Identifying The Neural Substrates Of Procrastination Essay

     Procrastination is something that you don’t naturally have an innate ability to do. It is often brought on by finding ways

Besides this omission by Kalat, he still provided an accurate and detailed account of the research article written by Ariely and Wertenbroch. This article is essential in understanding procrastination and answered throughly the three questions it posed. 1.) Are people willing to impose deadlines, with substantial consequences if they are not met, on themselves: yes. 2.) Are these self-imposed deadlines actually helpful in improving overall performance:

1.      What am I talking about? I am the thief of productiveness and time. I sound simple, but in fact I’m quite complex. I am a strange phenomenon. My purpose seems to make my life more pleasant, but instead it almost always adds stress, disorganization, and frequent failure. I want to achieve some outcome, usually something myself and others can value and respect; “I’ve got to start.” I delay briefly thinking of real and imagined advantages of starting to change later; “I will do it tomorrow.”

Procrastination is ignoring your responsibilities and avoiding them for no good reason. Experiencing procrastination can have a positive or negative reaction according to the amount of the behavior. The person that is procrastinating must first realize that they have a problem in order to find ways to overcome procrastination because they are putting their health, family and job at risk. Twenty percent of people realize they are procrastinators which in the end becomes a lifestyle. There are various reasons why people procrastinate.

Thesis: Procrastination is the main result of disorganization whether it’s at home, work or school.

Attention Getter: A famous author by the name of Wayne Dyer once said, “Procrastination is one of the most common and deadliest of diseases and its toll on success and happiness is incredibly heavy.”(1) In todays society it seems as if procrastination has become a normal and acceptable thing to do. It is often joked about amongst schoolmates and co-workers around the world. Nothing seems to get done until it absolutely needs to get done, then everyone runs around getting things done quickly and often times inaccurately. The trouble with this mentality however is that some things will never get done because something will come up tomorrow or the next day and what you are putting off now gets pushed even further back. Today I will persuade you to stop this habit from continuing. I will be explaining the problems we face when dealing with procrastination as well as how to deal with it and actions you can take to prevent it in the future.

Transition: After learning about the science behind procrastination, I want to talk about why we procrastinate.

Procrastination is a tendency to postpone, put off, delay, reschedule, take a rain check on, put on ice, hold off, or to defer what is necessary to reach a particular goal.(Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, Third Edition. Philip Lief Group 2009.) While attending College some students find it hard to juggle work, family, and friends. Leading most students down a dangerous path to procrastination; that negative impact affect students from their physical health, mental health, and social health.

Procrastination was a concurring problem in my life as a student. Once I advanced in school and started receiving due dates, turn-in dates, and deadlines I quickly realized that I had a problem with procrastination. I used to be the type of person that waited to the last minute to do my school work. I realized that this particular obstacle requires self-discipline and I have done something about it.

The paper also talks about procrastination, and how it relates to the achievement goal theory. In their research, they found out that mastery-avoidance orientation correlated positively with procrastination. Also, it detailed out the relationship between disorganization and procrastination, which was an invariably direct relationship.

Another factor that causes procrastination is fear. Fear is a very powerful emotion. Whenever someone is faced with a difficult task, they can become overran by the fear of not being able to complete it. People who succumb to this are setting themselves up for failure. Whenever someone feels as if they are going to fail, they tend to postpone the task for as long as possible. This means that they often try to avoid the task all together until completion is absolutely necessary. In doing so, the number of tasks that need to be done increases. However, the time required to complete them does not.

The questionnaire was posted online for psyc121 students of Victoria University of Wellington. “Please read each statement, and select the option that best describes how much you agree or disagree with each one” was the instruction given to the participants when completing a Pure Procrastination Scale (PPS) which was developed by Steel (2010). It had 12 items and on a one to five scale where one is strongly disagree and 5 is strongly agree. A statement “I generally delay before starting on work I have to do”. Higher scores meant higher levels of procrastination.

I have many flaws, one of which being procrastination. Procrastination has been a flaw of mine since I was three years old just learning to tie my shoe. When my dad told me that we were going to learn to tie my shoes today I would says something like, “I’m Hungry” or “I don’t feel too good today”, and I would make these excuses up all day until it was bedtime so by then it was too late to tie my shoes. Now just like avoiding and putting off tying my shoes I also put off my bedtime. As soon as my mom or dad turned off my bedroom light I would tell them that I needed a drink, I was hungry, or the most famous one was I had to go to the bathroom. I would sit in the bathroom for up to 15 minutes just avoiding going to bed.

Every student sets goals and deadlines to get their work done on time, but some wait until the last minute. As the grade level increases, the work load and difficulty increases, leading to more procrastination. Most students in high school procrastinate, and the question is, why? Is the work too hard? Do their teacher’s leniency cause them to? Do students not have enough time? Do extra-curricular activities take up too much of their time? There has been many other research studies on this topic, but I wanted to see if the students in my survey and interviews had any different correlations.

Over the years procrastination has become a bigger and bigger problem for our world. Many people take procrastination for granted or do not think of it as a big deal. But, what those people don't know is that this harsh epidemic is becoming a serious problem for many people. According to author Piers Steel of the book The Procrastination Equation, in the past quarter century the average self-score of procrastinators have increased by thirty-nine percent. In other words, more than a quarter of Americans admit the fact that they procrastinate. Even though many people have admitted to the fact that they procrastinate, there are still so many more people out there that do not know of the harsh effects of procrastination.