THE RESEARCH

In the Spring of 2023, the Office of First Year Writing administered a questionnaire to 708 students in English 1101 and 1121 courses at City Tech asking them what obstacles they were concerned about facing throughout the semester . Of these students, 285 mentioned time management (40%) and 264 mentioned procrastination (37%). Even more concerning to us was the fact that, when asked what they intended to do to overcome their obstacles, 462 students (65%) reported with internalized responsibility— a sense that they needed to solve the problem themselves without asking for help and by just… not having the problem any more (the most common solution to procrastination was, for example, “I need to stop procrastinating”). This indicated to us that, not only are many students unaware of college resources available to them but also that students are uncomfortable with asking for help.

Thus, the Procrastination Station was born! We decided this site would be a good first step to help students with procrastination and time management issues, to provide them with guides for asking professors for help and to provide professors with help for talking about procrastination and time management.  We are hoping to add more resources both on this site and off, such as videos with students and an in-person procrastination station at the Writing Center. Stay Tuned!!

City Tech Student Survey:

As you’ve read over and over on this site, countless scientific studies show us that procrastination is an issue of negative emotions related to the task at hand (in our case, usually school or writing.) These emotions tend to fall into the following categories:

  • Embarrassment, or fear of appearing stupid

  • Not knowing where to begin

  • Not understanding the assignment

  • Anxiety or distraction--contrary to popular belief, studies indicate that the cell phone does not cause distraction, so much as that it’s a symptom of distraction. However:

  • Cell phone addiction appears to afflict approximately 4% of the population.

Dealing with procrastination is not a one-solution problem (it’s not even a one-problem problem!) but in all cases, the solution calls for kindness. The research tells us that there is no instance in which berating oneself or someone else will improve their relationship to procrastination. To read more on the science of procrastination, take a look at these activities for students or these ideas for lesson planning. You may also want to look at the sources we’ve put together for students in our Later Library— or click here for a folder full of the other sources we used to research this site.

Procrastination:

Time Management:

Our student survey did also indicate something most City Tech professors already know, which is that our students are busy. Many of them work full-time, go to school full-time and are caretakers to boot. On our “Time Tips” page, we decided to provide resources for students to help them work on scheduling. In some ways, time management is less complicated than procrastination; it doesn’t include the affective component, but our students are definitely up against trying to schedule more into one day than there is time to complete. They may also underestimate the amount of time schoolwork takes, or they may not take into account that one has to schedule time for the unexpected.

We’ve also added an important section on “non-traditional time management.” This is for folks who may be neurodivergent, have chronic health concerns, or have otherwise unpredictable schedules. It’s important that both learners and professors understand that traditional hourly scheduling does not work well for everyone.