The Journal

Am I lazy or procrastinating? The difference research draws

Procrastination has a precise meaning in the research literature, and laziness a plain one in the dictionary. They describe different things, the measurements overlap more than the usual reassurance admits, and the difference still matters, most of all when the word is said by one person in a house about another.

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The definition the research actually uses

The definition the field works from was set out by Piers Steel in a 2007 review in Psychological Bulletin, which pooled 691 correlations. Steel combined what the competing definitions had in common into one sentence: "to procrastinate is to voluntarily delay an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay". Later papers treat it as standard.

Voluntarily: nothing outside you is preventing the job. Intended: you had decided to do it, which is why the thousands of things you never planned are not being put off. Expecting to be worse off: you can see the cost coming and delay anyway. Take one away and what is left is some other kind of delay.

Voluntary there means unforced, not effortless. Steel reports in the same review that procrastination "does appear to often be involuntary", with procrastinators typically agreeing that "No matter how much I try, I still put things off" (r = .64).

What laziness would look like, and why the behaviour does not fit it

Longman defines lazy as "not liking work and physical activity, or not making any effort to do anything". The definition turns on inclination. A lazy person, in that sense, has no quarrel with the undone job: they never meant to do it.

Procrastination requires the opposite. Steel pooled the studies setting intended work against procrastination scores. Across eight studies and 1,017 participants the average correlation was −.03, effectively zero: procrastinators, he writes, "usually intend to work as hard as anyone else or harder". What differs is whether the intention is acted on, and that gap reverses as a deadline arrives: in the final hour, Steel reports, the procrastinator does more work than planned.

The other tell is how it feels: the person expects to be worse off, so they know, and they mind. The review by Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl discussed below lists shame, guilt and anxiety among the feelings linked to procrastination.

What the trait measures show, and where they overlap

Steel's review contains no measure called laziness; the word appears only in two historical quotations. The nearest measures are the traits people reach for when they say it, and procrastination overlaps with them heavily. Its average correlation with conscientiousness was −.62, across 20 studies and 4,012 people; with self-control −.58, across 21 studies; with need for achievement −.44, across 17.

When conscientiousness has been broken into components, Steel adds, the one that best represents procrastination was labelled Industriousness, standing for "rationality, efficiency, and hard work". So the usual reassurance, that procrastination has nothing to do with industry, is not what the measurements say. Part of the overlap is built in: one item on a standard self-discipline scale reads "Before working, I waste time", which is close to asking about procrastination directly.

What the overlap does not show is unwillingness. A low self-discipline score records a self-described habit of not getting down to work; it cannot tell apart the person who never meant to do it from the person who meant to and did not. The figure that separates them is the intention figure, −.03. These are correlations, mostly between questionnaires: they describe what travels together, not what causes what.

Delay that is not procrastination: waiting, sequencing, and a decision already made

Frode Svartdal and Efim Nemtcan, in Frontiers in Psychology in 2022, say at least three forms of delay should be told apart: strategic and rational delay, often necessary; inconsequential delay, unnecessary but harmless; and irrational delay, maladaptive given an intended goal, which their conclusion calls "the core problem in procrastination". Their example of a rational delay: waiting until tomorrow to mow the lawn because it is raining today.

A household produces a great deal of the first kind. You cannot book the plumber until the landlord replies: waiting. You cannot paint until the plaster has dried: sequencing. You looked at the tariffs and chose to stay put this year: a decision, and Steel likewise excludes cases where the original intention was to delay.

The same authors examined more than 175 items from 18 procrastination scales, found only two that weigh the coming cost at all, and warn that trivial delays judged harshly may inflate scores. Some of what you hold against yourself may not qualify, and jobs waiting on somebody else belong on a list of their own.

Short-term mood repair: what the delay is for

The explanation that bears most directly on this comes from Sirois and Pychyl, in Social and Personality Psychology Compass in 2013. It is a theoretical review, arguing from existing studies and reporting no new data; the authors call the trait research correlational and offer an account of the process behind it.

A job that is boring, frustrating or unclear produces a bad feeling when you turn towards it. Turning away removes the feeling at once. In a phrase they borrow, we "give in to feel good": present mood is repaired, and the cost passes to a future self who often ends up feeling worse.

The experimental support they lean on is a 2001 paper by Dianne Tice, Ellen Bratslavsky and Roy Baumeister. Across three experiments, people led to believe their bad mood could not be changed stopped giving in to impulses, and in the third the behaviour that stopped was procrastination. If delay stops when it can no longer improve a mood, improving the mood is what it was for. That is laboratory work, read here from its abstract, not a study of households.

Read as character, the only remedy for an undone job is to try harder. Read as mood repair, the problem points at a specific feeling attached to a specific job, and that is something a person can act on.

The word said out loud: what "lazy" costs inside a household

What follows is an argument about language, not a finding; no study cited here tested the word lazy in a home.

Lazy is a claim about inclination, and so about responsibility. Udo Rudolph and colleagues pooled 64 investigations with more than 12,000 participants in Cognition and Emotion in 2004 and reported that judgements of responsibility shape whether people feel anger or sympathy, and that those feelings in turn influence whether they help. Those studies concern help giving and aggression in general, not couples or housemates.

Inside a house the word closes the conversation. The available replies to "you're lazy" are a denial or a counter-charge, and neither mentions the job. And the person who says it never learns that the boiler call is being avoided because the last one ended in a dispute over an invoice, the one fact that would have moved it.

What to say instead: name the feeling, then name the job

For yourself, run the definition as three questions. Did I intend to do this? Is anything outside me stopping it? Do I expect to be worse off for waiting? Yes, no, yes is procrastination. A no to the first is a decision and a yes to the second is waiting; neither calls for guilt.

Then name the feeling attached to the job: boring, fiddly, likely to bring bad news, or no idea where to begin. Then name the job in a form small enough to start, which is the subject of this site's piece on why starting is harder than doing.

For someone else, ask about the job and not the person. "What is it about the boiler call?" can be answered. Often the useful move is a trade: you make the call, they wait in for the engineer.

Persistent low energy is a different matter, and this piece is not medical advice: the NHS says to see a GP if "you've been feeling tired for a few weeks and you're not sure why". Where the tiredness is the whole of it, "Burnt out, or just tired? What the word actually covers at home", elsewhere on this site, separates the three states that word covers and gives the evidence behind each.

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