After 18 years of research, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people tend to procrastinate less as they progress through adolescence.
Research on procrastination has primarily focused on short-term behaviors over relatively short periods of time in academic settings. Although these studies have helped identify what causes people to procrastinate at work and the direct effects on performance and well-being, they don’t say much about whether procrastination changes over long periods of life, or whether it remains roughly constant as people get older.
Therefore, it is unclear whether procrastination should be understood as primarily a situation-dependent behavior or as a more persistent individual difference.
Lisa Bäulke and colleagues addressed this gap by investigating procrastination during the transition from late adolescence to adulthood. They sought to determine whether procrastination shows stability and change over time and how it develops with broader personality traits. This study was also motivated by the possibility that major life transitions, particularly the transition from education to the workforce, shape patterns of procrastination. By following individuals over time, the authors sought to determine whether procrastination decreases with age and whether it has a lasting impact on key life outcomes.
Researchers followed 3,023 people in Germany for 18 years, starting in their final year of high school and extending through late adolescence and adulthood. Participants were initially recruited from 149 schools and surveyed repeatedly over eight waves, spaced every two to four years. At each wave, participants reported on their tendency to procrastinate using a 12-item questionnaire designed to capture when people delay starting a task despite knowing that action is required.
Participants also completed personality assessments assessing conscientiousness and neuroticism at multiple points in time, and reported on their life situations, including whether they were studying, working, or transitioning between the two. A wide range of subsequent outcomes were also collected, including college graduation, grades, income, promotions, relationship status, parenting, life satisfaction, health, as well as technology use and mental health during the coronavirus pandemic.
This design allowed the researchers to link early trends to results nearly 20 years later, track both average changes in procrastination and individual differences in those trajectories, and account for missing data so that participants with partial data could continue to contribute.
Bäulke et al. found that procrastination exhibits both stability and change. People’s relative standing remained fairly stable, and those who procrastinated early on tended to procrastinate more later on, but overall levels declined over time. Therefore, procrastination is not solved. Generally, as people get older, they get better at not procrastinating. At the same time, there was significant variation in the degree of change among individuals, suggesting that some people improved more than others.
People who became more conscientious or less neurotic over time tended to show more positive changes in procrastination. The transition from university to the workforce also played a prominent role in these changes. Those who entered the workforce after studying tended to have even less procrastination, suggesting that a more structured environment and increased responsibility may help reduce tardy behavior. Conversely, higher levels of procrastination are associated with a lower likelihood of making this transition and delayed entry into the labor force, pointing to a reciprocal relationship between life circumstances and self-regulation.
Finally, procrastination was strongly associated with long-term life outcomes. High initial levels of procrastination and unfavorable trajectories predicted a range of negative outcomes years later, including lower academic performance, less favorable career outcomes such as lower income and fewer promotions, and differences in interpersonal relationships and health indicators. These associations extended to experiences during the pandemic, including mental health and technology use.
This study revealed that procrastination is not only a short-term habit, but a significant predictor of how people perform across multiple areas of life over nearly two decades.
Of note, this study relied on self-reporting, which could introduce bias. Additionally, the sample was drawn from one region in Germany, which may limit the generalizability of the results.
The study, “Once a procrastinator, always a procrastinator? Exploring the stability, change, and long-term correlates of procrastination in young adulthood” was authored by Lisa Bäulke, Brent W. Roberts, Benjamin Nagengast, and Ulrich Trautwein.
