Eunho Kim, an 18-year-old student at Waseda University in Japan, was supposed to spend four hours studying for midterms. Instead, he spent three of them scrolling YouTube Shorts.
"I doomscrolled for hours," Kim said.
He is not alone in his experience. “Time flew by incredibly fast. I didn’t even notice it," said Kiyoon Kim, a 20-year-old male currently serving in the South Korean military, recalling the time when he traded a final-exam study session for an all-night Instagram binge. "The voice in my head said: I have enough time to study, don't worry,” Kim said. “I thought that the procrastination was not that deep,” he added.
Kim has plenty of company. Estimates compiled in Piers Steel's 2007 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin suggest that 80 to 95 percent of college students struggle with experiences of procrastination.
Our inclination to procrastinate led to a nine-figure industry. Since 2022, a wave of AI productivity tools, including Motion, Reclaim.ai, Sunsama, and the scheduling assistants built into Notion, has promised to remove the friction between task and deadline by handing planning over to an algorithm. Motion announced $60 million in funding in September 2025 at a $550 million valuation. Dropbox, with roughly 18 million paying subscribers, acquired Reclaim.ai in August 2024. The premise underlying these tools is the one psychologists have been arguing about for decades: that delaying action is a defect that needs to be corrected.
A line of cognitive-science research, however, argues that procrastination—at least at times—needs no fixing. In a 2020 target article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences titled "Resource-Rational Analysis: Understanding Human Cognition as the Optimal Use of Limited Computational Resources," Falk Lieder of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and Thomas Griffiths of Princeton proposed a framework that recasts many so-called cognitive biases as optimal computation under bounded resources.
Their central claim is that any mind, like any system with finite time and finite computation, must decide how to spend its limited time and effort. Effort spent on one task is effort not spent on another: so deferring a task can be optimal whenever something more valuable needs to be done during the same hour. Behaviors that may seem irrational can turn out to be optimal, in the context of what you currently have (or don’t have).
In this view, procrastination, at least sometimes, is legitimate and acceptable. What many computational cognitive scientists call rational deferral, procrastination works when you’re waiting until you can produce better work. Here, you’re giving yourself time for additional information that is often necessary to completing the task.
Picture an essay assigned Friday with a prompt, for example:
- Analyze the relationship between two of the texts read in class.
Which two texts would produce the strongest essay? What relationship is the professor actually looking for? Time will allow for more information. The professor will have said more about the assignment in class. A classmate will have asked helpful questions in class. In contrast, a student who started writing before such information—someone who hasn’t procrastinated—may have begun writing without the additional (and useful) information.
There is another time when procrastination works effectively. In a 2009 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin, Ut Na Sio and Thomas Ormerod reviewed decades of laboratory experiments on what psychologists call the incubation effect. They found that setting a problem aside for a period and returning to it later improves performance and results.
Across the studies they analyzed, incubation periods produced reliable gains, and the benefits were strongest for divergent-thinking tasks: problems that have multiple solutions rather than one. Choosing which two texts to pair, or what relationship between them to argue, is exactly the kind of problem that requires divergent-thinking. For tasks with a creative component, the night spent not writing may be doing some of the writing.
Of course, not every researcher agrees with such a generous interpretation of procrastination. The most widely cited account of procrastination developed by Timothy Pychyl and Fuschia Sirois across two decades of work, frames the behavior as something else entirely. According to Pychyl and Sirois, procrastination is not benign or productive. It is a behavior that has to do with us trying to get away from emotions. People procrastinate, because the task triggers negative feelings like anxiety, boredom, and self-doubt. Avoiding the task relieves the feeling.
The voices of the two Kims described, you have enough time, don't worry and it wasn't that deep, are mood-repair scripts that the theory argues procrastinators say to themselves. The relief is real and short-term; the danger, though, is that the cost of the deferred task, also, is real and long-term.
Dianne Tice and Roy Baumeister, in a 1997 study in Psychological Science, reported the same observation: those who procrastinate report better mood early on but express higher stress, achieve worse grades, and suffer from more illness as the time passes. The realization of emotional distress later on is the signature characteristics of procrastination.
Most procrastination falls into the category Pychyl and Sirois suggest: avoidance in the service of short-term mood repair. In that case, you are not strategically waiting for the right time to start the task. Both Kims reported wishing to have started their work earlier. “I would’ve understood the materials better if I began looking at them earlier,” Eunho Kim said.
It’s helpful to think that not all procrastination is created equal. Before declaring your inclination to procrastinate as bad or benign, ask the following three questions:
- 1. Will new information arrive between now and the deadline that changes how the task should be done?
- 2. Does the task have a divergent or creative component the unconscious might genuinely help with overnight?
- 3. Is something more valuable competing for the same hour?
If the answer to any of these is a yes, rational deferral is the optimizer behaving correctly, and pushing through to start immediately may produce worse work than waiting. If the answer to all three is no, the procrastination falls into the description provided by Pychyl and Sirois: buying ten minutes of mood repair against the cost of a worse outcome.
Whatever Motion's valuation is next quarter, productivity apps might be able to provide aid for how to start. The decision whether now is the time to start on that work, though, is yours.
Sources cited inline:
- Lieder, F., & Griffiths, T. L. (2020). Resource-rational analysis. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 43, e1.
- Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65–94.
- Sio, U. N., & Ormerod, T. C. (2009). Does incubation enhance problem solving? Psychological Bulletin, 135(1), 94–120.
- Tice, D. M., & Baumeister, R. F. (1997). Longitudinal study of procrastination, performance, stress, and health. Psychological Science, 8(6), 454–458.
- Pychyl, T. A., & Sirois, F. M. (various). Work on procrastination as emotion regulation.
- Motion: $60M raise at $550M valuation, September 2025.
- Dropbox / Reclaim.ai acquisition, August 2024.
Interviews:
- Eunho Kim, Waseda University.
- Kiyoon Kim, currently serving in the South Korean military.
- Wills JeongHwan Maw, recent graduate of UNC Chapel Hill