Abstract
The purpose of the research was to analyze procrastination – a problem of time management that negatively affects the autonomy of people – in relation to leisure as a domain of everyday life. Specifically, the dynamics between leisure (activities and time invested – weekly frequency and duration of activity) and procrastination factors were studied. A sample of 185 university students (118 men and 67 women: Mage = 20.77 years, SDage = 2.53) answered a procrastination scale – validated for the Spanish population – which refers to four factors of procrastination (dilatory behaviors, indecision, lack of punctuality, and lack of planning) and an adaptation of the Time Budget (TB) (a table where the participants were asked to specify “the three activities that you prefer to do when you are not studying or doing a paid job”). Results show that leisure activities are associated with factors of procrastination. As a matter of fact, the different factors of procrastination were related to specific types of leisure activities, depending on the weekly frequency of the activity or its duration. In this sense, there are cases in which the greater frequency of leisure activities (hobbies and computing, social life and entertainment) seems to contain – control, inhibit – procrastination (specifically, affecting its component of indecision) variations in the weekly frequency and duration of certain type of activities result in higher or lower scores on certain factors of procrastination. In sum, the time invested in leisure can protect from or inhibit delaying tasks – which implies enhancing the autonomy of people – a deduction that opens up new lines of research to identify optimal time investments for coping with procrastination.
Highlights
The problem of time management known as procrastination has generated a large number of publications, due to its potential negative influence on the autonomy of people (Mouratidis et al, 2018; Won and Yu, 2018)
With the aim of discovering the dynamics of greater or less procrastination in relation to the time invested in leisure activities, the main characteristics of procrastination are described below, and later the evidence that justifies the analysis of this problem in conjunction with leisure
In order to evaluate the research hypotheses, a transversal predictive design was carried out – according to taxonomy proposed by Ato et al (2013) – in order to be able to predict which of the leisure activities has more impact on the aforementioned procrastination factors
Summary
The problem of time management known as procrastination has generated a large number of publications, due to its potential negative influence on the autonomy of people (Mouratidis et al, 2018; Won and Yu, 2018). Díaz-Morales et al (2006) validated an instrument, which in its Spanish language version, includes the General Procrastination Scale (GP: Lay, 1986), the Decisional Procrastination Questionnaire (DP: Mann, 1982), and the Adult Inventory of Procrastination (AIP: McCown and Johnson, 1989) This instrument contemplates four factors of procrastination: dilatory behaviors (“a summary of the predisposition to manifest intention-behavior gaps”), indecision (“putting off making a decision within some specific time frame”), lack of punctuality (“inability to work diligently on a task in order to meet a deadline”), and lack of planning (“lack of selfdiscipline needed to stay focused on a target task”). Apart from strengthening the corpus of scientific evidence regarding the relationships of procrastination with other aspects of life, specifying which leisure activities are more likely to increase procrastination levels (i.e., their factors) allows a planning and time management that would not diminish the person’s autonomy and development
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