Turtle, Task Ninja, or Time Waster? Who Cares? Traditional Task-Completion Strategies Are Overrated
Abstract
Standard approaches for identifying task-completion strategies, such as precrastination and procrastination, reduce behavior to single markers that oversimplify the process of task completion. To illustrate this point, we consider three task-completion strategies and introduce a new method to identify their use. This approach was tested using an archival data set (N = 8,655) of the available electronic records of research participation at Kansas State University. The approach outperformed standard diagnostic approaches and yielded an interesting finding: Several strategies were associated with negative outcomes. Specifically, both procrastinators and precrastinators struggled to finish tasks on time. Together, these findings underscore the importance of using holistic approaches to determine the relationship among task characteristics, individual differences, and task completion.
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Individuals who complete a task at the same time can exhibit very different temporal patterns of work progress.
“However, individuals who complete a task at the same time can exhibit very different temporal patterns of work progress28–30.”
From Temporal discounting predicts procrastination in the real world (2024) · cites this paper as [29]
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- Authors
- Vangsness, L., & Young, M. E.
- Affiliations
- Wichita State University (US)
- Kansas State University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Vangsness, Lisa
- Venue
- Psychological Science
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2020-02-26
- Volume
- 31
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 306-315
- ISSN
- 0956-7976 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-9280
- OpenAlex
- W3007789011
- Cited by
- 15
- References
- 36
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 4 · 2020: 2
- FWCI
- 0.89
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Psychological Science (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Holmes Museum Of Anthropology (Wichita State University) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Perfectionism, Procrastination, Anxiety Studies
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Grit, Self-Efficacy, and Motivation
- Keywords
- procrastination, task completion, research participation, electronic records, task characteristics, individual differences
- MeSH terms
- Procrastination, Adolescent, Adult, Cognition, Decision Making, Female, Humans, Individuality, Male, Middle Aged, Motivation, Task Performance and Analysis, Young Adult
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