Procrastination in Students: The Role of Laziness and Other Underlying Factors

Abstract

Abstract Procrastination is a global concern as it proves self-harming to its victims, especially the students, as it negatively affects their academic performance. Procrastination is an involuntary delay in doing something. To this effect, this experimental study investigates the underlying factors that foster procrastination among American students. Is laziness among students a major force that enhances delays in attending academic work? The current study hypothesizes that laziness plays a major role in defining the students’ attitude towards academic dedication. Based on a literature review from different scholars considered within this essay, most students procrastinates their academic tasks to attend activities that suit their interests, assuming they still have time for their academics. The study consists of a sample of 202 undergraduate students from a major Public American University males (n= 103) and females (n=99) were randomly sampled. This experimental study used a procrastination scale and standardized scales of perceived stress, depression, anxiety, fatigue and life satisfaction to evaluate variables of interest in the study (Procrastination and laziness) among the selected sample. Results of the study indicated that most students procrastinate due to a negative attitude toward a given academic task attributed to laziness in committing to the challenge. 90% of the sample, 55% males and 35% female, confirmed that the complexities of some courses foster a negative attitude towards the course leading many students to embrace procrastination. However, this study recommends considering the extent of the effect that fear of failure and lack of self-regulation enhance laziness and foster procrastination in students leading to poor academic performances. Causes of Procrastination among Students Research Question: Is procrastination among students all about laziness, or do other underlying factors enhance procrastination? Introduction Procrastination is an involuntary delay in doing something. Unfortunately, procrastination is a global concern as it proves self-harming to its victims, most especially the students, as it negatively affects their academic performances. The self-awareness within an individual defines the negative impact of procrastinating among victims. It is imperative to note that procrastination does not happen by mistake; rather, the victim remains conscious of the act. For this reason, one can describe procrastination as essentially irrational since victims engage in it knowing that its outcomes will be negative effects in the long run. Unfortunately, procrastination remains characterized by an individual's inability to cope with challenging emotions or negative moods like anxiety, insecurity, self-doubt, boredom and frustrations. To this effect, arguing from a psychological point of view, procrastination proves to be an emotion regulation problem instead of assuming it is 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. Therefore, it is imperative to consider various scholars' arguments on the major triggers of procrastination among students and wrap up with a simple experimental study that confirms or disagrees with the scholar's findings. Balkis and Duru (2016) view procrastination as an act of postponing actions to avoid stress. The two believe that procrastination is a strong self-regulatory failure that enhances poor performance and reduces well-being. What does this imply? Regardless of the nature of the postponed task, procrastination exposes the victim to negative consequences that one could have avoided if the victim did not postpone the action (Duru and Balkis 2017). In their article “Procrastination, self-regulation failure, academic life satisfaction, and affective well-being: under regulation or misregulation", these authors examined the role of self-regulation failure is procrastination. While defining self-regulation, the two associated the term with an individual's inability to make the proper judgment about task attendance, leading to postponement to enjoy positive effects like avoidance of immediate stress associated with the task in question. Unfortunately, an inability that remains well defined among students leads to negative effects on their academic performances. Further in their study, Balkis and Duru (2016) investigated the effects of procrastination on students' academic satisfaction and well-being. They noted that lack of self-regulation leads to procrastination, negatively affecting students' academic performance and well-being. To this effect, one can attribute a lack of self-regulation skills leading to self-regulation failures concerning task management to laziness in one way or the other, which this essay aims to research further. Students take a huge percentage of the young generation globally. Unfortunately, in their study, Zhang (2018), among other authors, confirms that young generations serve as the primary victim of procrastination in all odds of life, the education sector taking the lead. While investigating the rising cases of academic procrastination among undergraduates, these authors hypothesized that fear of failure, which leads to stress, plays a major role in fostering procrastination among students. In their research, Zhang et al. (2018) noted that out of the 1184 undergraduates examined, over 70% of them procrastinated in at least one type of academic task. Such findings indicate that students delay attending some of their academic assignments to avoid stress and engage in activities that make them happy, not thinking of the adverse effects that such delays cause in the long run. Though many students ignore that procrastination is a chronic problem whose impact on such students’ academic and later life cannot be ignored, they still pursue it, which proves a potential barrier to many students' goal realization success. In the article "Anxiety, depression, and procrastination among students: Rumination plays a larger mediating role than worry” by Constantin English and Mazmanian (2017), the authors argue that students' ability to perform is adversely affected by procrastination which becomes defined by their inability to self-regulation. While investigating major triggers of procrastination among students, these authors noted that laziness to attend an academic task does not just happen but is rather fostered by a negative force that illuminates fear of failure among many students. The research findings indicated that anxiety and depression enhance students' procrastination, leading to lower academic performance in general. However, it is imperative to note that although not the major findings of these scholars' study, laziness is closely connected with negative energy/attitude toward a task. The findings are closely confirmed by Beutel et al. (2016). In their article “Procrastination, distress and life satisfaction across the age range–a German representative community study,” Beutel et al. (2016) examined 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 between 14 and 29years expressed higher procrastination levels, with men procrastinating more than women. They further...