Procrastination Research Paper

800643461

Section: D88

Procrastination is Natural and That’s Okay In the 2016 TedTalk, Inside the Mind of an Urban Procrastinator, blogger Tim Urban speaks about his experience with procrastination and how it affects everyone. Urban suggests that there is not a non-procrastinator or a procrastinator because everyone procrastinates. By doing so, he informs the general audience that everyone is a procrastinator because procrastination is a natural part of everyday life. I agree that procrastination is natural to our everyday life because everyone procrastinates at some point, society has enabled procrastination making it something more common than ever, and procrastinating is different than being a procrastinator. In Inside the Mind of an

No matter who a person is or what they are doing, at one point or another, everyone procrastinates. In the article, The real reasons you procrastinate—and how to stop, Professor Timothy Pychyl of Carleton University claims “It usually happened when people fear or dread, or have anxiety about, the important task awaiting them. To get rid of this negative feeling, people procrastinate—they open up a video game or Pinterest instead” (Swanson, 2016, pg. 2). Pychyl’s point in Swanson’s article is that procrastination happens due to the stress of a daunting task, and this is a common part of many lives. There comes a point when a person is under a great deal of stress or anxiety because of a deadline that is due, yet they consciously make the decision to put the task aside in order to focus on something else. Everyone does this exact thing at one point, yet scientist and psychologists wonder why. It is because procrastination is a natural event that occurs throughout a person’s life. While some people’s procrastination may not be as obvious as others, there is still a time and place where each person procrastinates. Within Amy Novotney’s article Procrastination or ‘intentional delay’, University of Calgary psychologist Piers Steel, Ph.D. in his meta-analysis reports that “80 percent to 95 percent of college students procrastinate, particularly when it comes to homework” (Novotney, 2010, pg. 1). By including this research, Novotney’s point

The difference between procrastinators and procrastinating in terms of Urban’s ideas is that each person has the Rational Decision Maker and the Instant Gratification Monkey, but in some people the Instant Gratification Monkey takes control and remains in control of the brain, leading to procrastination (Urban, 2016). On the basis of Urban’s argument, it can be concluded that those who turn into procrastinators have a brain in which the Instant Gratification Monkey takes control most of the time, while those who procrastinate sometimes have an Instant Gratification Monkey that takes control some of the time, but then gives control back to the Rational Decision Maker. The natural procrastination that occurs in everyone on a daily basis is the short amount of time where a person knows that something needs to be done, but their rational decision maker is pushed aside by the Instant Gratification Monkey, but shortly after the Rational Decision Maker regains control. Those who are procrastinators allow the Instant Gratification Monkey to not only take control in their brain, but it stays in control for as long as necessary. Procrastinators stem from the neutrality of procrastination that causes it to become part of everyday routine. When this happens, the person then procrastinates in many areas of life. That once natural habit, becomes a toxic lifestyle that contributes to stress and