Psychologists on Why You Procrastinate; and How to Stop!- Time Magazine

From time to time, everybody leaves a task lingering on their to-do list for a few hours -- or days, or weeks -- too long. Procrastination is a normal, near-universal phenomenon -- which makes it all the more important to understand why it strikes and what to do about it. "Procrastination is not just avoiding or delaying a task," says David Ballard, head of the American Psychological Association's Center for Organizational Excellence. "It also has to include an aspect that's counterproductive, irrational or unnecessary." Those triggers typically fall into one of four camps: expectancy, value, time or impulsivity, says Alexander Rozental, a procrastination researcher and a clinical psychologist at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. In other words, "People procrastinate because of a lack of value [associated with the task]; because they expect that they're not going to achieve the value they're trying to achieve; because the value is too far from you in terms of time; or because you're very impulsive as a person," Rozental says.

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