Why Do Students Procrastinate?

Soon, I discovered a method to avoid the potential of feeling insubstantial, if only for a few more hours or days. Thus, allow me to introduce you to an old friend, procrastination. My way of thinking soon became, “If I’m not going to get an A, then why even put the effort in?” and consequently, innumerable assignments were put off until five in the morning where it would be due in two hours or it would never reach my teacher’s hands at all. I’m sure most teachers believed the cause to be laziness or a lack of ambition, however I strongly believe that if they’d known the constant stress, self-doubt, and exhaustion that I

Procrastination and putting things off can have many consequences in your life. I know this because I am always waiting until the last minute to do anything whether it is getting ready for work or getting my homework done. Although you can still get your work done on time, procrastinating can drastically impact a student’s life by leading to decreased grades, an increase in stress, and a lack of responsibility ultimately reducing the student’s chances for success.

I myself have been guilty of procrastinating on a daily basis. Seniors still want to make solid grades depite their lack of motivation to get them. As a result of putting off studying, students often cheat to maintain decent grades. Furthermore, some of them wait until the night before the test to cram in study time. Because of the desire for money and freedom, many upperclassmen spend their time working instead of completing homework assignments. A year of procrastination and negating responsibilities can turn into bad habits that follow some students for years to

Don Marquis, a famed humorist, journalist, and playwright remarked: “Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.” If that is so, then I must have been a prodigy. Transitioning to a pristine and more work-driven environment, however, forced me to pay more mind to my grades.

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:

With college approaching rapidly, procrastination will be a problem for many incoming freshman; however, in the article, Hansen says, “Don’t procrastinate; prioritize your life.”

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.

The problem of procrastination starts when a student waits until minutes before a class to study for a class. This may seem like a solution for students who are pressed for time; however, this doesn’t allow time for the information to be solidified and vital information can be lost. These behaviors form because students have found that in the past they were able to successfully pass the class by doing their homework literally hours before the projects deadline. This reckless learning may help pass the class, but doesn’t give the information the time needed to be solidified into memory. This reckless learning also produces effects within projects that are often below the students’ academic level and can cause

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.

According to Semb, Glick and Spencer (1979), the level of procrastination increases as an individual stays longer in universities. It was stated by Ellis and Knaus (1977) that approximately, over 70% of college students engage in this activity. Undergraduates tend to start papers during the last minute; they fail to prioritize what should be accomplished first, and as a result, their academic performance is greatly affected. A detrimental effect on their studies leads to having poor grades and eventually, failure in class (Semb, et.al., 1979).

“I’ll stop procrastinating…Tomorrow.” This is a mindset that is possessed by a majority of students today. Although putting off writing that English paper until the night before it is due may not seem like a big deal, it has many harmful effects. In fact, what better topic is there for that English paper? Very few are spared from the epidemic known as procrastination. Even less overcome this issue. In order to successfully defeat procrastination, we must first understand it.

A great deal of students don’t develop effective study habits and this ultimately results in feeling a decreased sense of self-esteem, stress, disorganisation, poor academic success, and a negative sense of self-efficacy which is linked to poor self-control (Pychyl & Dann, 2010). This is primarily caused by procrastinating. Procrastination is delaying an activity that possesses important benefits for us in the long-term but is voluntarily delayed in the short-term because of short-term impulsive temptations which offer greater immediate rewards (Steel, 2007). I chose to modify this problematic target behaviour because it was where I exercised poor self-control.

Have you ever had an essay due in three weeks and thought to yourself, “I’ve got time. I’ll just do it later”? Does staying up studying for an exam until 3 am in the morning sound familiar? How about running to class because you were working on a project until the very last second? If any of these unfortunate situations sound relatively familiar, you have endured the horrendous event of procrastination at some point of your jam-packed life. The one secret that nobody is enforcing on your young life is the extreme power of time management. In Chapter 5, the topics we address are as follows:

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.

There are all always two types of students in this small world, first, the students that come ready to class with a three to five-page essay all proofread, nice and stapled with three transition sentences highlighted turned. Second, there are those students who come to class with not even half of a paper written out, unstapled, not a single transitional sentence highlighted and may have plenty of errors due to not proofreading the essay. Those second group of students are procrastinators, which are people who delay an assignment to do the task right before the deadline. Now, why do most of all 99.99% of school boys and girls procrastinate? Well, most people might have problems with lack of focus, or the person might be lazy and decide to