Are procrastination stuck forever or can their habits change over time? Let’s find out about Art Markman experts!
New research looks for age-related changes in the tendency to procrastinate.
- Procrastination reflects a person’s avoidance of difficult tasks, despite the negative consequences of that avoidance.
- There is an individual difference in the tendency to procrastinate.
- New research shows that this trend has been declining since a young age.
- Entering the workforce affects people’s tendency to procrastinate.
Procrastination is an attitude in which someone procrastinates doing something they know is important. They recognize that procrastination can make the results more difficult. Delaying to see a doctor when you have medical concerns can lead to more serious illness. Waiting to get started in school can make it hard to get good grades.
Read more here: How to use your dreams to cultivate your creativity.
Everyone has procrastination on what is important to them, but there are individual differences in procrastination. Some do it rarely, while others do it often.
Research has shown that procrastination is associated with five major personality traits: consciousness and conscience. Consciousness is the tendency to finish what has begun. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the more conscientious people are, the less likely they are to procrastinate.
Neuroticism reflects the amount of energy people have in their motivational system and is often associated with anxiety and worry. People with high neuroticism are more likely to delay than people with low neuroticism, perhaps because they fear negative outcomes from vital activities.
Personality is slow to change over time. If the delay involves two important characteristics, it may be too late to change. 2026 paper by Lisa Baulke, Brent Roberts, Benjamin Nagengast and Ulrich Tratwein in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Resolved this question by examining changes in human-reported delays over nearly two decades.
They analyzed the dataset of the survey completed by the German youth given the first round of the survey in their final year of high school. They are regularly observed for the next 18 years. The survey asked about different personality traits, it also asked about procrastinating attitudes and life events (such as getting a job, getting married and having children).
In line with previous work, the authors found individual differences in people’s tendency to procrastinate. People with a high conscience tend to procrastinate less than people with a low conscience. High-minded people tend to procrastinate more than low-minded people neuroticism.
Interestingly, there is a general tendency for people to procrastinate less as they get older. Although there is a slight tendency for people to become conscious and less nervous as they get older, the decrease in the tendency to procrastination is greater than the prediction of conscious change and neuroticism alone.
There is also an interesting correlation between the tendency to procrastination and the transition from school to workforce. On the other hand, the more people tend to procrastinate, the more they tend to enter the workforce. The reason for this difference is not clear. There are many possibilities for this discovery. For example, it may be that people who procrastinate do worse in school, making it harder for them to get a job. Or it may be that the tendency to procrastinate also affects people’s work programs.
On the other hand, when people enter the workforce, it greatly influences their tendency to procrastinate. Perhaps because schools are more tolerant of procrastination than work, the tendency to procrastinate decreases significantly after people enter the workforce.
Finally, the tendency to procrastinate is related to some life outcome. The more people procrastinate, the less likely they are to have a stable relationship, the less likely they are to enjoy life, and the less likely they are to have a bachelor’s degree or a promotion in the workplace.
Procrastination is clearly a behavior that has a negative impact on your life, chronic procrastination.
However, as people get older, they take on more responsibility and tend to Delay Decreased. This work suggests that making teens more responsible for getting a job is beneficial. To make such interventions more effective, it is also helpful to teach strategies for adolescents to overcome procrastination. This includes teaching them how to schedule their work and how to deal with stress related to tasks and other tasks. This will help them finish the job rather than avoid it.
In particular, schools do not focus enough on the role that tasks play in academic skills. Instead, the school always focuses on the importance of getting good grades and reducing the number of mistakes they make. That can create anxiety around big projects. If students focus more on the value of assignments for knowledge and skills, they may view feedback as something that helps them learn rather than negative reflections about themselves.
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For more information, check out my book Smart changeAvailable at this link: https://www.amazon.com/Smart-Change-Art-Markman-audiobook/dp/B00IB2YY38/
References
Bäulke, L., Roberts, BW, Nagengast, B., & Trautwein, U. (2026). Delay Always procrastinate? Examine the stability, change, and long-term relationship of procrastination in adulthood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 130 (3), 550–568.
Written by Art Markman, Ph.D.
This post was originally published on Psychology Today
