Active Procrastination

To procrastinate is to knowingly put something off, almost always despite the potential for negative consequences.

If you have a class assignment that’s due next week, you could start working on it early, giving yourself plenty of time to complete it. Alternatively, you could wait until the very last second to even get started.

If you choose the latter course, you might not have enough time to complete the assignment, or you might have to stay up all night to do it (resulting in a lack of sleep, and maybe an inferior end-product).

Procrastination is generally seen as a harmful habit, and in some cases is considered a negative psychological response to stress or anxiety.

You might put off getting started on something because it’s not clear how to even take the first step, and you might put it off until the last minute because just thinking about having to focus on that sort of task makes you panic or causes you to worry about failure. As a result, you might turn attention toward absolutely anything else out of reflexive self-preservation, which in turn can cause you to ignore it until the night before it’s due.

While procrastination is sometimes considered to be an issue of time management, then, in others it’s seen as a (possibly maladaptive) behavioral response that replaces long, drawn-out periods of stress with shorter, sharper versions of the same. Instead of worrying about something for a week, you can worry for a night—and by some standards and for some people, that might be preferable (and worth the risk of possibly not completing things on time).

Another way of framing procrastination is through the lens of passive and active versions of the concept.

According to this categorization, time management and stress-related versions of procrastination would be passive, as they’re something we reflexively do in response to unpalatable variables and stimuli. In contrast, active procrastination is a conscious decision to put things off because we believe doing so will benefit us (and perhaps whatever it is we need to do) in some concrete way.

An active procrastinator, rather than being paralyzed by fear or indecision, may decide to wait until the last minute to complete an assignment because they feel they work better under pressure (and are maybe even more likely to achieve a focused, flow state by waiting), or they feel the project is so easy that it will be more satisfying to produce it under an artificial time constraint.

They may also put it off so that they have more time to think about how to proceed; the “measure twice, cut once” approach to producing something thoughtful, which in turn may necessitate fewer revisions after the initial draft.

There’s research that suggests active procrastination is associated with different personality types (especially extraversion and neuroticism) and types of motivation than passive procrastination, and that it tends to lead to better grades (in academic settings), as well.

Other research has questioned those findings, however, suggesting that active and passive procrastination lead to similar academic outcomes (ultimately, at least), and that active procrastination is a completely different thing, possibly warranting a distinct label (“purposeful delay” has been suggested).

However we categorize these constructs, it may be useful to have more than one label to affix to delaying behaviors, as some of our efforts in this regard might serve us, both psychologically and in terms of our productivity and effectiveness, while others may point at negative response patterns that are worth recognizing and possibly addressing.