Frank Wieber & Peter M. Gollwitzer : Oxford University Press, 2010

Have you ever purposefully delayed or postponed a goal-directed action (for example, writing an essay or filling out tax forms) despite strong intentions to achieve the goal and sufficient opportunities to pursue it. If so, then you are in good company: so has a large percentage of the general (15 to 20 percent) and the academic (80 to 85 percent of American college students) population. In addition to academic examples, procrastination has been studied in the areas of personal health (dieting, exercising), social relationships (contacting friends), work (job seeking behaviour), and financial management (retirement savings). Procrastination is a widespread phenomenon with potentially severe consequences, such as dropping out of school, compromised health, divorce, and job loss. Intuitively, it would seem relatively easy to classify certain behaviours as procrastination. For example, the fact that a student put off reading a book chapter might at first glance be sufficient to label his or her behaviour as procrastination. But after a closer look at the phenomenon, additional criteria that cannot be objectively judged from an outside perspective emerge. Building on the numerous definitions of the commonly used term procrastination that can be found in the scientific literature,4 we suggest four criteria that must be fulfilled in order to classify a behaviour or a lack of behaviour as procrastination. A person has to (1) commit to the goal in question, (2) have the opportunity to act on the goal, (3) expect to be worse off later in the case of a delay, and (4) voluntarily decide to put off the intended action of in action until a later point.

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