The Procrastinator’s Plight
Why can’t I just do the damn work?
Oh dear. This blog-post is due in only a few short hours. I've been given weeks to complete it. And yet, here I sit, coffee in hand, 4:48 pm, finally getting started…
Though my intuition tells me that I can’t be the only one. Surely there are others! An informal comparison (of the number of blogs posted versus the number of students registered for the class) quickly confirms my suspicion. Phew. So how many other students are currently banging away at their keyboards, frantically trying to pull together a semi-coherent blog-post before the rapidly approaching deadline? Well, a study of academic procrastination, in which 47% of students reported that they “always” or “nearly always” procrastinate on writing-based assignments (such as this one), suggests that there are at least a couple of us. What a way to spend a Friday night!
But what does any of this have to do with psychological testing? Well, unfortunately for my eventual grade in this class, probably not a whole heck of a lot. It did, however, get me thinking. Why is it that I seem to be incapable of completing any form of productive work without the threat of an imminent deadline? Is the deadline itself what’s motivating me? Or are there other variables at play? Perhaps stress? If so, is there some form of assessment to measure my responsiveness and/or susceptibility to stressful situations?
These are all questions I hope to answer, though perhaps over the course of the semester and not in the second half of a single blog-post!
That said, I want to spend the remainder of this post exploring the idea that the stress imposed by the deadline is what’s motivating me to do the work. I attribute a large part of my habitual procrastination to the fact that I seem to thrive under stressful situations. And while I would take issue with anyone classifying this blog-post as the work of someone who’s thriving, at the very least I’m finally getting it done.
Not surprisingly, I don’t seem to be that bothered by stress, nor do I rank particularly high on my perception of stress. Sheldon Cohen’s Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) is used to measure the degree to which situations in one’s life are rated as stressful. It was first published in 1983, and has become a widely used psychological instrument in measuring perceived levels of stress. My score on the PSS 10 item inventory (along with a number of other online tests) indicate that I’m not a particularly high-strung person. Perhaps this is why I’m able to view stress (or rather, situations that I perceive to be stressful) as a form of motivation rather than a limitation. For the record though, I’m not a psychology major, and encourage anyone more knowledgeable to chime in below.
So what does this all mean? For me, probably very little. Old habits die hard, and I’ll likely continue to do the majority of my work at the last minute. I’ve always worked this way, I enjoy working this way, and I’ll probably continue to work this way for as long as I can get away with it. In fact, in the time I’ve spent feeling guilty about not writing this blog, I've been able to update my resume, apply for jobs, catch up on readings, paint my apartment, and stalk my TA’s twitter back to 2011 — good luck with grad school, Kristin!
So while some view procrastination as a mechanism for coping with the stress associated with starting (and subsequently completing) tasks such as blog-posts, perhaps it’s not all that bad. In fact, in some perverse way, I’m almost looking forward to how much I’ll be able get done before the next post is due!
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References:
Cohen, S; Kamarck T; Mermelstein R (December 1983). “A global measure of perceived stress”. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 24 (4): 385–396. doi:10.2307/2136404. PMID 6668417.
Steel, Piers (2007). “The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure”. Psychological Bulletin 133 (1): 65–94. doi:10.1037/0033–2909.133.1.65. PMID 17201571.
