The Harmful Impact of Procrastination on Productivity and Well-Being

Negative Effects of Procrastination Name: Institutional Affiliations: Date: Introduction Procrastination can be defined as involuntary delays to do something or doing something against one better judgment which proves to be self-harming (Pinxten et al., 2019). Self-awareness within an individual defines the negativities associated with procrastination. One becomes aware that he/she is avoiding a task in question and understands that such delays are a terrible idea. For this reason, it is wise to define procrastination as essentially irrational since people engage in it knowing very well it is going to have negative consequences on them. Procrastination becomes characterized by an individual's inability to cope with challenging emotions and negative moods like boredom, anxiety, insecurity, frustration, and self-doubt, among other adverse effects induced by specific tasks (Duru and Balkis, 2017). For this reason, arguing from a psychological point of view, procrastination proves to be an emotion regulation problem as opposed to the assumption of it being a time management problem. The task's nature can define deeper negative feelings towards it like self-esteem issues, anxiety, and insecurity, which may have adverse effects on the victim, including significant chronic stress and depression. Literature Review Beutel (2016) and his fellow authors define procrastination as the act of postponing action to avoid stress. These authors argue that procrastination proves to be a potential self-regulatory failure that leads to poor performance and reduced well-being. For this reason, it becomes clear that, regardless of the nature of the postponed task, procrastination exposes the victim to negative consequences that one could have avoided if he/she did not postpone the action. Beutel et al. (2016) researched the association of procrastination with distress and life satisfaction amongst 1,350 women and 1,177 men aged between 14 and 95. Their findings indicated that young men and women aged between 14 and 29years expressed higher procrastination levels, with men procrastinating more than women. They further confirmed that procrastination was highly associated with stress, anxiety, more depression, and reduced life satisfaction. Their research attributes procrastination to a self-regulatory failure which defines this research argument that connects procrastination to laziness. With the young generation serving as the most affected by procrastination, it confirms the assumption that laziness, especially amongst youths, leads them to delay their tasks to enjoy the immediate positive effects without considering the negative consequences after that. For this reason, Beutel et al., (2016) research would have gone a mile further to analyze the connection between procrastination and youth laziness which this essay will pay study in detail. In their article on “Procrastination and Stress: Exploring the Role of Self-compassion,” Sirois (2014) attributes procrastination's adverse effects to an individual's levels of self-compassion. A high level of self-compassion is the ability to understand why one suffers, especially after experiencing the negative consequences of procrastination and vice-versa. Based on their research, one can define self-regulation as an individual’s ability to make the proper judgment regardless of the situation one becomes exposed to at any given moment. Therefore, lacking such skills, especially amongst the youths, defines the source of their stressful life as attributed to procrastination effects, especially in their academic performance. Low self-compassion, as analyzed by these authors, serves as the primary determinant of stress amongst procrastinators. Once again, their research fails to dig deep in analyzing laziness as a potential determinant of increasing procrastinators' cases amongst youths and adults. In efforts to analyze the consequences of academic procrastination on student performance, Abdi Zarrin and Gracia (2020) experimented with 198 students from different universities within Iran. The experiment aimed to understand how lack of self-regulation and fear of failure affect academic performance amongst graduates. Just as confirmed by Beutel et al. (2016), Abdi Zarrin and Gracia's (2020) findings associated male students with higher levels of academic procrastination as compared to their female students whose fear of failure remained well defined. Such results indicate that procrastination becomes highly connected to self-regulation failures which this essay best describes as laziness. Though Abdi Zarrin and Gracia's (2020) research is so rich in analyzing the connection between self-regulation, fear of failure, and academic procrastination, it fails to address the extent to which laziness plays a vital role in determining academic procr