Procrastination is the habit of delaying something that needs your immediate attention. Putting things off can become a serious problem for college students. Dr. Piers Steel, a leading researcher and speaker on the science of motivation and procrastination, writes that procrastination is on the rise, with 80–95 percent of students in college spending time procrastinating.² According to Steel, half of college students report that they procrastinate on a regular basis, spending as much as one-third of their time every day in activities solely related to procrastination. All this procrastination takes place even though most people, including researchers who study the negative consequences of procrastination, view procrastination as a significant problem. These numbers, plus the widespread acknowledgment of the negative effects of procrastination, provide evidence that it is a serious issue that trips up many otherwise capable people. Researchers at Carleton University in Canada have found that college students who procrastinate in their studies also avoid confronting other tasks and problems and are more likely to develop unhealthy habits, such as higher levels of alcohol consumption, smoking, insomnia, a poor diet, or lack of exercise.³

The good news is that, of those people who procrastinate on a regular basis, 95 percent want to change their behavior.⁴ As a first step toward initiating change, it is important to understand why people procrastinate. According to Steel, some people who are highly motivated fear failure, and some people even fear success, although that might seem counterintuitive. Consequently, some students procrastinate because they are perfectionists; not doing a task might be easier than having to live up to your own very high expectations or those of your parents, teachers, or peers. Many procrastinate because they are easily distracted—a topic we’ll explore later in this chapter. Often they have difficulty organizing and regulating their lives, have difficulty following through on goals, view the assigned task as too far into the future, or find an assigned task boring or irrelevant⁵ or consider it “busy work,” believing they can learn the material just as effectively without doing the homework.