Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Procrastination is a universal phenomenon, with a significant proportion of the population reporting interference and even harm from such delays. Why do people put off tasks despite what are apparently their best intentions, and why do they de- liberately defer in the face of prospective failure? Past research shows that procrastination is a heterogeneous construct with possibly diverse causes. To grapple with the complexity of the topic, we construct a taxonomy of different types of procrasti- nation and potential sources for each type. We simulate com- pletion patterns from three broad model types: exponential or inconsistent temporal discounting, and waiting for interesting tasks; and provide some preliminary evidence, through com- parisons with real-world data, of the plausibility of multiple types of, and pathways for, procrastination.