By June Ramli
Perth, Feb 9: Have you been procrastinating your assignment… again?
If you’re a mature student juggling work, study, and personal responsibilities, procrastination often has very little to do with laziness.
More often, it’s about overwhelm, emotional friction, or the mental load that comes with trying to do everything at once.
I know this firsthand. As a mature student myself, completing assignments while working can feel disproportionately hard — not because the work is impossible, but because starting feels heavier than it should. So instead of blaming myself, I looked at what productivity experts, founders, therapists, and psychologists actually say about procrastination.
A clear pattern emerged: procrastination isn’t about the task — it’s about what the task represents.
Productivity expert Monisha Longacre, Founder and CEO of Productivity 101 and author of Practical Productivity, encourages people to start by understanding the root cause:
“First, I ask them to think about why? Are they delaying the work because it’s too overwhelming? Too difficult? Not important? Something else? Based on this analysis they can find a way forward.”
That “why” can be surprisingly small — or deeply emotional.
Zeyuan Gu, CEO & Founder at Adzviser LLC, shared a simple but revealing example:
“The bulb in the hallway went out, and for some reason I just… didn’t replace it… This went on for about two weeks… When I finally did it, the whole thing took less than two minutes… It was a good reminder that procrastination often isn’t about the size of the task, but the mental friction we attach to it.”
For others, procrastination is shaped by past experiences.
Anu Verma, founder of Victim 2 Victor, described avoiding the task of finding a business partner after a previous bad experience:
“I realised I was protecting myself from past wounds rather than responding to the present. I learnt that procrastination is not always about the task itself, but about unresolved experiences that make us hesitate to trust again.”
Mental health professionals echoed this emotional dimension again and again. Joel Blackstock, Clinical Director at Taproot Therapy Collective, described procrastination as a nervous system response rather than a motivation problem:
“I realized I was in a state of ‘functional freeze’ where the task felt like a threat to my nervous system… It was a humble reminder that procrastination isn’t about laziness; it’s about emotional regulation.”
He also explained why many people rely on last-minute pressure to finally begin:
“We often tell clients that they aren’t actually procrastinating; they are self-medicating with their own stress hormones… By waiting until the last minute, you manufacture a crisis that dumps cortisol and adrenaline into your system.”
While that strategy may work in the short term, Monisha Longacre warns that it comes with real consequences. In Practical Productivity, she explains that procrastination reduces flexibility and resilience:
“If you procrastinate, your ability to deal with unforeseen emergencies is severely limited… You leave yourself with no breathing room.”
She also points out something many busy adults don’t realise until much later:
“For me, the biggest reason I don’t like to procrastinate is because I want to be open to opportunities that may come my way… procrastination quietly steals flexibility from your life.”
Across all the responses, one theme kept repeating: progress doesn’t come from willpower — it comes from reducing resistance.
Psychologist Daria Zalivnova, Head of Preventive Programs and private practitioner, summed it up with a practical, body-first approach:
“Don’t wait to feel ready. Physically move your body into the task’s starting position… Action creates motivation, not the other way around.”
For mature students especially, the takeaway is reassuring: procrastination is not a personal failure. It’s often a signal — of stress, fear, perfectionism, or overload. The solution isn’t to push harder, but to make starting safer, smaller, and more human.
Sometimes, the hardest part really is just opening the document — or screwing in the light bulb.
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