The Science of Procrastination

Procrastination. We all do it. I, for one, am doing it on this assignment right now. It's easy to understand why we do it: we hate to do work, and would rather gain short term pleasure by avoiding work rather than dealing with the long term stress that is the assignment. When I was assigned this project on Tuesday of this week, I thought it was a joke! Who gives an assignment the day after the AP test? Fortunately, I'm a senior, so I'm not nearly as stressed out about my grades. Since the start of the second semester, whenever I've been given an assignment, I've ignored it until the very last minute. So, at 10pm on the night before this assignment was due, I figured that there is no better topic to write about than the phenomenon that I am experiencing at this very moment: procrastination. I hope to, in as little time as possible, uncover the science behind why we procrastinate, and why everyone claims it's bad for us.

This is me writing this blog post at 10pm the night before it's due.

Why do we procrastinate? You may not want to admit it, but you have procrastinated at some point in your life. Everyone procrastinates, but some people procrastinate far more than others, and scientists believe that this may be the result of genetics. According to research done by the Association for Psychological Science, procrastination is inheritable. When surveying the procrastination habits between identical twins (who share 100% of their genes with one another) and fraternal twins (normal siblings), they found that the procrastination habits among the identical twins were incredibly similar compared to that of fraternal twins, suggesting the heritability of traits regarding procrastination. In addition, the study found that there was a strong correlation between one's impulsivity and tendency to procrastinate.

Why is this important? If you think about it, prior to the modern age, humans should have been far more interested in completing their day to day tasks rather than their long term goals. Things like hunting and cooking were far more important to the survival of humans back then. Without this prioritization of the essential stuff, humans may have failed to survive. This explains why procrastination is so rampant in our world today. Impulsivity was a favorable trait to have, thus it was selected for in the human population back then, but times have changed. Now we have easy access to food and other essential resources, but we are still incredibly impulsive due to our genetics. So, we procrastinate and waste our time with useless tasks that have little benefit to us in the future. Was it beneficial for me to watch 3 episodes of Spongebob Squarepants instead of writing this blog post? Of course not! If I had worked on this sooner, it probably would've been 100 times better. But I did have a lot of fun not worrying about my assignment.

I know what you're thinking: "Ben, you're like one of the smartest people on this planet and you procrastinate a lot, so does procrastination make you smarter? Is it smart to procrastinate?" Here's what I'll tell you: no. According to a study done by Tice and Baumeister at Case Western Reserve University, when college students were asked to rate how often they procrastinate and how stressed out they normally are, they found that students who procrastinated often were less stressed out than the average student. However, to my dismay, the study also found that those students performed significantly worse in their classes, while also reporting higher levels of stress overall. What does this tell us? Putting assignments off does not make us less stressed out, it just keeps us from relieving ourselves from our stress sooner. It also tends to lower our grades.

Procrastination, as a wise man (me) once said, is like a drug addition. It is easy to get hooked, and once you start, it is very hard to stop. In addition, procrastination trades long term stress relief for poor performances and short term happiness. Basically, if you don't procrastinate, don't start, and if you do procrastinate, try your best to break the habit. Drugs are not cool, and neither is procrastination.

Yet, despite all of the downsides to procrastination, if you're reading this, it means that Ms. Eckert didn't hate my blog post, so my procrastination paid off. Povich out.

Addendum: This is Ms. Eckert, the meanie teacher who gave out this assignment on the day after the AP Bio test. I knew I was going to assign a blog post because I do it every year and I absolutely love reading my students' posts (and Ben's was no exception) but I procrastinated in assigning it. My bad.