Procrastination

Almost everyone occasionally procrastinates, but a worrisome 15 to 20 percent of adults routinely put off activities that would be better accomplished right away.

Procrastination is more when a person fails to adhere to scheduling and ends up putting off the tasks of greater importance or urgency.

Understanding why people put off projects has led to strategies for helping all of us get and stay on task.

Task aversiveness is one of the main external triggers for procrastination.

The amount of time before the dateline also influences the tendency to procrastinate. In particular, people are more likely to dawdle when the deadline is far away. The reason for this lies in a phenomenon known as temporal delay, which means the closer a person gets to a reward (or a feeling of accomplishment), the more valuable the reward seems and hence the less likely he is to put off performing the work needed to earn it. In other words, immediate gratification is more motivating than are prizes or accolades to be accrued in the distant future.

Such a preference may have a strong evolutionary basis. The future, for those in the Stone Age, was unpredictable at best. “Thus, there was truth to the saying ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,’ ” Pychyl says. “For survival, humans have brains with a procrastination bias built in.”