Procrastination Is a Thought Problem

This article is about three things that sit inside putting a task off, and about why KTT calls procrastination a thought problem. In KTT’s reading, each of them is a thought, conscious or not, though it may arrive as a feeling or an urge without words. Research mostly names them under other labels, and the studies read for this article did not test whether a thought comes first.

A report is due on Friday. It is Tuesday. The file is open. A thought says: this will be tedious. Another says: this will not come out well. A third offers a way out: later will be easier. The file is closed, and the thoughts go quiet.

Three thoughts

The thought about the task: “This will be tedious.” Research calls it task aversiveness. A 2007 meta-analysis, which combines many studies, looked at 691 correlations and found delay consistently linked to how unpleasant a task is. A correlation shows that things occur together, not that one causes the other.

The thought about the self: “This will not come out well.” Research calls it self-efficacy, the belief that a task can be done. It was linked to delay in the same review. A 2020 study of academic procrastination found delay linked to difficulty managing emotion, especially to appraisals of the ability to change the situation.

The thought about later: “Later will be easier.” Fuschia Sirois and Tim Pychyl proposed in 2013 that putting a task off can bring short-term relief from boredom, worry or self-doubt. The relief does not last, and the cost arrives later. Pychyl puts it this way: “Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem, not a time management problem.” In Gross’s model of emotion regulation, one of five strategies, reappraisal, is itself a change of thought.

Thoughts can also loop. In a questionnaire study of 141 people, rumination and daydreaming were linked to delay.

An old thought

The word names it: crastinus means “of tomorrow.” Hesiod, an early Greek poet, wrote in Works and Days: “Do not put your work off till tomorrow and the day after.” A Ming-dynasty poem, the Míng rì gē, opens 明日复明日，明日何其多, roughly “tomorrow, and again tomorrow; how many tomorrows there are.” Sources attribute it to Qian Fu or to Wen Jia.

What can be done

In trials, approaches based on cognitive behavioral therapy, a form of talk therapy that examines thoughts and behavior, reduced procrastination more than other approaches. That comes from a 2018 review of 24 studies. These approaches also work on goals and self-monitoring, so the result does not show that thoughts alone matter.

What is not known

Whether the thought comes before the delay or after it is not known. Most of the studies above are correlational.

How the unpleasant feeling arrives is open too. Taste aversions show that a learned aversion can run against a person’s own belief: cancer patients can come to dislike a food they know did not make them ill. That example comes from food, not from tasks. Whether a learned reaction like this counts as an unconscious thought depends on what counts as a thought.

Research also links delay to impulsiveness, and a twin study found it partly heritable. Neither was measured as a thought.

The trial results come with limits. A later review noted small samples and likely publication bias, so the effects were probably overestimated.

Recognizing the thoughts

• One names a feeling about the task.
• One doubts the ability to do it.
• One offers a later time as the way out.