Procrastination and Why We Do It


Written by Angela Mae Pamisa 
Illustration by Vince Marvin Dejon 


         Are you sure that you should be clicking that new episode? Or start another game? Have you enrolled yet? Time is ticking and another academic year is approaching us. With the impending days leading to the next semester, let us look back and remember fondly, every student’s best friend. Procrastination.

 

Procrastination is defined as an act of delaying or postponing something. In academic setting, it is a type of domain-specific behavior and is the tendency of students to delay academic assignments even when they are aware that they should and have a deadline for doing so. Every student had their experience with cramming, where we store as much information in our short-term memory in preparation for an exam or staying up till late, working on a project. An act that is notorious for causing stress and anxiety in students.

 

“It’s fine, I have a week to do this assignment.” And here you are, burning the midnight oil as you cram a week given task in one night. This is the conundrum of procrastination. Despite the known consequences of actions, we continue to do harmful decisions for us and repeat it over and over again. Computational neuroscientist Sahiti Chebolu from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, in her scientific paper “Optimal and sub-optimal temporal decisions can explain procrastination in a real-world task”, classified the possible patterns of procrastination and identified explanation for each.

 

Chebolu frames procrastination as a series of temporal decisions. There are series of possible explanations why we decide the way we do when faced with an upcoming deadline or the newest episode of our favorite show. One reason is the preferences of the brain for immediate rewards, it weights the possible gains of different activities and pick the course of action that will lead to a more immediate pleasant result in the present than what is lying ahead, may it be winning a game of mobile legends than a paperwork due tomorrow.

 

In her study, it was found that multiple delays can actually lead to higher chances of doing tasks last minute. There is the presence of underestimation on the effort needed for a task that we keep putting off. In complete opposite, there is also the presence of uncertainty in where, tasks that we are not confident upon, gets put off again and again until time is nearly over. The delays that happen in such circumstances lowers the chances of completion in time. Instead, it is optimal to do tasks as early as possible.

 

According to Chebolu, preventions can be more targeted if we recognize procrastination as a sequence of temporal decisions and identify the places and reasons where we typically stray. If you can find the reasons why you decide the way you do, the more aware you are of the interventions you could do. An easily distracted person can look for ways to limit distractions, and others who are more inclined to tasks with rewards can also integrate a self-rewarding system as they work.

 

No, you are not just plain lazy. Decisions we make have reasons behind them, and the sooner we identify these reasons, the more productive we will be.

 

References:

Chebolu, Sahiti; Dayan, Peter. Optimal and sub-optimal temporal decisions can explain procrastination in a real-world task. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2024, Volume 46 DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/69zhd

 

Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. “The science of procrastination”. Science Daily, 31, June, 2024, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/06/240626152138.htm . Accessed 18 July 2024.

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