Cultural Context -Procrastination

Procrastination is a phenomenon that people have been with humans since at least the time of Cicero (Steel, 2007). The prevalence of the general population is as high as 20% to 25% (Ferrari, Díaz-Morales, O’Callaghan, Díaz & Argumedo, 2007). The prevalence of academic procrastination (that is, procrastination in learning-related activities; for example, writing semester essays, learning exams) among college students is much higher. As many as 70% of college students consider themselves procrastinators (Schouwenburg, 2004).

In the book "It's about time!: the six styles of procrastination and how to overcome them", Sapadin and Maguire (1996) mentioned that there are six types of procrastination, namely the Worrier, the perfectionist, the over-doer, the crisis maker, the dreamer and the defier. The Worrier will not start this important or difficult task because they don't believe they can do it. They worry that they will not succeed. They are anxious about the idea of failure. The perfectionist is similar to the worrier in that it will not start working because of fear of failure. However, for the perfectionist, failure means not completing the task perfectly. The typical belief of the perfectionist sounds like "If you don't do well, you will fail." The over-doer is dedicated to accomplishing many tasks. In this way, they are unable to prioritize important tasks and thus cannot complete tasks on time. The classic "the over-doer" of procrastination is afraid of not complying with standards that they cannot achieve or standards that others cannot imagine. This will make them take too much responsibility and fail to complete key tasks. The crisis maker believes that in order to be motivated to complete a task, they need the pressure or pressure inherent in the last-minute action. They believe that without these, they would not perform best. The dreamer believes that they don't have to work hard to get what they want. The last one is the defier. Imagine a situation where the boss of the defier gave them a boring, ordinary or stupid right task. The defier thought it was not worth it, so they postponed the completion. Procrastination can make creativity happen more naturally (Fernie, Bharucha, Nikčević & Spada, 2017). Graham Wallas (1962) described creativity in the book The Art of Thought through four stages, namely: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification. In the blog, when reflecting on my daily procrastination journey, I found that I spent the longest time on Incubation. I also interviewed a lot of friends at the same time, and everyone was in line with my situation. They all had the longest time in the first and second stages of the early stage.

After I interviewed my target users, I found that we were often confused and anxious in the first and second stages of the early stage. So I want to use this app to help everyone quickly get through the confusion period and complete homework on time.

How to help people with procrastination like me solve problems? There is neither a single explanation of "why people procrastinate" nor a single method of "how to overcome this behaviour" in this world. Stanford University philosophy professor John Perry's "Structured Procrastination Method" was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. Perry (2010) proposed a structured procrastination method in the book “The art of procrastination”, starting with small, low-priority things to build a sense of accomplishment, and then cheering up to complete more important tasks. People always focus on their biggest and most important responsibilities and then waste their time on non-profitable activities, such as going online and watching TV. Jerry (2010) believes that we should not be unhappy about our own habits of doing things because the sense of guilt will dissipate our energy and instead strengthen the desire to delay. As a patient with chronic procrastination, Perry recommends that people who have similar problems like him choose an important task, but postpone it for a while before conquering it, and do things that are easy to complete first. This will build confidence to complete more important tasks. 

Fernie, B. A., Bharucha, Z., Nikčević, A. V., & Spada, M. M. (2017). The unintentional procrastination scale. Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, 35(2), 136-149.

Ferrari, J. R., Díaz-Morales, J. F., O’Callaghan, J., Díaz, K., Argumedo, D. (2007). Frequent behavioural delay tendencies by adults: International prevalence rates of chronic procrastination. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 38, 458–464.

Perry, J. (2010). The art of procrastination: A guide to effective dawdling, lollygagging, and postponing. Workman Publishing.

Schouwenburg, H. C. (2004). Procrastination in academic settings: General introduction. In H. C. Schouwenburg, C. H. Lay, T. A. Pychyl, J. R. Ferrari (Eds.), Counseling the procrastinator in academic settings (pp. 3–17). Washington, DC: American Psychology Association.

Sapadin, L., & Maguire, J. (1996). It's about time! the six styles of procrastination and how to overcome them. Viking Pr.

Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133, 65–94.