With effort, procrastinators can change

I didn’t visit a dentist for years in my 20s. I periodically considered setting up an appointment but relocated so frequently that it never quite happened. When, after years of procrastination, I finally wound up in the dentist’s chair, I had racked up a small mountain of dental bills.

My teeth, and pocketbook, may never fully recover. But there’s good news for young adults prone to putting things off: Procrastination, defined as the tendency to delay an intended action despite expecting to be worse off for that delay, tends to decline with age, researchers report January 15 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Though procrastination can be hard to rout out, change is possible. 

“Is there light at the end of the procrastination tunnel? I would say yes — if you switch it on,” says Lisa Bäulke, a psychologist at the Hector Research Institute of Education Sciences and Psychology at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

Not taking active measures to rein in the self-sabotage during the formative years of early adulthood can have repercussions in people’s professional and personal lives almost two decades later, the team found.

Most procrastination research tends to focus on single time points or spans of just a few weeks or months, Bäulke says. How procrastinators change across their life spans has remained an open question. An ongoing long-term study in Germany that started in 2002 with over 3,000 high school seniors from almost 150 schools gave her team a way to explore that question.

Across eight rounds of data collection, one every two to four years, participants filled out surveys pertaining to personality, school, career, relationships and overall health. During rounds 2 through 6, participants also filled out a 12-item procrastination survey, rating on a five-point scale agreement with statements such as “I often take a very long time to get started on something” and “I put off starting work for so long that I don’t finish it on time.”

Young adults prone to procrastination entered the workforce later, earned fewer promotions, were less likely to be in a relationship or have children and reported worse life satisfaction than their nonprocrastinating peers, the team found. Meanwhile, landing a job after graduation was linked with a drop in procrastination. Real-world stakes, such as the possibility of getting laid off, might kick people into gear, Bäulke suspects. 

In many ways, procrastination mirrors the age-related trajectory of major personality traits. In particular, people high in conscientiousness tend not to procrastinate while people high in neuroticism do. Just as those personality traits mellow with age — conscientiousness goes up, neuroticism goes down — so, too, does procrastination. But procrastination seems more variable. On average, procrastination decreased more steeply than neuroticism over time, for instance. That suggests that stalling tendencies may be less innate than major personality traits and more amenable to change. Factors such as one’s environment and support systems can hinder or help the chronic procrastinator, Bäulke says.

The analysis adds to considerable evidence showing that moving the needle on procrastination is possible, if challenging, says psychologist Frode Svaltdal at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. Now, researchers need to sort out how to help procrastinators shed their worst tendencies. “Interventions work, but too little is known about their long-term effects,” he says.

Strategies focused on goal setting, time management, motivation and managing distractions show promise, research elsewhere shows.

For myself, the pain of Novocain proved a powerful motivator. In my middle age, I remain a master procrastinator in many things — but I’m a dedicated flosser.