Avoiding procrastination through time management: an experimental intervention study

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a short-term time management intervention on procrastination. Procrastination is a serious issue for many students and associated with different negative consequences, such as anxiety or low grades. As procrastination is described as a self-regulatory failure, a training programme focussing on self-regulatory skills might be helpful. We randomly assigned 96 students to a treatment (n = 47) and a control group (n = 49). As hypothesised, participants of the control group showed procrastination: they spent more time on a self-selected, important academic task right before the deadline was reached compared to the weeks before. The participants of the treatment group, instead, allocated their work time more equally and did not show procrastination. Therefore, the explored time management intervention prevents from a serious time management problem.

Keywords:

• time management
• procrastination
• planning
• training programme

Acknowledgements

We thank the Würth Industrie Service GmbH & Co. KG for the financial support of our research. We also thank Lydia Pinneker, Julia Hartmann and Sabine Ströhle for their contributions concerning the collecting and entering of the data as well as statistical analysis and preparation of tables and figures.