9

What’s Bred in the Bone: Personality and Procrastination

My personality might put me at risk, but I can adapt.

FIONA AND DAVID HAVE been married for more than ten years now. Fiona’s friends describe her as organized. Typically, she’s the planner in their group, and they know that they can really count on her. When there’s something to be done, she does it right away. David sets high standards for himself. He is also very self-critical. He seems to hear his parents’ voices echo in his mind whenever he approaches a task, saying, “It could be better.” When faced with a task, David always seems reluctant to get started. Fiona and David are very similar when it comes to household tidiness (they are both quite particular, even fussy), but they can drive each other crazy at times when it comes to scheduling and doing tasks.

Issue

The example above highlights the notion of individual differences. We might think of Fiona as conscientious and David as a perfectionist. This approach to personality is based on the concept of personality traits.

Traits are terms that psychologists use to summarize the way we typically act. Traits describe something about how we expect a person to act in most situations. Of course, how we actually behave depends on both personality and situation, but for the moment, I want to focus on personality traits.

Certainly, procrastination has been shown to be related to personality traits. Some people are more prone to procrastinate, and a contributing factor is personality. This is particularly true when the situational pressures to engage in a task in a timely manner are not strong. When the situation is not pushing us to act in a certain way (for example, a supervisor actually monitoring our actions), our personality will have a great deal of influence on our behavior.

The examples above provide two very common traits related to procrastination, but in different directions. Fiona’s conscientiousness—that is, the fact that she is typically organized, planful, and dutiful—is a trait that is highly negatively related to procrastination. The more we are conscientious, the less we typically procrastinate.

In contrast, David is an example of a socially prescribed perfectionist. Yes, there are different varieties or types of perfectionism. The one we need to focus on is the socially prescribed perfectionist, because it is most strongly related to procrastination. Socially prescribed perfectionists believe that others hold unrealistic expectations for their behavior and that they cannot live up to these expectations. They experience external pressure to be perfect and believe that others evaluate them critically. This leads them to internalize these expectations and be self-critical as well (that “little voice in David’s head” is an example of this internalized criticism).

Contrasting Fiona and David like this shows how personality can be a resilience or risk factor for procrastination. We need to take this into account in our own lives.

Would you say that you have a procrastination-prone personality?

To answer this question, you need to have a little more information about which personality traits have been shown to be associated with procrastination. Some of the key traits that are related to procrastination are listed below. I just need to make one more comment before you review this list.

There are potentially thousands of personality traits. Personality psychologists have simplified these into a superstructure of traits known as the “Big Five.” Much like the three colors of the color wheel, the Big Five are said to be the primary traits. Other traits are a part of these five or a blend of them. You can remember the five traits with the mnemonic CANOE: Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness (to Experience), and Extraversion.

Of course, in a digest-type book, I cannot explain each of these in detail, and it is really not that important because our focus is on procrastination. Research pioneered by Henri Schouwenburg (University of Groningen) and Clarry Lay (York University) has revealed that only two of these traits have meaningful relations with procrastination—Conscientiousness and Neuroticism (which is also known as Emotional Instability). I discuss these first below.

The other traits that I discuss below are related to the Big Five traits, but I address them separately because they deserve special consideration given their relation to procrastination. For example, impulsiveness is sometimes discussed as part of low emotional stability, sometimes extraversion. In any case, it is not necessary to focus on these definitional issues. Just think of these traits as aspects of our personalities.

INSTRUCTIONS

For each of the traits below, rate yourself from “Not at all like me” to “Exactly like me” on how much you think the trait describes you.

1. Conscientiousness

Highly conscientious people are described as responsible, scrupulous, persevering, and fussy or tidy. You can see how this trait is negatively associated with procrastination and might be considered a resilience factor against unnecessary delay. The various facets of the trait as measured in popular personality tests include: Competence (efficient), Order (organized), Dutifulness (not careless), Achievement striving (thorough), Self-discipline (not lazy), and Deliberation (not impulsive).

2. Emotional instability

Emotional instability is the alternative wording of the trait of Neuroticism. People who score high on emotional instability can be described as nervous, worrisome, or anxious. The various facets of the trait as measured in popular personality tests include: Anxiety (tense), Angry hostility (irritable), Depression (not contented), Self-consciousness (shy), Impulsive (moody), and Vulnerability (not self-confident)

3. Impulsiveness

A person who scores high on impulsiveness tends to act before thinking. This trait reflects low self-control, especially in the presence of potentially rewarding activities. Impulsivity reflects less ability to consider the consequences of one’s actions.

4. Self-efficacy

This trait represents the belief that we are able to do what is necessary to achieve a desired outcome. It reflects self-confidence and competence.

5. Self-esteem

Self-esteem is how we feel about ourselves. It is our appraisal of our self-worth. Another way to think about it is the extent to which we perceive ourselves as being relatively close to being the people we want to be.

6. Socially prescribed perfectionism

As I noted, socially prescribed perfectionists believe that others hold unrealistic expectations for their behavior. They believe that others expect them to be perfect, and they can feel compelled to try to live up to these expectations.

Now that you have reviewed some of the main personality traits that researchers have identified as traits associated with procrastination, you can see which is larger, your risk for or resilience to procrastination. To calculate each, you need to sum items together as listed below. For each item, write in the number you circled when reading above, then sum these for a total score out of a possible 30.

This simple scale is not scientifically valid, but it does provide you with a rough estimate of your vulnerability to procrastination from a personality perspective. These scores provide an index in terms of how your personality is contributing to or protecting you from self-regulation failure. Of course, given that you are reading a book about procrastination, I might assume that you are more at risk than resilient. You may find that your risk score is quite a bit larger than your resilience score. The question is, what can you do about this?

STRATEGY FOR CHANGE

Personality presents an interesting challenge when we think about self-change. By definition, we consider personality as the relatively enduring characteristics of the individual. They are not easily changed.

However, we do not have to change our personalities to succeed. We can act counter to our dispositions or traits. For example, there are many introverted individuals who can function well socially, speak in front of crowds, and engage others effectively in the workplace. It does take strategic effort at times, but we are successful daily “acting out of character.”

It is important to acknowledge that some psychologists believe that acting out of character, counter to our traits and disposition, can deplete our self-regulatory strength or willpower. As we discussed previously, willpower is a limited resource, so this is important to recognize. We will be investing our energies to act out of character to succeed. Everything noted earlier about bolstering our willpower will be important to take into account as you work to address your personality risk factors.

In terms of procrastination, it is possible to act out of character in terms of low conscientiousness or high impulsivity. The key thing is to be strategic, and as we have discussed, part of being strategic is making predecisions about how to respond before you face a situation. If you can be proactive like this, you will not rely so much on your personality and habitual ways of responding.

Remember the implementation intentions discussed earlier? These are intentions that take the form of “In situation X, I will do behavior Y.” Implementation intentions, as you may recall, are a form of predecision. You are deciding ahead of time what will be a stimulus for what response.

You may find implementation intentions useful again in terms of counteracting a habitual response that is part of who you are as defined by these personality traits. For example, if you are rather impulsive, your predecision with an implementation intention might be “If an alternative intention arises, such as an invitation to go out, I will say that I will make my decision in ten minutes.” This built-in predecisional delay may help to counteract the typical impulsive response to just get going.

I think it is clear by now that the key issue is this predecision. Knowing a little bit about your personality traits that may put you at risk to procrastinate, you can now act on that knowledge by deciding in advance how you will counter this habitual response.

For example, if you are impulsive, it is particularly important to reduce distractions in the surrounding environment when you are trying to work. Impulsive people have more difficulty resisting these distractions, even with implementation intentions. So, as I discussed in a previous chapter, part of your predecisional process can be to eliminate or reduce the distractions before you get down to work.

Similarly, if you tend to be disorganized, deliberately working on structuring tasks can be very important to reducing procrastination. This can be as simple as creating a “to do” list of subtasks that help you see the steps you need to take. It can also be the more challenging job of organizing your work area so that it is not so cluttered. But be careful: Some of us use this tidy-up job as our way to procrastinate! Once the desk is tidied, pencils sharpened, and new software downloaded onto the computer, we think, “That’s enough for today!” Procrastination draws on our ability to deceive ourselves. We find excuses for just about any unnecessary delay.

The strategies above address the issues of impulsivity and conscientiousness. What about the worry and anxiety that define low emotional stability? What if we are worried that we don’t have the ability to do the task? What if we cannot tolerate frustration? This seems more serious, right?

Yes, some of us are prone to worry and self-consciousness, and many of us have irrational beliefs that make us prone to procrastinate. Our procrastination may be based on a fear of failure, for example. The route to self-change, both in the short term behaviorally and the long term in terms of stable personality change, is to challenge your worries and beliefs as they arise. When a task triggers thoughts such as “I can’t do this,” “I’m such a screwup,” “I don’t know how,” “I’m going to fail,” it’s absolutely essential that you challenge each of these beliefs. Why do you think they are true? What is the real risk of not succeeding when you try? Through this process, most of us realize that these are truly irrational thoughts, perhaps part of the habits we call personality, but not real in terms of the world around us.

In sum, I am arguing that these stable individual differences we call personality traits can contribute to our procrastination. We cannot make changes in these traits quickly or easily, but we can recognize our relative self-regulatory strengths and limitations. In doing this, we set ourselves up to act more proactively and consciously out of character as we may need to achieve our goals.

Perhaps most important to understand is that personality should not be an excuse. In fact, acknowledging and addressing our limitations can develop some of our greatest strengths.