Are procrastinators stuck forever, or can their habits change with time? Let’s learn some insights from expert Art Markman!
New research explores age-related changes in the tendency to procrastinate.
- Procrastination reflects people’s avoidance of hard tasks, despite negative consequences of that avoidance.
- There are individual differences in the tendency to procrastinate.
- New research suggests that this tendency decreases from young adulthood onward.
- Entering the workforce affects people’s tendency to procrastinate.
Procrastination is a behavior in which someone delays doing something they know is important; they recognize that the delay may make the outcome more difficult to achieve. Delaying a doctor visit when you have medical concerns can lead to more serious illness. Waiting to start an assignment in school may make it harder to get a good grade.
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Everyone has procrastinated on something important to them, but there are individual differences in procrastination. Some people do it rarely, while others do it often.
Research suggests that procrastination is related to two of the Big Five personality characteristics—conscientiousness and neuroticism. Conscientiousness is the tendency to finish what was started. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the more conscientious people are, the less likely they are to procrastinate.
Neuroticism reflects the amount of energy people have in their motivational systems and is often associated with worry and anxiety. People high in neuroticism are more likely to procrastinate than people low in neuroticism, perhaps because they fear negative outcomes from important actions.
Personality characteristics are slow to change over time. If procrastination relates to two significant traits, perhaps it is also slow to change. A 2026 paper by Lisa Baulke, Brent Roberts, Benjamin Nagengast, and Ulrich Tratwein in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology addressed this question by examining changes in people’s reported procrastination over almost two decades.
They analyzed a data set of surveys completed by young German adults who were given the first round of the survey in their final year of high school; they were surveyed periodically over the next 18 years. This survey asked questions about a variety of personality characteristics, it asked about procrastination behaviors, and also about life events (like getting a job, getting married, and having children).
Consistent with previous work, the authors found individual differences in people’s tendency to procrastinate. People high in conscientiousness tend to procrastinate less than people low in conscientiousness. People high in neuroticism tend to procrastinate more than people low in neuroticism.
Interestingly, there was a general tendency for people to procrastinate less as they got older. Even though there were small tendencies for people to get more conscientious and less neurotic as they aged, the decreases in tendency to procrastinate were larger than would be predicted from changes in conscientiousness and neuroticism alone.
There was also a fascinating relationship between the tendency to procrastinate and the transition from school to the workforce. On the one hand, the more someone tends to procrastinate, the later they tend to enter the workforce. The reasons for this difference are not clear. There are many possibilities for this finding. For example, it could be that people who procrastinate do worse in school, which makes it harder for them to get a job. Or, it could be that the tendency to procrastinate also affects people’s job applications.
On the other hand, when people do enter the workforce, it has a big influence on their tendency to procrastinate. Perhaps because school is more forgiving of procrastination than work, the tendency to procrastinate decreases significantly after people enter the workforce.
Finally, the tendency to procrastinate was related to several life outcomes. The more people procrastinated, the less likely they were to be in a stable relationship, they had lower life satisfaction overall, and they were less likely to have completed a university degree or to get promoted at work.
Procrastination is clearly a behavior with negative effects on the lives of chronic procrastinators.
However, as people age, they take on more responsibilities, and the tendency to procrastinate decreases. This work suggests that holding young adults more accountable for getting work done is helpful. To make an intervention like this more effective, it would also be useful to teach young adults strategies to overcome procrastination. This involves both teaching them how to schedule their work and how to handle the anxiety associated with assignments and other tasks. This will help them complete the work rather than avoid it.
In particular, schools don’t focus enough on the role that assignments play in learning skills. Instead, schools often focus students on the importance of getting good grades and minimizing the number of mistakes they make. That can build up the anxiety around big projects. If students focused more on the value of assignments for learning knowledge and skills, they might treat feedback as something that helps them learn rather than a negative reflection about themselves.
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For more insights, check out my book, Smart Change, available at this link: https://www.amazon.com/Smart-Change-Art-Markman-audiobook/dp/B00IB2YY38/
References
Bäulke, L., Roberts, B. W., Nagengast, B., & Trautwein, U. (2026). Once a procrastinator, always a procrastinator? Examining stability, change, and long-term correlates of procrastination during young adulthood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 130(3), 550–568.
Written by Art Markman, Ph.D.
This post was originally published on Psychology Today
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