After having read about procrastination and active delay and finding them fascinating last semester, I'm here in this self-efficacy class now hearing that it might just be a fad that we like to attribute to something we aren't efficacious about in order to satisfy ourselves. While I was a little reticent to accept this concept at first, it kind of became clear to me within the span of an hour that Bandura's ephemeral conception of procrastination could just be a little more adaptive than trying to label it as 'slacking off', or calling it active delay to make it sound a little more pleasant. It goes to the root of those concepts with its elegant use of flow charts.
hello darkness my old friend.
Why do we need to look at that procrastination as something that painfully separates us from our end in view rather than as the nothingness between the periods where we actually have efficacy to do the task at hand? Doesn't this make life a bit easier and allow us to go do other things that might be seemingly 'mindless' but that we have the efficacy to derive pleasure from at that point of time? Why do we need to say that scrolling on Instagram is a 'bad thing' while we laze around in between assignments? Why can't it just be something we need or feel efficacious to do to get back on track and master something or perform?
Personally, I think that outlook is what guides this, and looking at it by labeling procrastination so explicitly and unfavorably could be what causes us to be so demotivated often, telling ourselves we're no good or can't get any work done. One might argue saying that
procrastination does exist, but to that, I'd say that it only exists because we have the inner tendency to label so many things, give them a name and a connotation, and make things complicated for ourselves as a race. However, as Dewey says we act rationally, and it indeed does quell our worry to label things and give them a name and this forms the rationale behind it, but are we looking at how it can come back to bite us later?
I definitely agree that not all the time we spend doing "mindless" things like scrolling Instagram are a bad thing. In fact, I think doing those things is good for staying entertained and giving yourself a break. But when we (students) do those things when we had planned to do important, meaningful tasks, that's where the negative aspects come in. I'm borrowing this next passage from Wolters, Won, & Hussain (2017):
ReplyDeleteIn large part, research has supported this deleterious view of procrastination. Studies consistently show that increased procrastination is associated with lower levels of learning or decreased academic performance (Ferrari 2004; Kim and Seo 2013; Pychyl et al. 2000; Tice and Baumeister 1997). Procrastination also has been linked repeatedly to negative indicators of individuals’ physical health, well-being and job performance (Kim and Seo 2013; Schouwenburg et al. 2004).
I don't think we've just made up the term procrastination because we wanted to give those behaviors a negative connotation, but because people have consistently reported that they, generally speaking, lead to maladaptive outcomes