Performing Under Pressure

Anyone who has scraped by a deadline may believe that they do their
best work under pressure. A growing body of research, however, suggests
that there is no silver lining to procrastination. Instead, people may
procrastinate to stave off insecurity about failure.

Joseph R. Ferrari, Ph.D., a psychology professor at DePaul
University in Chicago, has found that procrastinators usually perform
more poorly than nonprocrastinators, even when he controlled for
intelligence. They also perform more slowly and less accurately when
carrying out difficult cognitive tasks under time constraints.

On the one hand, procrastinators enjoy the pleasure that
accompanies jittery nerves before a deadline, according to Ferrari. But
they also have less self-confidence than their peers. Procrastinators may
exert less effort because they want people to think that they're not
trying rather than believe that they are incapable.

In experiments reported in the
European Journal of Personality, procrastinators
completed less of a task than nonprocrastinators when given a strict time
limit, but fared almost as well with more time. Ferrari believes that
this reflects scaled back efforts under pressure.