Procrastination and Task Avoidance: Theory, Research, and Treatment

Procrastination and Task Avoidance: Theory, Research, and Treatment J.R. Ferrari, J.L. Johnson, and W.G. McCown & Associates. New York: Plenum, 1995, 268 pp. I have a confession to make: This book review was three weeks late-and that's nothing compared to my income taxes, parking tickets, and visits to my in-laws. It's often said that people study psychology to understand themselves better: I must admit that my curiosity in this book was both personal and professional. Procastination and Task Avoidance is an ambitious attempt by some of the leading researchers on procrastination to wrestle with the growing amount of research on this neglected social problem. Although the authors draw few definitive conclusions, they do provide a useful summary of the research and theorizing to date. The good news is that most people do procrastinate from time to time, so-take heart-your own occasional lapses are quite normal. Indeed, some researchers have argued that procrastination is more common in capable individuals, because they have learned they can defer their work until the last minute and still do reasonably well. However, the bad news is that procrastination is normally distributed such that a significant minority (20-30% in college student samples) are habitual procrastinators, consigned always to play catch-up. Why Do We Procrastinate? Much of the book focuses on the intriguing issue of why many of us habitually procrastinate. The authors approach the causality issue from a decidedly psychological perspective-not surprising, given their professional backgrounds. To simplify greatly, there appear to be two major, independent avenues to habitual task avoidance. The first is lack of conscientiousness, where one routinely puts off doing work that is perceived to be difficult, boring, or otherwise undesirable. The key word here is "perceived": People lacking in work discipline, time management, and self-control are predisposed to view many tasks as a grind. Such people also may be characterized by impulsiveness, extraversion, and sensation-seeking, and may tend to rebel against authority. The second avenue to procrastination is neurotic avoidance, where one is anxious about meeting expectations (usually others), and copes with this fear of failure by doing other things. The irony, of course, is that procrastination makes failure even more likely, thus reinforcing one's fears. People suffering from neurotic avoidance tend to be indecisive, self-conscious, socially anxious, have low self-esteem and self-confidence, and hold perfectionist standards. If people lacking in conscientiousness can be said to be underaroused, people suffering from neurotic avoidance are overaroused. What makes procrastination so insidious is that, regardless of its genesis, one may become trapped in a vicious circle. Procrastinators are adept at rationalizing their inaction. Examples of common defensive cognitions are, "I'll do it later," "I'm very good at getting things done at the last minute," "I'm too uptight to do this now," and "I could never get this done to my boss's satisfaction, so why bother now? " If the subsequent delay undermines performance, the procrastinator has a built-in excuse to protect his or her self-esteem: "I would have done better if I had had more time. " Through this self-handicapping, procrastinators plot to fool themselves and thereby deny responsibility for their inaction and the need to change their behaviour. Although the book doesn't say so, the research on procrastination seems to support several cliches about time and work, such as: "The squeaky wheel gets the grease" ("tasks are less likely to be procrastinated if there is the likelihood of punishment in the near future, as compared to at a distant time," p. 28); "If you want something done, give it to a busy person" ("Persons with more external time commitments . actually reported less procrastination," p. …