How Can I Help My High School Procrastinator?

When procrastination is starting to get in the way of a student’s academic success, your support can make a big difference.

You asked: My 15-year-old has always been a procrastinator — he claims he needs the pressure of a deadline to inspire him. I’m sympathetic to that, but now that he’s in high school, waiting until the last minute means he’s turning in sloppy, unfinished work and projects. This is also the first year he’s taken an outside class for grades that “count” on his transcript, and it’s frustrating to see his work not reflecting his abilities. How can I help him stop putting work off until the last possible minute?

When it comes to procrastination, there are basically two kinds: functional and dysfunctional. It sounds like for a lot of his life your son has engaged in functional procrastination — he might put his work off until the last minute, but he’d get it done in the end by putting in a last-minute push. Now, though, he’s hitting high school, where longer —term planning is often required to get work done, and his procrastination has become dysfunctional. He might get the work done on time, but he’s not getting it done well. He knows what he needs to do, but he’s not able to push himself to do it. The work he’s doing has changed, but his method for dealing with it hasn’t—and if his procrastination goes unchecked, you’re right that he’s looking at a lower GPA than his intelligence level might indicate, not to mention increased stress levels and academic anxiety.

The great thing is that you’re recognizing that procrastination is a problem now, while the stakes are fairly low. In a few years, a procrastination habit could mean failing out of college, losing a job or blowing an internship, but right now you have a window when the cost of procrastination is high enough to motivate your student to make some changes but still low enough that he doesn’t have to shoulder major consequences.

The root of procrastination lies in our brain chemistry. People who procrastinate tend to believe that they must be in a good mood to tackle a task they consider uninteresting; when given a choice between two options, who wouldn’t choose the one that seems more fun? Most people will sigh, buckle down, and get to work anyway, but chronic procrastinators keep choosing Option B. For chronic procrastinators, short-term mood repair takes precedence: Chronic procrastinators want to eliminate the negative mood or emotions now, so they give in to feel good. They give in to the impulse to put off the task until another time, explains Tim Pychyl, procrastination researcher at Carleton University and the author of Solving the Procrastination Puzzle. The problem, says Pychyl, is that teens who procrastinate vastly overestimate how much motivation they actually need to do something. It may be hard to work up the motivation to write an entire essay, but you don’t need a lot of motivation to make a list of sources for an essay.

In other words, the key to beating procrastination is to break tasks down into parts so small and specific that your student can feel totally confident he’ll be able to succeed in them. The easiest way to do this is to help him figure out how to focus on time — say “let’s set the timer and work on this for just five minutes” — or task —“let’s do just this first math problem right now.”

So say your son has a biology quiz coming up on Friday. Usually, he’d wait until Thursday night and cram, but that’s not been working out so well for him. So instead, encourage him to try to do something small—review five biology terms or recopy his notes from chapter one. Or perhaps he has an essay due—he has a great idea but can’t seem to get motivated to start working until it’s late at night and he’s got to finish the whole thing in one big rush. Instead of trying to get him to sit down to finish the whole thing, encourage him to spend just 15 minutes writing the first body paragraph before dinner. Sometimes, he may be inspired to keep going once he’s started—sometimes just getting started lowers the bar enough for a procrastinator to complete a task. Sometimes, he may just do the discrete task he’s outlined. Either way, making the task specific, small, and concrete is the most effective way to help your son rewire his thinking about big projects.

Don’t expect long-term habits to change quickly. Your son may be totally committed to changing his habits and still need a lot of consistent help and support from you to make it happen. Procrastination can be hardest to combat in kids who have executive function or attention deficit issues, but patient persistence can make a big difference for all kids.

This Q&A was originally published in the fall 2018 issue of HSL.

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