"You see, procrastinators tend to be people who have, for whatever reason, developed to perceive an unusually strong association between their performance and their value as a person. This makes failure or criticism disproportionately painful, which leads naturally to hesitancy when it comes to the prospect of doing anything that reflects their ability — which is pretty much everything."
I disagree.
My reasons for procrastination go like this:
1. I don't know yet how to tackle the problem. (and I munge on it in the back of my mind while procrastinating)
2. I am tired, but don't want to admit it. (and procrastination is faux rest)
3. I'm pushing off committing to doing X because finally jumping in is scary. (it closes options to doing something else and humans would rather do nothing and have many options than do something and have no options)
4. X just isn't that important to me right now. (it's much easier to clean the kitchen before cooking, than randomly in the middle of the day)
Those all sound like some form of fear to me. 1 sounds like fear of incompetence: You don't know how to solve the problem, but that's just because "you aren't really thinking about it", so you protect yourself from the idea that you might actually be clueless. #2 happens to me a lot, and it's being afraid that resting/sleeping will prevent you from getting work done (which may be true, but if a nap is going to make things late, it's already too late)
No, it's not a fear of incompetence. It's seriously just a problem of working out what exactly I want to do.
Good case in point from this week: "Write a book chapter on d3 layouts".
Now that's a very vague task and it takes some thinking to even get started on it. You have to even decide what the first step towards a solution is and once you do have it, you then have to do the creative part of figuring out how to write about it.
Creative tasks in particular do not resolve themselves with a focused step-by-step approach, you must solve them by procrastinating (ie. slowly thinking about them freely).
Completely agree on point 3; fear of success is a big issue when it comes to side projects and the like, or in another form, fear of what the future/task looks like once the project is underway. There's also an aspect of enjoying the planning stage more than the execution stage, which is common in "analysis paralysis" type procrastination situations.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned ADD/ADHD yet; continually starting and not following through is a classic behaviour, though procrastination is a slightly different beastie, I can see a relationship here. In that case I would characterise it less as procrastination for your, or the OP's, reasons; and more procrastination because the brain cannot grab on and commit to the task, so it goes and does something (ten things) different instead.
Well, maybe you're not a procrastinator, but simply a lazy person? :) [just kidding]
1. I see it differently. I usually know/see some first approximation that could be easy to do (and fixed later when better solutions comes up), but I'm totally resisting to do what I perceive as inferior solution. My procrastination may be even about finding this better solution and the problem is that I am holding the progress at all just because I'm fiddling with getting something super right atm, which is rarely really needed (almost never). My performance is perceived by others as non-existent, because I'm paying attention to details that may not even really matter.
2. This one is the obvious one, but it's not the main procrastination problem. 10% at most. Well, until you're constantly working at night for instance (because of your procrastination) and you're becoming constantly tired through the day - then you're making being tired a sad routine. It's procrastination force feedback, but again, it's not the main reason for procrastination as I see it.
3. Starting doing real job is somewhat "scary", true, but it's often simply the effect of 1.
4. If you can postpone something, it's obviously not that important to you right now or you feel that there is enough time to do it a bit later (and you feel it will be a quick thing, which isn't always the case, many times also because of the perfection factor).
In the end, despite aiming for perfection, I often have to make cuts, go with worse (in my eyes) solution, because there is no time for "playing" and deadline is already behind me. This is the worst.
I disagree as well. My reasons for procrastination tend to fall around artificially creating a high stress situation. You see, I perform very well (very high productivity) under stress, to the extent that high performance may actually be a stress coping mechanism for stress.
I certainly do not procrastinate because I'm lazy, or have poor work ethic, or even risk averse. You can ask my family about that one. None of them would describe me as risk averse.
For me, it really comes down to stress as a motivator. Procrastination means doing things at the last moment, which creates an artificially stressful situation.
It may also be interesting to note that I do not suffer from any traditional high stress related health issues. My doctor recently commented that I am in exceptional health for my age (mid-thirties)
Usually the 'work better under stress' is a fallacy that procrastinators use. Timothy Pychyl puts it this way: 'It's not that you work better under pressure, it's that you only work under pressure.'
But - I like your coping mechanism theory, that's worth exploring.
If the kitchen is dirty, I'd rather order in. When I absolutely have to clean dishes (so we can eat), is when I hate it the most. Plus, I hate knowing that the kitchen will be dirty again straight after cooking. I'd rather do them some where in the middle, start or end of the day when there's no pressure and I can just use the time cleaning to think over my thoughts.
I disagree.
My reasons for procrastination go like this:
1. I don't know yet how to tackle the problem. (and I munge on it in the back of my mind while procrastinating)
2. I am tired, but don't want to admit it. (and procrastination is faux rest)
3. I'm pushing off committing to doing X because finally jumping in is scary. (it closes options to doing something else and humans would rather do nothing and have many options than do something and have no options)
4. X just isn't that important to me right now. (it's much easier to clean the kitchen before cooking, than randomly in the middle of the day)