Passive vs Active Procrastination: Why It’s Important to Know the Difference
Tags: Mindfulness, Lifestyle, Education, Self, Psychology

It’s an early Saturday afternoon. You’re tired from the weeks’ activities — most notably from the stress you’ve had to handle at work all week, again. You’ve now finally found time to lie down and switch off. So you hop on the sofa, recline your feet on the protruded armrest and switch the TV on for the new series you’ve started. Then, without thinking, you pick up your phone and begin scrolling for news on social media.

Hours pass. It’s 7 pm and sorting dinner is now a thing. “Where’s the day gone? And why am I still so tired?” It feels like another Saturday has gone to waste. And you feel the same way even if you were productive — cleaning the house top to bottom, going to your fitness class or gym for an hour or two, and seeing your friend for that all-important four-hour catch-up. Why does it feel like we never truly rest?

I found this problem among my friends. They are almost always tired or “in desperate need of a holiday” because they haven’t — because they don’t know how to — switched off. And after reading about this for some time now, it seems to be because of the tendency to resent “laziness”.

Procrastination is a good thing when done right. But it’s only when we are “lazy” in the right way that we start to understand this. Society today lives in an “always-on” state: we wake up, check our phones for emails and a social media dopamine injection. We then try to distract ourselves on the way to work — or, now that people are working from home, rush straight to our work desk five minutes after awakening. And once work is over, we get up, leave, glare at our phones as we walk to the car, or station, or sofa, and stick to it for the rest of the evening. Or we find the energy to fulfil outstanding chores or work on side projects until we finally start to force ourselves to sleep. Then we start again.

Now, where would there be time to switch off in this process? It’s an almost automatic ritual for every day of the week. Where would we find time to rest and silence our minds for once? The answer is with active procrastination, a tool we deliberately apply to keep ourselves rested between the grooves of a busy week.

The problem is people already procrastinate quite often. Except they do what’s called passive procrastination: the tendency to delay what we should be doing because we want to satisfy our immediate inner cravings.

Procrastination is a time for flicking the off switch in our heads and letting the mind wander freely without focusing on anything. For something as delightful as this, we still do it the wrong way. So let’s explore how procrastinating the right way can improve both your productivity and creativity, all while improving your mind, motivation and mood.

Passive Procrastination: The Wrong Way to Do Nothing

According to Cognition Today, passive procrastinators are often crippled by indecision and the inability to self-regulate themselves for completing tasks. Traditional (passive) procrastinators fail to begin work, loading them with anxiety, causing even more stress and inaction. They constantly delay important tasks, even after committing to it.

A study published in Personality and Individual differences found that procrastination can play a role in how creative we are. 631 participants across two studies were measured on their procrastination tendencies, emotional stability, and conscientiousness (discipline and organisation), and then tested on their self-reported creativity and expert-rated creativity (three experts judged how creatively they captioned a cartoon)

Passive procrastinators reported low levels of self-reported creativity. But researchers believed that while they thought they were less creative, their idle-automatic mind contributed to creative thinking. When people passively procrastinate, they’re not usually in control of their decisions, focus, or behaviour. Their mind wanders. Attention moves in unguided ways, and this wandering enabled access to divergent ideas and associations. This closely linked to creative thinking. Because their mental state is not limited by rigid or logical or simple thinking, so their unconscious automatic state may facilitate their creativity.

However, passive procrastinators did report low levels of life-satisfaction, worse use of time, and low self-efficacy. Even though they delayed their work equally as long as active procrastinators, they still scored worse according to an earlier study.

Final reports also found that passive procrastination strongly links with poor psychological wellbeing. Traditional procrastinators tend to have negative beliefs and self-handicapping anxiety. Some researchers speculated that their low sense of purpose reduces the feeling of autonomy, agency, and activeness in decision making, which goes against actively delaying work for growth.

Passive procrastinators tend to focus more on mood-improving, enjoyable activities. They have an inability to make decisions or act on time, such as delaying a school essay until the night before it’s due — which I’m sure many of us have been the perpetrator to. Time management tends to, therefore score poorly, and they often struggle to cope with stress. Compared to active procrastination, they’re almost worlds apart.

Active Procrastination: Why Deliberate Laziness Helps You Do Better

Active procrastination can create desirable outcomes and positive results in productivity and success. People who classify as active procrastinators tend to delay completing tasks because they enjoy working under pressure; it helps them perform better.

An essential difference between the two is that though they spend the same amount of time delaying a task, active procrastinators explicitly decide to delay and do it when the time comes. Still, they do so with a better mindset and motivation to work. Active procrastination has four key dimensions:

Preference for time pressure: they are not usually frustrated with meeting deadlines. They do not lose their ability to concentrate under time-pressure; they instead prefer it. Intentional decision to put off tasks: active procrastinators intentionally delay tasks to make better use of their time and deliberately increase motivation. They gain a sense of autonomy, volition, and agency in doing so. Ability to meet deadlines: active procrastinators, unlike their passive counterparts, are not always late and running behind schedule. They often succeed in finishing the tasks on time. Outcome satisfaction and beliefs: active procrastinators tend not to be satisfied with the outcome when they work slowly and finish their work long before the deadline. They are more likely to disagree with the statement “I don’t do well if I have to rush things”.

Arguably it’s not considered to be an actual form of procrastination as we take the liberty to add negative consequences and unpleasantness to the concept of procrastination. It’s effectively an intentional, self-motivated delay in starting something to create better, more satisfying results — a self-regulation strategy to improve productivity.