I think we gained a great deal in our understanding of procrastination when we began to consider it as a form of self-regulation failure, particularly in terms of immediate mood repair that undermines longer-term goal pursuit (when we "give in to feel good"). The literatures on self-regulation failure and willpower still hold much promise in our understanding of the psychological processes that explain the intention-action gap we know as procrastination.

What is particularly important about the self-regulation literature is the clear emphasis on the self. Free choice, if not free will, is assumed (and rightly so) in understanding the self-sabotage we call procrastination.

In contrast, the more deterministic assumptions of say the behavioral-economic perspective offer us little promise of really understanding procrastination. Although this alternative perspective is not atheoretical, it rests on questionable (I really mean "faulty") assumptions about human nature. At best, this perspective models procrastination as rational delay. The focus is on preferences and utility. It's a matter of the perceived consequences, typical of utilitarianism. We do the task at hand that has the greatest utility, and we can do little other.

What is missing from this perspective, making it truly a dead-end conceptually, is any notion of the human being as an agent making free choices in the world. The misguided assumptions of this perspective leaves us as mere mechanisms weighing preferences and acting on the outcome of these preference comparisons.

As fellow PT-blogger, Mark White, wrote in his outstanding chapter in The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination (soon to celebrate its first birthday), ". . . they [the behavioral economic models] cannot escape the tyranny of preferences and therefore cannot explain how the agent may resist the pull of his preferences and choose not to procrastinate" (White, 2010; p. 220).

Resisting Procrastination
I want to understand procrastination, this self-regulation failure, so that we can overcome this needless, self-defeating delay. To do this, I realize that I need to know more about human agency and choice.

Not everyone succumbs to short-term preferences that undermine long-term goal pursuit. Some of us, as John Searle writes in Rationality in Action,  are able to do what we had planned on doing. He writes, ". . . you just haul off and do what you are going to do, or carry out the decision you previously made . . ." (p. 17). I think we have much to learn in understanding the agentic choice of these individuals who "haul off and do it."

In the year ahead, I will be writing more about this sense of agency, the role of autonomy, responsibility and will, as well as the various notions of intention that we need to understand in order to really grapple with procrastination, as opposed to just modeling patterns of delay with some sort of "procrastination equation."

I'm excited by this prospect, as I think I've come a long way from the "quick and dirty" studies of the early research and the unjustified assumptions of behavioral economics to a perspective that draws more fruitfully from a rich theoretical framework for understanding human action.

I hope you'll join me on this journey. With just under a million readers a year, we're a large group!