Recent research published in psychological report found that people who procrastinate frequently can set meaningful personal goals and imagine achieving them just as vividly as non-procrastinators. However, people who procrastinate frequently tend to have greater anxiety about failing, especially when it comes to short-term goals. These findings suggest that procrastination is less about the inability to imagine the future and more about managing the negative emotions associated with pursuing a goal.
Procrastination is generally considered a failure of self-regulation. This occurs when you delay an important task even though you know that delay will have negative consequences. Past research has linked this behavioral trait to impulsivity and a tendency to prefer immediate rewards over distant rewards.
This behavior is related to a concept known as temporal discounting, in which the value of a reward decreases the further apart it is in time. For this reason, procrastinators often choose quick and easy activities over difficult tasks that delay their effects.
Some researchers have proposed that people who procrastinate may suffer from episodic future thinking. This psychological concept refers to the mental process of creating detailed simulations of possible future events. Previous research has shown that high procrastinators may have difficulty visualizing general future scenarios with clear sensory details.
The researchers conducting the current study wanted to see if this mental block applied to very personal events, especially the achievement of one’s own goals. They designed this study to investigate how the tendency to procrastinate is related to how people mentally simulate personal goals. They specifically compared short-term and long-term goals to see if timelines change emotional or cognitive experiences.
“Research on procrastination has been largely psychometric, and has focused primarily on devising and testing personality scales (the ‘who’ question) to determine the extent to which individuals are procrastinators. “When we focus on questions), this is often done for narrow categories of tasks (very often academic),” said study author Helgi Clayton McClure, a lecturer in psychology at York St John University.
“We wanted to examine procrastination through the lens of personal goals that each person in our study selected and defined as tasks that were important to them. This would allow us to go beyond individual-level cognitive and motivational biases and identify specific task characteristics (e.g., levels of anxiety about possible failure) that are consistent with higher self-reported procrastination.”
To test these ideas, scientists recruited 111 university students from the UK. Participants completed an online survey and were asked to write down six personal goals. Three of these are short-term goals that are expected to be completed within a month, and the remaining three are long-term goals that will take at least six months to accomplish.
Participants rated several characteristics for each goal on a sliding scale from 0 to 100. This includes how much effort you plan to put in and how likely you are to intentionally avoid working on your goal. They also rated how important the goal was to them personally, how likely they were to actually succeed, how much control they felt they had, and the overall difficulty of the goal.
Next, participants engaged in specific mental exercises. They imagined future scenarios in which they successfully achieved their respective goals. They wrote brief descriptions of these achievement events.
Participants then rated these mental simulations based on sensory details such as sights and sounds. They also assessed their sense of autonomy. This term describes the feeling of traveling through time in your mind and experiencing events directly in your mind’s eye.
Next, participants rated their anticipated emotional responses to these goals. They estimated how happy they would feel when they succeeded and how disappointed they would feel when they failed. Importantly, they also rated how anxious they currently felt when thinking about not achieving their goals.
To measure their general tendency to delay tasks, participants completed a 12-item questionnaire called the Pure Procrastination Scale. The survey asks individuals to rate their agreement with statements about voluntary delay, such as running out of time or delaying a decision until it’s too late.
The data revealed several different patterns in how procrastinators view their ambitions. As expected, the scientists found that people with high procrastination scores were more likely to avoid goals. This avoidance tendency applies equally to both short-term and long-term goals.
High procrastinators also reported lower intended effort and a lower perceived likelihood of success than low procrastinators. They also believed that achieving their goals was generally more difficult.
Despite this negative outlook, high procrastinators rated their goals as equally important as other participants. They also expected to feel exactly the same level of happiness when they achieved their goals.
When evaluating psychological simulations, scientists found no differences based on level of procrastination. High procrastinators were well-equipped to use rich sensory details to imagine their own success. They also experienced the same level of mental time travel during the exercise.
“We expected there to be differences in the details of sensory perception (how vividly they can imagine achieving a goal) between high and low procrastinators. However, unlike other studies based on imagining future events in general, there is no evidence of such. This shows that being a ‘procrastinator’ does not necessarily mean having a low sense of a positive future state (achieving a goal) if people can choose a personally meaningful goal to focus on.
The most significant differences emerged in the emotional domain, particularly with regard to anticipatory anxiety. Those who scored high on the procrastination scale felt more anxious when thinking about failing their goals. This is consistent with the idea that procrastination is primarily caused by a desire to avoid negative emotions associated with a task. When thinking about a goal causes intense anxiety, people are more likely to put off starting the goal.
This anxiety was especially pronounced when it came to short-term goals. The scientists note that this may seem counterintuitive at first glance, as long-term goals are often perceived as more important and carry heavier penalties for failure. However, for people who are strong procrastinators, impending deadlines tend to trigger a stronger and more immediate emotional response. My short-term goals have become so emotional that I now have a lot of anxiety.
“Our findings highlight that emotional expectations, a fairly new concept emerging from the clinical literature, are associated with the experience of procrastination. They suggest that people’s tendency to procrastinate is not only due to downplaying the value of distant rewards (‘the deadline is miles away, so I don’t need to work on it yet’) or struggling to control competing impulses (‘I should work on it, but gaming, drinking, and socializing are much more fun’).”
“Anxiety about failing to achieve a goal may also be a characteristic feature of procrastination. This suggests that strategies to manage anxiety may be just as important as attempts to change people’s perceptions of distant rewards or help them manage impulses.”
Although this study provides evidence about the emotional hurdles of procrastination, it also has certain limitations. This study relied entirely on self-reported estimates of goal avoidance, rather than tracking participants’ actual behavior over time. Participants’ beliefs about how much they can avoid a task may not perfectly match their real-world behavior.
The scientists suggest that future studies should use longitudinal designs. This type of study observes the same individuals over a long period of time. This approach allows you to track the exact steps taken towards achieving your goals and see how anxiety directly impacts your daily behavior.
“I’m currently conducting pilot work with students to longitudinally look at what happens next. Do high procrastinators show reduced goal achievement in real time, and how does that relate to some of the characteristics measured in this study? In the longer term, we plan to integrate this with broader research on future-oriented emotions in clinical and non-clinical settings, and move into potential intervention work in the context of motivation and goal pursuit in students’ higher education trajectories.”
The study, “High Trait Procrastination Predicts Increased Goal Anxiety Despite Invariance in Simulated Goal Attainment,” was authored by J. Helgi Clayton McClure, Stephanie Sayan, and Rachel J. Anderson.
