Anyone who has scraped by a deadline may believe that they do their best work under pressure. A growing body of research, however, suggests that there is no silver lining to procrastination. Instead, people may procrastinate to stave off insecurity about failure.

Joseph R. Ferrari, Ph.D., a psychology professor at DePaul University in Chicago, has found that procrastinators usually perform more poorly than nonprocrastinators, even when he controlled for intelligence. They also perform more slowly and less accurately when carrying out difficult cognitive tasks under time constraints.

On the one hand, procrastinators enjoy the pleasure that accompanies jittery nerves before a deadline, according to Ferrari. But they also have less self-confidence than their peers. Procrastinators may exert less effort because they want people to think that they're not trying rather than believe that they are incapable.

In experiments reported in the European Journal of Personality, procrastinators completed less of a task than nonprocrastinators when given a strict time limit, but fared almost as well with more time. Ferrari believes that this reflects scaled back efforts under pressure.