While procrastination tends to decrease with age, it can have long-term effects on academic performance, income, and health.
Many people struggle with procrastination, putting off tasks that should be tackled sooner, or cleaning their room instead of submitting a project due today. A new study that tracked approximately 3,000 subjects for 18 years showed that while procrastination tends to decrease with age, it has long-term impacts on academic performance, income, and health.
Once a procrastinator, always a procrastinator? Examining stability, change, and long-term correlates of procrastination during young adulthood.
Longitudinal study finds procrastination declines with age but still shapes major life outcomes over nearly two decades
https://www.psypost.org/longitudinal-study-finds-procrastination-declines-with-age-but-still-shapes-major-life-outcomes-over-nearly-two-decades/
While there have been previous studies on procrastination, most have focused primarily on short-term behaviors, particularly among students. These studies have helped to understand the causes of procrastination and its impact on performance, but it remains unclear whether procrastination habits change over the long term.
Therefore, a research team led by psychologist Lisa Bollke , who studies procrastination at the University of Tübingen in Germany, decided to investigate procrastination from late adolescence to adulthood. By tracking subjects over a long period, they hope to understand how procrastination changes or stabilizes over time, whether the transition from education to work affects procrastination, and its impact on various life outcomes.
The research team conducted a follow-up study of 3,023 participants recruited from 149 high schools in Germany, covering an 18-year period starting from their final year of high school. Participants answered questions measuring their procrastination habits every two to four years, underwent tests on personality traits such as conscientiousness and neuroticism , and reported on their living situations, including academics, employment, and the period between the two.
In addition, data was collected from participants on various aspects of their lives, including whether they graduated from university, their academic performance, income earned from work, career advancement, relationship status with a partner, parenting, life satisfaction, and mental health and technology use during the COVID-19 pandemic. By analyzing these results, the research team was able to link the tendency to procrastinate in the final year of high school with the state of their lives 18 years later.
The analysis revealed that individuals who exhibited procrastination habits in the early stages of the study tended to maintain strong procrastination habits throughout their lives. On the other hand, the overall level of procrastination tended to decrease with age, and procrastination habits gradually improved. However, there were significant individual differences in the changes in procrastination habits, and the degree of improvement varied from person to person.
Furthermore, individuals whose conscientiousness increased or neurotic tendencies decreased over time tended to improve their procrastination habits. Similarly, the transition from university student to working adult was also associated with an improvement in procrastination habits, suggesting that being in a more structured environment and having increased responsibilities as a working adult may help reduce procrastination.
Conversely, the higher the level of procrastination, the more difficult the transition from university student to working adult, and the more likely it was to enter the workforce later. This suggests a reciprocal relationship between living environment and self-control.
Procrastination is strongly linked to long-term life consequences; those who procrastinated heavily in their final year of high school tended to experience various negative effects several years later, including lower academic performance, reduced income and promotion opportunities, and relationship and health problems. These correlations also extended to mental health and technology use during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Psychology media outlet PsyPost stated, 'This study reveals that procrastination is not merely a short-term habit, but an important indicator of a person's performance in various areas of their life over approximately 20 years.'
It should be noted that the data used in this study was based on self-reporting, and therefore may be subject to unconscious bias. Furthermore, since all participants were collected from a specific region of Germany, generalizing the results to other regions remains a challenge for future research.
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in Free Member, Science, Posted by log1h_ik