The Important Link Between Self-Efficacy and Procrastination
Many people struggle with procrastination, when they unnecessarily delay doing things such as completing assignments, dealing with household tasks, or working on passion projects. This can lead to various issues, such as worse performance, missed opportunities, and increased stress.
Because of this, it’s important to understand what causes procrastination, and to find ways to overcome it. The following article will help you with this, by presenting an important psychological concept called “self-efficacy”, showing how it relates to procrastination, and explaining how you can use it to reduce procrastination.
Self-efficacy is a person’s belief in their ability to perform the actions needed to achieve their goals. For example, if a student thinks that they will be able to successfully do everything that they need in order to get a good grade on a paper (e.g., background research, writing, and editing), then they have high self-efficacy in this context. Conversely, if a student thinks that they won’t be able to do what they need in order to get a good grade, for instance because they think that they aren’t able to write well enough, then they have low self-efficacy in this context.
Self-efficacy can be domain-specific. For example, a student might have high academic self-efficacy, but low social self-efficacy, meaning they believe more in their ability to perform academic tasks than social tasks.
