Procrastination Facts: Interesting and Useful Facts About Procrastination

This article contains a collection of interesting and useful facts about procrastination, which will help you understand what procrastination is, how, when, and why it affects people, and what can be done to overcome it.

As you will see, these facts are all based on credible sources, and primarily on peer-reviewed research articles, which are either linked in the text or referenced directly.


Facts about the prevalence of procrastination


Facts about the dangers of procrastination

  • Procrastination is associated with a wide range of mental and physical health issues, such as stress and an increased rate of illness, as well as with the tendency to delay getting treatment for those issues.
  • Procrastination is associated with various financial and employment issues, such as earning a lower salary, having shorter durations of employment, and having a higher likelihood of being unemployed or under-employed (as opposed to working full‐time).
  • Students often report that procrastination occupies over a third of their daily activities, usually in the form of behaviors such as sleeping, watching TV, or playing video games.
  • Though student procrastinators tend to experience less stress early on in the semester, they also tend to experience more stress later on in the semester and overall.
  • For students, procrastination is associated with a wide range of academic issuessuch as worse exam scores, worse grades, more course failures, more course withdrawals, and an increased likelihood of dropping out.


Facts about procrastinators

  • Age is negatively correlated with procrastination, which means that older people tend to procrastinate less than younger ones.
  • Gender is associated with procrastination, as men tend to procrastinate more than women.
  • Compared to non-procrastinators, procrastinators are more likely to remain single than to get married, less likely to stay married, and more likely to get separated rather than divorced.
  • Out of all the personality traits in the “Big Five” model (which include conscientiousness, openness to experience, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism), the personality trait that procrastination is most strongly associated with is conscientiousness, as people who have low conscientiousness tend to procrastinate more.
  • There is generally no significant correlation between people’s intelligence and their tendency to procrastinate.
  • There is a strong genetic component to procrastination, which means that the tendency to procrastinate is moderately heritable, so some people are naturally more prone to procrastination. This aligns with the fact that associated factors, such as self-control and conscientiousness, also have a strong genetic component.
  • At both the phenotypic and genetic levels, procrastination is strongly associated with impulsivity (the tendency to take rash action without thinking or planning) and goal-management failure (the tendency to fail to set and pursue short and long-term goals).
  • People who are externally oriented (i.e. believe that outcomes that they experience depend primarily on external factors outside their control) tend to procrastinate more than people who are internally oriented (i.e. believe that outcomes that they experience are within their control).
  • People who are evening types (“night owls”) are more likely to engage in procrastination in general and bedtime procrastination in particular than people who are morning types (“early birds”).

Note: for more information about procrastinators in general, see the dedicated article on the topic.


Facts about the causes of procrastination

  • Procrastination is often involuntary, as evidenced by the many procrastinators who agree with the statement “No matter how much I try, I still put things off”.
  • People’s procrastination is largely independent of their self-reported work intentions, which means that procrastinators often intend to work as hard as non-procrastinators, or even harder.
  • There is a disparity between procrastinators’ intended and actual work habits, a phenomenon referred to as the intention-action gap, whereby they work less than they intend to. This gap generally grows as the amount of time between the intention and the action grows, meaning that it tends to be greater for actions that are far in the future. At the same time, this gap tends to narrow as the deadline for an intended action approaches, and it may even reverse, meaning that, when finishing tasks right before the deadline, procrastinators often end up doing more work than they originally intended.
  • Procrastination occurs, in large part, as a result of issues that people have with emotion regulation, and negative emotions, such as fear, distress, guilt, and anxiety, can therefore lead to procrastination.
  • People sometimes procrastinate because they feel overwhelmed with regard to the tasks that they need to handle.
  • People often procrastinate on tasks because they find them aversive (e.g. boring or unpleasant), and there is a positive correlation between trait procrastination and task aversiveness, which suggests that procrastinators are more prone to perceiving tasks as aversive, and that this may be one of the causes of their procrastination.
  • People sometimes procrastinate as a result of difficulties in valuing outcomes or associating outcomes with tasks.
  • People are more likely to procrastinate when their goals are vague or abstract, compared to when their goals are concrete and clearly defined.
  • People tend to discount the value of outcomes that are far in the future (a phenomenon known as temporal discounting or delay discounting), which can lead to procrastination.
  • Procrastination often occurs when people displaypresent bias, and choose to engage in activities that they feel reward them in the short-term, at the expense of activities that are more rewarding in the long term.
  • People sometimes procrastinate because they feel disconnected from their future self, a phenomenon known as temporal self-discontinuity or temporal disjunction.
  • Some people procrastinate because they suffer from depression.
  • Low self-efficacy and low self-esteem are associated with higher levels of procrastination.
  • People sometimes procrastinate as a way of placing barriers in their own way, so that if they fail their failures could be attributed to their procrastination rather than their abilities, a behavior which is referred to as self-handicapping.
  • People sometimes procrastinate due to their tendency to engage in self-defeating behaviors, which means that they actively try to sabotage their own progress.
  • People sometimes procrastinate due to an underlying fear of failure.
  • Different aspects of perfectionism are associated with procrastination in different ways. Specifically, perfectionistic concerns, which are characterized by excessive preoccupation with other people’s opinion, negative self-evaluations, and an inability to experience satisfaction even after successful performance, are associated with higher rates of procrastination. Conversely, procrastination strivings, which are characterized by the tendency to set excessively high personal standards and demand perfection from oneself, are associated with lower rates of procrastination.
  • There’s a substantial association between many ADHD-related behaviors and procrastination, and various procrastinatory behaviors are sometimes viewed as symptoms of ADHD.
  • Low-quality sleep can lead to procrastination, especially among people who naturally struggle with self-regulation.
  • People sometimes procrastinate as an act of rebellion, generally by postponing a task that they resent being given by an authority figure.
  • People sometimes procrastinate due to sensation seeking. For example, this can involve postponing a task because of the expectation that it will be more exciting and enjoyable to work on it right before the deadline, when there’s intense time pressure.
  • A person’s ability to avoid procrastinating can be influenced by the people that this person spends time with, in both a negative or a positive manner.

Note: for a more comprehensive explanation of why people procrastinate, see the dedicated article on the topic.


Facts about solutions to procrastination

Note: to learn more about how to stop procrastinating, read the dedicated guide on the topic.


Facts about the etymology and history of procrastination

  • According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest use of the term “procrastination” in English writing appeared in 1548, in Edward Hall’s “The union of the two noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke” (known as “Hall’s Chronicle”), where the author wrote: “Without longer procrastinacion, he assembled togither”.
  • According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of the term “procrastinate” also appeared in 1548 in Hall’s Chronicle (similarly to the term “procrastination”), where the author wrote: “The kyng of England..was so sore moued against the Scottysh kyng, that he would not procrastinate nor deferre one houre tyl he were reuenged.” and also “Thinkyng that if that pardon were any lenger space procrastened or prolonged, that..Sir Thomas Broughton..should sodeynly moue a newe insurreccion against him.”
  • According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “procrastinator” first appeared in 1607, in Thomas Walkington’s “The optick glasse of humors”, where he wrote, “So is he no procrastinatour.”.
  • According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “procrastinate” is borrowed from Latin, and specifically from “prōcrāstināt” in classical Latin, which is the past participle stem of “prōcrāstināre”, meaning “to put off till the next day, to defer, delay”. This word, in turn, comes from the combination of “pro” (in this context a prefix meaning “forward”), and “crāstinus”, meaning “belonging to tomorrow”.
  • According to the Oxford English Dictionary, words similar to “procrastination” appeared earlier in certain Romance languages than in English. For example, when it comes to the term “procrastination”, the Middle French “procrastination” appeared in 1520, and the Italian “procrastinazione”, appeared before 1536. Similarly, when it comes to the verb “procrastinate”, the Italian equivalent “procrastinare” appeared circa 1300, and the Middle French “procrastiner”, appeared in the 15th century.

In addition, historical evidence shows that people have been discussing the concept of procrastination for more than two millennia. For example, historical quotes about procrastination include the following:


— Hesiod, in “Works and Days” (circa 700 BCE)


“He who postpones the time for right-living resembles the rustic who’s waiting until the river’s passed by: yet it glides on, and will roll on, gliding forever.”

— Horace, in “The Epistles”, Book I, Epistle II (circa 20 BCE)



— Seneca, in “On the Shortness of Life” (circa 49 CE)



— Marcus Aurelius, in “Meditations”, Book II, Passage 4 (written circa 180 CE)


Note: a lot more has been said about procrastination by various people throughout history. If you want to read more procrastination quotes, see the dedicated article on the topic.


Additional information about procrastination

If you want to learn more about procrastination, beyond the facts that you saw here, take a look at one or more of the following: