PSYC313 - Time Management Reading

Aims:

• are people willing to impose meaningful (costly) deadlines to overcome procrastination?
• are self-imposed deadlines effective in improving task performance?
• when self-imposing deadlines, do people set them optimally, for maximum performance enhancement?

Pilot: people are willing to impose early deadlines for themselves, strategically
Results:

• If people impulsively procrastinate and are aware that they do so, people are willing to commit to early/costly deadline in order to overcome it.
• Self-imposed deadlines do not enhance performance however, as much as externally imposed deadlines.
• Performance is lower when deadlines are self-imposed compared to externally evenly spaced deadlines, but better than maximally delayed deadlines.

Correlational study between procrastination, efficacy expectations (the ability to propduce desired or intended results) anxiety, gender and age

Wanted to investigate the relationship bewtween efficacy expectations towards an important project and procrastination, using a self-report questionnaire.

• Efficacy strength was an inverse predictor of procrastination: individuals with strong efficacy expecations (those who can impose positive behaviours to acheive desired or intended results) tended to report less procrastination.
• Anxiety did not contribute to the variance associated with procrastination

Intervention: an efficacy intervention is needed in order to overcome procrastination.
Self-efficacy needs to be explained, and tasks need to be devised and executed to promite strong self-efficacy in students to overcome procrastination. This will also involve identifying those students who are prone to procrastination and targetting them for the efficacy intervention.

Invesigated self-regulation as a predictor of academic procrastination, using self-report methods of academic procrastination and the academic motivation scale.

Suggests that people have different motivations for furthering their education at university.

• Intrinsic: doing something for the sheer pleasure of it
• Extrinsic: actions or behaviours performed due to externally coerced forces

Results:

• Correlation indicates that those students who have more intrinsic/autonomous motivational  reasons for attending university report less procrastination than those who have more extrinsic/less-autonomous reasons for attending university.
• Self-regulation accounted for more than 25% of procrastination variance

Concludes that procrastination is related to a motivatiaonal problem.

Assessed whether time-management is related to college acheivement.

Time management practices are largely affected by individual differences and take perserverence in order to improve and perfect. Analogous to a computer, due to it's limited processing resources - time.

Hypotheses: students with well-developed time-management skills will accomplish more intellectually and will thus acheive better grades, even if time-management is minimal, but effective and structured.

Results:

• Self-reports of time management are related to college performance
• Time-management skills are also a predictor of SAT scores (academic attainment measure)