Thursday, Oct. 19
15:45 – 16:45 (1 hr)
Meeting Room: Beluga (3rd floor – B Tower)
Joseph Sadek*, MD, FRCPC, DABPN Professor of Psychiatry, Dalhousie University

CanMEDS Roles:

1. Communicator
2. Collaborator
3. Professional

At the end of this session, participants will be able to: 1) Describe important causes and effects of procrastination; 2) List useful steps in increasing work efficiency and overcoming procrastination; and 3) List some scales that are used to assess procrastination.

Procrastination is a prevalent form of maladaptive behavior and self-regulatory failure that is not entirely understood. Some researchers defined procrastination as a tendency to delay important tasks despite the negative consequences. A meta-analysis of procrastination’s possible causes and effects showed that strong and consistent predictors of procrastination were “task aversiveness, task delay, self-efficacy and impulsiveness, as well as conscientiousness and its facets of self-control, distractibility, organization, and achievement motivation.” Research guided by self-determination theory has focused on the social-contextual conditions that improve the natural processes of self-motivation and healthy psychological development. This workshop examines the different theories of procrastination, provides a link to different psychiatric disorders, and suggests specific management strategies for each condition.

References:

1. Symptoms on the relationship between procrastination and internalizing symptoms in the general adult population. Front Psychol 2021;12:708579.
2. Steel P. The nature of procrastination: a meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychol Bull 2007;133(1):6594.