Procrastination affects productivity in several ways. Whether you’re on a team or want to achieve success as an individual, procrastination can hinder your efforts to achieve your goals. This article will discuss the impact that this destructive habit has on both personal and group productivity.
Delaying Important Tasks Is Destructive
Ferrari, Johnson, and McCown described procrastination as voluntarily delaying an intended course of action despite being worse off for the delay. The habit of delaying important tasks develops when people constantly ignore or delay something that’s important because it’s difficult or unpleasant. Sometimes they may not be psychologically ready to take on the task.
Procrastinators are not lazy people. They are often very hard working and many are perfectionists, who think that they need to wait until the right time or when they have the right skills, to do a task well. Procrastinators often experience negative emotions, such as:
– Shame
– Guilt
– A sense of failure
– Depression
People who keep on putting off the things that they need to do to achieve their goals, eventually become demotivated and disillusioned. They may constantly beat themselves up over the things that they haven’t accomplished but they feel stuck in a rut.
Workplace Procrastination is An Active Process
Workplace procrastination is an active process. That is, you choose to delay doing something. Instead of taking action to achieve your goals, you pay attention to something else. If you keep doing this with your career goals and in the workplace, you’ll eventually find that you’re earning a lower salary than your peers.
Procrastinators experience lower spells of employment and are frequently underemployed. Nguyen, Steel and Ferrari showed that procrastination is a type of self-regulatory failure, which limits occupational attainment. Procrastination affects both work attainment and on the job performance. The work done by these researchers shows that if someone wants to achieve more on the job, procrastination will need to become a thing of the past.
Completing Low Priority Tasks
People who procrastinate tend to complete low-priority tasks, so the team’s overall goals are not pushed forward significantly. Even when they set a high-priority task for the day, it does not get done because they go off to do something unimportant, like buy donuts for the department. Even though they are getting things done that are related to the job, the impact of these tasks is relatively small, so their progress is modest.
This particular type of procrastination leads to decreased productivity in every sector, affecting lawyers, educators, and auto mechanics. For example, if a mechanic has to change an engine and they spend their time on low-priority tasks such as checking a logbook, checking tires, and so on, they may be doing tasks related to the main job but until they actually get started on the main job, they won’t really achieve the thing that’s most important to them.
Wasting Time On Non-Related tasks
Procrastinators may sometimes waste time on tasks that are not related to their core purpose. For example, if they have a set of reports to complete, instead of doing those, they may spend thirty minutes in the break room, browse emails without making decisions on the action they want to take with them and even send wasteful memos to coworkers for an hour.
While this type of procrastination does not affect all procrastinators, it is extremely non productive.
A consistent procrastinator can waste two hours a day at work, on tasks such as sending memos that don’t need to be sent or visiting the office next door. This means that in the course of a week, they would waste 10 hours.
This is an invisible cost but it impacts profitability. While it’s obvious that this behavior is wasteful, it can be just as unproductive as a hard-working procrastinator who wastes their time on tasks that are related to their work but are not a priority. Wasting time on non-related tasks can throw off your team
Decreased Work Engagement
People who procrastinate have a decrease in work engagement. Cropanzano and Wright showed that people who are more engaged have an increase in workflow, optimism and confidence. Conversely, we could expect that people who are not as engaged will have a decrease in these factors, leading to a decrease in productivity.
If someone is not engaged at work, they will not be as confident about the tasks they need to complete and they will be less optimistic about the outcomes of any effort they decide to put towards a task at work.
Some hard-working employees realize that they are procrastinating with certain tasks, but they are too stressed, distracted and overwhelmed to change. In this case, steps can be taken by the organization to remove the obstacles that lead to procrastination. A study by the Ernst and Young Productivity Pulse has shown that the percentage of workers who are distracted on the job and cannot do their best as a result, is about 50%.
As early as in 1977, Ellis and Knaus showed that some procrastinators give up if the work they are required to do seems too difficult. Technology such as Facebook and Snapchat can cause employees to lose valuable hours, as they choose to use these apps instead of tackling activities that they would prefer to avoid.
Friction Between Employees
Procrastination can cause friction between employees, as one person needs a specific task done by a particular time and another wants to delay doing it out of fear or another emotional factor. This friction contributes further to decreased productivity on teams, because team members feel that they are not understood, may not want to work with others in the future or even feel that they are being used.
Dr. Yseult Freeney of Dublin City University has studied the way in which procrastination affects working relationships in all sectors. He states that it is difficult for team members who value things like discipline, to work comfortably with those who do not seem to value timeliness or behave in other ways that are contrary to productivity. Procrastination affects productivity in a variety of ways but procrastinators can change.