When you have something urgent to do, do you do something entirely different, instead?
Click start to play today’s Word Search, where you can find the word “delay”.
Procrastination comes from the Latin verb procrastinaire, which means to put off till tomorrow. It also has Greek roots, from the word akrasia, which means doing something against our better judgment. So, the idea is – we know we’re not supposed to be doing this other, less important task instead of the one we’re meant to do, still, we do it anyway.
According to a March 2019 report in US-based news website, The New York Times, we don’t procrastinate because of an intrinsic character flaw or even our inability to manage time properly. It’s actually because of an emotion regulation issue.
In a 2013 study published in the online journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass, researchers from the UK-based University of Sheffield found that procrastination is just our way of coping with the negative moods and emotions that come about from certain tasks, like anxiety, insecurity, boredom, and frustration. We procrastinate because we focus on the immediate urgency of managing those moods, which becomes a priority over completing the task.
While some of the emotions we face are transient, others go much deeper, into our evaluation of self. For instance, if you have to write a report for your boss, you might start to do so, but end up staring at a blank page, consumed with self-doubt. You might even have a crisis of self-esteem and ask, “Am I good enough to do this job?”
Those negative emotions become associated with writing that particular report, and procrastination doesn’t do any good – the negativity is still there even when you return to the document after a short break to reorganise your spice drawer in the kitchen. But the momentary relief we find in avoiding our urgent tasks, are what drive us to procrastinate over and over again.
It’s a vicious cycle, and something most people do. It’s so prevalent that researchers around the world are studying this issue in-depth, and the body of research dedicated to procrastination is called procrastinatory cognitions.
Are you avoiding a task at this very moment? Well, you might as well have a little fun and solve today’s Word Search! Let us know if you enjoyed it at games@gulfnews.com.
