Why do we procrastinate?

New research from Germany may help explain why so many people procrastinate.

The research comes at an opportune moment as the start of a new year is traditionally a time when many of us earnestly pledge to make a fresh start in some way - by getting fit, losing weight, giving up smoking and so on.

But of course by the beginning of February the sad reality is that all too often those excellent resolutions and commitments have gone by the board.

Most of us fail to carry through these commitments, not because we're insincere, but because tomorrow always seems a better time to get started.

For many who are possibly more motivated, procrastination is seen as a curse which can be costly, as delaying things leads not only to lost productivity but also to all sorts of hand wringing and regrets and damaged self-esteem.

Because of these reasons psychologists are eager to learn just what is going on in the mind that makes it so hard to actually do what we set out to do and to also reveal if humans - some of us at least - are programmed for postponement and delay.

An international team of psychologists led by Sean McCrea of the University of Konstanz in Germany, were curious to find out if some tasks are seen as psychologically 'distant' - thereby making us put them aside for later rather than tackling them immediately.

The team suspected there may be a link between how a task is perceived and procrastinating.

The psychologists gave questionnaires to a group of students and asked them to respond by e-mail within three weeks.

While all the questions concerned mundane tasks such as opening a bank account and keeping a diary, different students were given different instructions for answering the questions.

Some were asked to think and write about what each activity implied about personal traits: what kind of person has a bank account, for example while others were asked to write simply about doing each activity: speaking to a bank officer, filling out forms, making an initial deposit, and so forth.

The plan was to get some students thinking abstractly and others concretely - the psychologists sat back and waited - in some cases they waited and waited.

They recorded all the response times to see if there was a difference between the two groups, and found there was a clear and significant difference.

Even though all of the students were being paid upon completion, those who thought about the questions abstractly were much more likely to procrastinate - and some never got around to completing the assignment at all.

By contrast, those who were focused on the how, when and where of doing the task e-mailed their responses much sooner, suggesting that they tackled the assignment straight away rather than delaying it.

The researchers say that merely thinking about the task in more concrete, specific terms makes it feel like it should be completed sooner and this reduced procrastination.

They believe the results have important implications for teachers and managers who may want their students and employees starting on projects sooner.

The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.