Procrastination in School

Morgan Hale
02/06/2018
The Academy for the Arts Science and Technology
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Procrastination, for many years, has been a true issue in students around the world.

Procrastination is when someone delays or puts other aspects above things that are important in

life. For students, that would be avoiding a paper that is due or not doing homework. Some

would say sleeping in class is also a form of procrastination which makes you not do the work

you are supposed to be doing. Many people struggle with this and try to find ways to fix the issue

but also tend to struggle with solutions to procrastination because they are caught up in

everything they delayed. Let's fix that.

There are a myriad of things you can do to fix or handle your procrastination issue. One

thing is someone could do is setting goals and trying their best to achieve the goals they set.

Research studies have shown that setting goals is very beneficial to a students academic success.

Goal focus can be conceptualized both as a trait-like construct of habitually focusing more on the

means or the outcomes of goal pursuit, and as a more state-like construct that can change

depending on the motivational phase, situational factors, age (Freund. 2012; Krause and Freund

2014), or experimental manipulation (Pham and Taylor 1999). Setting goals in school is a way to

make yourself feel more successful in school. Procrastination, often, can ruin that if you do not

manage the goals in a sufficient way. You have to prioritize your goals in what is most important

and what is least important. Many researchers have found that setting goals can make your whole

mood change as well as change your outlook on school (Motiv Emot, 2016). Goal setting has

been around for a very long time and has helped many people in being successful. It can help

you be more efficient and more “put together”. Most schools have you start setting goals at a

young age and students will think that setting a goal is not efficient but as they go about their

schooling, they will soon come to a realization that it is very important. Setting goals to finish

task is not the only thing that will help you with procrastination.
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Another helpful way to get you away from procrastination would be to work on

forgetting things that have happened in the past and starting to look at things a different way than

what you have before, which would mean changing. Many students do not like the aspect of

change and that will lead into procrastination which was put into a study. (Naddafi, 2016). Many

family issues can be a result in change as well. Change can cause students to resent and not do

anything in school as an act for attention. For example, students who start school somewhere

and have been there all their lives, then have to move to a different state and school, would have

difficulty getting used to that kind of change because it is new to them. The student could

become stressed and unmotivated. There could also be an academic change, which would result

in a student procrastinating on the things he or she does not know how to do; leaving stacks of

work.

Another interesting solution to procrastination in school would be Cognitive structuring

that has a huge effect.. Cognitive structuring is the basic mental processes people use to make

sense of information and you decide things. You will find that many students and even adults

lack this structure in their life’s. Planning is a very important for students to obtain early rather

than late in academic school years, especially in highschool and college students. Time

management and planning can help tremendously. Planning is a way to structure decision

making by setting a goal in terms of content and time span, and anticipating the steps leading

from a goal to action (International Association for Applied Psychology, 2000). A student should

set their cognitive structure up like this; standard, monitoring, and strength. A student could also

add self control to that. A student has to be more focused on the time they have to do things

rather than they day it is due because what happens when you start a day before your work is

due? You do not reach your expectations from the teacher and do not complete the assignment as
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well as you could have if you would have started the day you were assigned to something.

Buechler (1997), stated that overly optimistic predictions of time may be made more realistic by

taking into account previous experiences and possible distractions or other barriers that may

occur in the future execution of the task. The best way to manage time is to prioritize things that

you need to get done so that procrastination can be eliminated. You can prioritize things in your

life by the importance of something and the time things need to be completed. A student needs to

understand the importance of some things schools assign them to do because a teacher does not

assign something if it is not important. Knowing how long it takes yourself to complete a certain

task and how much things that need to be put into it will also help you prioritize things because

some things may take you an excessive amount of time to complete. Not only just complete it,

but complete it to your full extent and not done sloppy or as a querulous student. Mental

stimulation of the process for doing well on an exam led to better grades, in comparison to two

other conditions that involved stimulating a desired outcome or using unstructured self

monitoring (Pham and Taylor 1999).

Lastly, Strengthening volition is a very important way to overcome this issue. Volition is

the power of choosing and determining things. As students, our frontal lobe; the decision making

process of our brain, is not fully developed until age 21. That is a very big cause of why students

can not make clear and thoughtful decisions. Some decisions students make, do not make any

sense. Students tend to not prioritize their decisions as well. A task that is avoided because it is

too complex and too challenging may be made more tractable by creating proximal subgoals and

setting shorter deadlines (Latham & Seijits, 1999). Changing who you associate and spend your

time with can also help with making better decisions about school work and task. Distant

yourself from people, places, things etc. that distract you from priorities in your life, those things
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can wait until after your task is completed. Manage your time by making school come before

anything else and you will meet your goals successfully.

Together, the world can change the look on procrastination. Lets eliminate the word. And

focus on goal setting and being more organized. Procrastination does not have to effect every

student's life if the solutions become what we always know to do.

Reference page

Krause, K., & Freund, A. M. (2016). It’s in the means: Process focus helps against procrastination in the

academic context. Motivation and Emotion, 40(3), 422-437.

Van Eerde, W. (2000). Procrastination: Self‐ regulation in initiating aversive goals. Applied Psychology,

49(3), 372-389.
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Solomon, L. J., & Rothblum, E. D. (1984). Academic procrastination: Frequency and cognitive-behavioral

correlates. Journal of counseling psychology, 31(4), 503.