The Types of Procrastinators: Which One Are You?

It’s 1:15am and you’re taking an online quiz to find out what kind of procrastinator you are. The quiz has a progress bar. You’re on question nine of twelve. The thing you were supposed to do tonight is still not done, and there’s something a bit funny about the fact that identifying your procrastination style has itself become the procrastination, but you’d quite like to know the answer anyway.

Here’s the answer the quizzes don’t give you. There are several competing typologies, they come from very different places, and the one with the best research pedigree performed worst when someone finally tested whether the types exist. That’s more useful than it sounds, because it points at what does predict your delay, and it’s not a personality label.

Where these lists come from

Two separate families of typology are in circulation, and they get quoted side by side as though they carry the same weight.

The first came out of academic psychology in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly through Joseph Ferrari’s work, and split procrastination into arousal, avoidant and decisional forms. Each was attached to a measurement scale, which is what makes it a research typology rather than a description.

The second came off the self-help shelf. The six styles most online quizzes use, the perfectionist, dreamer, worrier, defier, crisis-maker and overdoer, come from It’s About Time!, a 1997 trade book by clinical psychologist Linda Sapadin. It’s thoughtful, it’s clinically informed, and it isn’t a peer-reviewed study. There’s no validated instrument for those six categories.

Both are worth knowing about. Only one of them can be checked.

1. The arousal procrastinator

This is the type who says they work better under pressure, and means it. They delay until the deadline is close enough to generate real urgency, then produce in a single intense burst, and they’ll tell you the work is better for it.

In the six-nation prevalence study, about 13.5% of men and 14.6% of women identified as arousal procrastinators (Ferrari et al., 2007). It’s a genuinely common self-description.

It also doesn’t survive being measured. Ferrari ran chronic procrastinators and non-procrastinators through timed tasks under varying cognitive load. Under high load with a brief window, the procrastinators completed fewer items and made more errors. In a second experiment they were slower under a two-second limit. The conclusion was that people who work under pressure regulate speed and accuracy less effectively, not more (Ferrari, 2001).

The belief persists for an understandable reason. You only ever see the midnight version of the work. There’s no calmer draft from a week earlier sitting next to it for comparison, so the one you produced wins by default, and the relief of finishing is easy to mistake for satisfaction with the result.

2. The avoidant procrastinator

This type delays to protect something. If you never really start, the outcome can’t be a verdict on your ability, because you can always point at the time you didn’t have.

Ferrari’s framing is that avoidant procrastination protects self-esteem, and that it can involve fear of success as much as fear of failure, since succeeding raises expectations you’d then have to keep meeting. In the six-nation data, avoidant procrastinators were slightly more common than arousal ones, and there were no significant differences by sex or by country across six quite different cultures.

The lived version is specific. You reorganise your files. You answer emails you could have left. You do four small useful things, each of which is genuinely worth doing, and none of which is the thing. Every one of them provides a small honest defence against the accusation that you wasted the day.

This is where perfectionism-driven delay tends to sit, and the two often show up together.

3. The decisional procrastinator

The third type postpones the decision rather than the work. Nothing gets done because nothing has been chosen yet, and choosing feels like the risky part.

This one entered the model from a separate measure, Mann’s decisional procrastination questionnaire, and it describes something recognisable: the person who has three good options, understands all three, and cannot commit to one, so the deadline arrives and picks for them.

It’s worth separating from the other two, because the intervention differs. If the block is at the decision, no amount of reducing task friction helps. There’s nothing to start yet.

4. The active procrastinator

In 2005, Angela Chu and Jin Nam Choi proposed a distinction between passive procrastinators, who delay involuntarily and end up paralysed, and active procrastinators, who deliberately choose to work close to deadlines. Their study reported that active procrastinators showed time perceptions, attitudes, coping styles and academic performance close to or better than non-procrastinators, and better than passive procrastinators on all of it (Chu & Choi, 2005).

That’s a flattering finding, and it got quoted heavily.

It has since been challenged directly. Shamarukh Chowdhury and Timothy Pychyl argued that active procrastination lacks construct validity, essentially that whatever the scale is picking up, it isn’t procrastination as the field defines it (Chowdhury & Pychyl, 2018). If procrastination means delaying while expecting to be worse off, then someone who delays strategically and isn’t worse off isn’t procrastinating. They’re planning.

Which may be a relief if you’ve been calling yourself an active procrastinator. You might just be someone who works to deadlines.

5. The six styles from the self-help shelf

The perfectionist who won’t start until conditions are right. The dreamer who prefers the idea to the execution. The worrier who catastrophises the task. The defier who resists being told. The crisis-maker who needs the adrenaline. The overdoer who takes on so much that everything slips.

These are useful descriptions. Most people recognise themselves in at least one, and they give language to patterns that are otherwise hard to name. If reading that list made something click, the click is meaningful.

What they aren’t is measured. There’s no validated scale for them, no prevalence data, and no studies testing whether people sort into six groups rather than three or one. They come from clinical observation written up for a general audience, which is a legitimate thing to be and a different thing from evidence.

Treat them as vocabulary rather than diagnosis, and they’re worth having.

The awkward finding: the types don’t hold

Here’s where the article turns on itself.

Piers Steel set out to test the arousal, avoidant and decisional model properly, first meta-analytically and then with factor analysis on a sample of more than 4,000 respondents. The evidence didn’t support the tripartite model, and the avoidant and arousal distinction in particular failed to separate. What the data pointed to instead was a single construct: procrastination as irrational delay (Steel, 2010).

He built a new measure out of that analysis, the Pure Procrastination Scale, which correlated better with the outcomes that matter than the older type-specific scales did.

So the scales that were supposed to measure different types were substantially measuring the same thing. People who score high on one tend to score high on the others. The categories describe flavours of a single tendency rather than distinct groups of people, which is why you probably recognised yourself in more than one of the sections above.

That’s not a failure of the researchers who proposed them. It’s how construct validation is meant to work, and the field updated.

What’s actually underneath all of them

If the types collapse, something has to be left standing.

Steel’s earlier meta-analysis, pooling 691 correlations, found the strongest and most consistent predictors were task aversiveness, the timing of rewards and punishments, self-efficacy, impulsiveness, and conscientiousness with its facets of self-control, distractibility, organisation and achievement motivation. Impulsiveness alone reached a corrected correlation of .52 with procrastination (Steel, 2007). Traits that dominate popular explanations, including neuroticism and rebelliousness, turned out to be weakly related at best.

Underneath that sits a mechanism. Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl described procrastination as short-term mood repair: the task provokes something unpleasant, avoidance relieves it immediately, and the relief is what gets reinforced, while the cost lands on a version of you who isn’t in the room yet (Sirois & Pychyl, 2013).

Read the five types again with that in mind and they stop looking like personalities. The arousal type is describing what the relief feels like. The avoidant type is describing what the threat is. The decisional type is describing where in the sequence it happens. Same process, different vantage points.

Why the type question is so appealing anyway

It’s worth being fair to the impulse that sent you looking. Wanting to know your type isn’t silly, and it’s usually not vanity.

For most people the alternative explanation on offer has been “lazy”, and that one is both harsher and emptier. A type is the kinder cousin of that accusation: it says the delay has a shape, that other people share it, and that it comes from somewhere rather than from a defect. That reframe does real work, and it’s why the quizzes are comforting even when they’re unvalidated. We’ve written separately about why laziness isn’t a psychological construct at all, which is the more important half of that comparison.

The trap is that a type explains without asking anything of you. Once you’re a crisis-maker, the behaviour is accounted for, and accounting for something feels a lot like addressing it. People often report leaving a typology quiz feeling better and doing nothing differently, which is a reasonable description of what the quiz was designed to deliver.

The research picture is less flattering and more useful. Delay has causes you can name, and named causes have handles. Our guide to why you procrastinate covers those causes in full, and none of them requires you to first settle the question of who you are.

A better question than “which type am I?”

Types are stable by design, which is the problem with them. If you’re a crisis-maker, that’s who you are, and there’s nothing to do on a Tuesday afternoon about who you are.

Emotions aren’t stable. They attach to particular tasks and they change.

So the question worth asking isn’t which of five categories you fall into, it’s what this specific task is provoking right now. Boredom, because it’s tedious? Anxiety, because it might be judged? Resentment, because you didn’t choose it? Confusion, because you don’t know the first step? Each of those has a different answer, and none of them requires you to have a personality type first.

Most people find the answer differs by task, which is exactly what you’d expect if the types were never really the unit. The practical work follows from there, and how to stop procrastinating goes through it step by step.

When to talk to a professional

Worth raising with someone if delay has cost you things that mattered and nothing you’ve tried has held, if the self-criticism around it is constant, or if it comes alongside low mood, persistent anxiety, or difficulty starting most things rather than particular things.

Scope is the signal to notice. Procrastination usually attaches to specific tasks while leaving others intact. When almost everything has become hard to start, that pattern is worth a proper assessment rather than a quiz.

The takeaway

You can keep the labels. They’re decent shorthand, they help people describe an experience that’s otherwise slippery, and recognising yourself in the avoidant description tells you something true about what you’re protecting.

What they won’t do is sort you into a group with its own solution, because when researchers looked for those groups they didn’t find them. There’s one tendency underneath, driven mostly by how a task makes you feel and how easily you’re pulled toward whatever feels better right now.

That’s better news than a type. A type is something you are. A feeling about a task is something you can work with, and it can be different tomorrow.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Chowdhury, S. F., & Pychyl, T. A. (2018). A critique of the construct validity of active procrastination. Personality and Individual Differences, 120, 7–12. Link
2. Chu, A. H. C., & Choi, J. N. (2005). Rethinking procrastination: Positive effects of “active” procrastination behavior on attitudes and performance. Journal of Social Psychology, 145(3), 245–264. Link
3. Ferrari, J. R. (2001). Procrastination as self-regulation failure of performance: Effects of cognitive load, self-awareness, and time limits on “working best under pressure”. European Journal of Personality, 15, 391–406. Link
4. Ferrari, J. R., Díaz-Morales, J. F., O’Callaghan, J., Díaz, K., & Argumedo, D. (2007). Frequent behavioral delay tendencies by adults: International prevalence rates of chronic procrastination. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 38(4), 458–464. Link
5. Sapadin, L., & Maguire, J. (1997). It’s About Time! The Six Styles of Procrastination and How to Overcome Them. Penguin Books.
6. Sirois, F., & Pychyl, T. (2013). Procrastination and the priority of short-term mood regulation: Consequences for future self. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(2), 115–127. Link
7. Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65–94. Link
8. Steel, P. (2010). Arousal, avoidant and decisional procrastinators: Do they exist? Personality and Individual Differences, 48, 926–934. Link