Many students in higher education procrastinate regularly. They do this despite the painful price of putting off studying for tests, writing papers and doing other academic tasks: worse grades (or outright failure), stress, shame, lack of sleep and much more.
Helping students overcome their procrastination is easier said than done, however. Our best efforts are often ineffective or, worse, counterproductive. So educators need to consider a collaborative approach, while taking into account students’ needs and practical constraints such as the number of students you’re dealing with.
Why collaboration can help overcome procrastination
Approaches to addressing students’ procrastination can be externally or internally led. At one end of the spectrum, educators take charge fully; at the other, the students take the lead.
The more externally led our approach, the more we as educators take responsibility for setting up and managing the systems that keep students on track. A typical example is unpacking a project into steps and assigning an intermediate deadline for each part, without explaining why or involving students in the process.
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This approach provides the structure and accountability that students need. However, it doesn’t directly teach them how to avoid procrastinating when this external structure is absent. That might get them through our course but it won’t prepare them for what comes next. And that is crucial given that procrastination is a major obstacle to entering the workplace and thriving once there; it can interfere with everything from interview preparation to project completion.
A more internally led approach, meanwhile, shows students that they are expected to handle their procrastination on their own. For example, the instructor sets a single deadline at the end of the course and warns students not to wait for the last minute, with possibly some direction as to how to do it.
This approach pushes students towards self-reliance and autonomous motivation. Realistically, though, many students may get lost without the external structure and accountability, even if it’s rooted in good intentions of empowering them.
The ideal solution, then, is a more collaborative approach to helping students overcome procrastination, where educator and students share active and explicit responsibility for helping the latter avoid procrastinating. This should strike the right balance between internal autonomy and external structure, accountability and guidance. The aim is to both help students in the immediate term and provide a learning experience that promotes long-term growth.
Why motivation is a tough balancing act
There’s no single right place on the collaboration spectrum when it comes to instilling good academic practice. That said, the more advanced the student, the more internally led you should let them be. Generally speaking, as students progress – from freshmen to PhD candidates – and become more capable, they should increasingly be able to manage their own behaviour.
What’s ideal in theory isn’t always feasible in practice, though. If your course has dozens of students, for example, you won’t be able to engage with each of them personally. So even if personal external guidance would be optimal, you might have to settle for a session where you explain to students why their procrastination is problematic and what they can do to stop. Or if there’s no room for this, you might have to reduce the amount of signposting, while emphasising that it’s students’ responsibility to take charge and directing them to resources that could help.
Putting anti-procrastination collaboration into practice
To figure out how externally or internally led your approach should be as you plan your teaching, ask yourself two key questions:
- How ready are your students to take charge right now? Consider how prepared they seem in practice based on the performance you observe, rather than using their stage of learning as a guide.
- What are the practical constraints on how much you can engage with students? The best techniques won’t help if you can’t implement them.
You should go with the most internally led approach that students can handle, assuming that it seems likely to: a) help them take action right now; and b) help them learn how to take action in the future.You should also check that there are no practical obstacles in the way.
You might decide to unpack the first project of the course into shorter deadlines, and share a guide on how to navigate the rest. Or you might try to pre-empt students’ uncertainties about an assignment rather than encouraging them to come to you with questions when they arise. Or it could change how you use other techniques for reducing students’ procrastination, from decatastrophising their fears to building their self-efficacy.
You can revisit your plan based on what seems to work. For instance, if at first you let students set their own intermediate deadlines, you might revisit this in the middle of the semester if it’s clear students aren’t ready to do it themselves.
No perfect solution to procrastination exists. But we can help students procrastinate less, both when they study and, hopefully, long after they graduate.
Itamar Shatz is an affiliated lecturer at the University of Cambridge. His latest book is Solving Procrastination: The Science of Why We Put Things Off and How to (Finally!) Stop (Penguin Random House, 2026).
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