying bills, not completing job assignments, etc.

In calling procrastination an “affliction,” I mean to indicate that it is an avoidance behavior that creates undesired consequences for the procrastinator, assuming that most procrastinators would prefer not to get in academic trouble, have their cars repossessed, get fired, etc. On the other hand, procrastination itself does not qualify as a psychiatric disorder, although obviously there are some psychiatric disorders, most typically depression, for which procrastination is a major symptom.

There are obviously many possible explanations for why people procrastinate, and at 1,000 words (the recommended max for this post) I cannot mention all of them. I will........

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