Bloggers know about procrastination. I - for one - have forgotten more about procrastination than most people will ever know! As a matter of fact, at this very moment I should maybe be worrying more about a presentation I am giving this Thursday than about posting this blog entry!
Indeed I have so close a personal relation with procrastination that it almost feels detached and wrong to rely on a scientific paper when writing about the topic...but now I just came across this nice little paper in last month's Journal of Personality and Individual Differences which looks at a very interesting aspect of overcoming procrastination; namely forgiveness. And here I am, blogging:
For the study, 119 first year students at Carleton University in Ottawa were assessed for their procrastination and self-forgiveness over the course of a semester. A first assessment of procrastination and self-forgiveness (using 7-point Likert Scales on sentences such as "I put off studying until the last minute", or "I dislike myself for procrastinating", etc.) was taken immediately prior to the first mid-term exam.
Midway between the first and the second exam students were asked to report on how much they believed procrastination had influenced their performance on the first mid-term.
Then again, immediately prior to the second mid-term, students were asked how much they had procrastinated regarding the upcoming exam.
Since I'm not the biggest fan of Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) for data analysis (Oh, I know this statement is going to come back to haunt me, but until then I'll continue to do regression analysis), I'm going to spare you the details and jump right to the findings:
Apparently those students who scored high on the self-forgiveness scale, ended up reducing procrastination from exam 1 to exam 2. The reason for this seemed to be explicitly that self-forgiveness erased negative feelings about the result of the first exam, and thus made studying for the second exam a little easier/ procrastinating less necessary.
Sounds convincing to me: We procrastinate in order to avoid things such as dealing with the negative experience associated with not having studied enough for the first. If the negative feelings are dampened through forgiveness, there is less to avoid, and students should procrastinate less. Tellingly, students who procrastinated little on the first exam (and also scored well, I assume) did not show this interaction between self-forgiveness and procrastination; likely because there was nothing to forgive...
The authors, one of which is Timothy A. Pychyl from Psychology Today's Don't Delay blog, manage to state this far more eloquently:
"Forgiveness allows the individual to move past their maladaptive behavior and focus on the upcoming examination without the burden of past acts to hinder studying. By realizing that procrastination was a transgression against the self and letting go of negative affect associated with the transgression via self-forgiveness, the student is able to constructively approach studying
for the next exam."
And with this I should get back to doing actual work.
Main Reference:
Wohl, M., Pychyl, T., & Bennett, S. (2010) I forgive myself, now I can study: How self-forgiveness for procrastinating can reduce future procrastination. Personality and Individual Differences, 48(7), 803-808. DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2010.01.029
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<Cross posted with Ingenious Monkey>
