The Next Step

People procrastinate because there is a tendency to get positive reinforcement for it from very early on in their lives. Academia is especially bad with this. The go-getters tend to be the ones doing extra work due to typos in assignments or late-in-the-game assignment changes, much to the procrastinators’ relative benefit. Sometimes assignments are canceled altogether or, in the case of one of my CS courses in college, are proven impossible by whoever tries it first.

What, then, is the incentive to work on these things sooner than we absolutely have to? No wonder everybody in the CS program learned to put their assignments off until the night before it was due. You can see the results of this in the business world where such behaviors really can hurt, but have been ingrained to such an extent (16+ years of education) so as to be hard for people to un-learn. Educators have to find a way to encourage proactive behavior or at the very least not reward procrastination.