Steel (2007): The Nature of Procrastination
Piers Steel's 2007 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin pooled results from hundreds of studies to identify what reliably predicts procrastination: task aversiveness, delay of reward, low self-efficacy and impulsiveness. It found procrastination is fundamentally a self-regulation failure, not laziness, and barely related to perfectionism, and proposed temporal motivation theory to explain it.
| Citation | Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65–94. |
|---|---|
| Study type | Meta-analysis of 691 correlations across several hundred studies |
| Key predictors found | Impulsiveness, low conscientiousness, task aversiveness, reward delay, low self-efficacy |
| Weak/no predictors | Perfectionism (near zero), intelligence, sensation seeking |
| Prevalence noted | 80–95% of college students procrastinate; ~15–20% of adults chronically |
What the study found
Across the pooled literature, the strongest individual predictors of procrastination were impulsiveness and low self-discipline (facets of conscientiousness), followed by task characteristics: we delay tasks that are aversive and whose rewards are distant. Popular explanations fared badly, perfectionism, long blamed for procrastination in self-help writing, showed essentially no relationship once other traits were controlled.
Why it matters
This paper reframed procrastination from a character flaw into a predictable interaction between a person's self-regulation capacity and a task's structure. Every effective technique on this site works by changing one of the variables Steel identified: making tasks less aversive, rewards more immediate, starting easier, or impulses harder to act on.
Caveats
Meta-analysis inherits the limits of its inputs: most underlying studies used student samples and self-report questionnaires, and correlations can't establish causation. Later experimental and longitudinal work has broadly supported the framework.
Peer-reviewed meta-analysis, Psychological Bulletin (APA). One of the most cited papers in the procrastination literature.
Related
Temporal discountingTechniques that target these predictors
Frequently asked questions
Does this study say procrastination is genetic?
Not directly: it identifies trait impulsiveness as a key predictor, and later twin studies (e.g. Gustavson et al., 2014) found procrastination and impulsivity share substantial heritable variance. Heritable does not mean unchangeable: the environmental levers are exactly what techniques manipulate.
What is temporal motivation theory in one sentence?
Motivation rises with a reward's value and your expectancy of getting it, and falls with delay and your sensitivity to delay, so we act when a task's 'motivational maths' beats the alternatives, which for distant deadlines happens far too late.