According to the study of Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch (2002), procrastination is all too familiar to most people. People delay writing up their research (so we hear!), repeatedly declare they will start their diets tomorrow, or postpone until next week doing odd jobs around the house. Yet people also sometimes attempt to control their procrastination by setting deadlines for themselves. In this article, we pose three questions: (a) Are people willing to self-impose meaningful (i.e., costly) deadlines to overcome procrastination? (b) Are self-imposed deadlines effective in improving task performance? (c) When self-imposing deadlines, do people set them optimally, for maximum performance enhancement? A set of studies examined these issues
Thirty-two percent of the general sample were severe procrastinators, with the most common patterns being Socially-focused and Optimistic, or being Ambivalent and Independent-minded. The most common patterns for clients involved Evaluation Anxiety or being Discouraged/Depressed, or Dependent. However, all six patterns occurred for some students in each sample. The results are discussed as supporting individualized assessment and solutions for academic
In Study 1, a factor analysis of responses by 203 Turkish undergraduate students to an academic procrastination measure provided evidence of reliability and validity for the revised scale. In Study 2, 784 students (363 women, 421 men; M age = 20.6 years, SD age = 1.74 years) completed the validated Turkish Procrastination Assessment Scale-Students. The results were that 52% of students self-reported frequent academic procrastination, with male students reporting more frequent procrastination on academic tasks than female students. Significantly more female students than male students reported greater academic procrastination because of fear of failure and laziness; male students reported more academic procrastination as a result of risk taking and rebellion against control than did female students. (Bilge Uzun Özer, Ayhan Demir and Joseph R.