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procrastinate

/prəˈkræstɪneɪt//prəʊˈkræstɪneɪt/·verb
to put off a task you know you should be doing, usually to your own cost
Fig. 1 — The alarm goes off at six and a hand comes out from under the duvet to hit SNOOZE.
01Definition

To procrastinate is to postpone what you should be doing now, knowing you should be doing it. The word is built from Latin pro- ('forward') and crastinus ('of tomorrow') — literally to shift a thing to tomorrow, and to keep shifting it. It is not neutral delay: a postponed meeting is scheduled, but a procrastinated essay is avoided, and researchers describe the habit as an emotional dodge rather than laziness — the discomfort of starting outweighs, briefly, the distant cost of not having started.

02In use
  • iI procrastinated for three weeks, then wrote the whole thing in one panicked night.
  • iiCommittees procrastinate by commissioning another report on a decision they already understand.
  • iiiShe stopped procrastinating the moment the task shrank to something she could start.
03Collocations
  • stop procrastinating
  • procrastinate on a task
  • chronic procrastination
  • procrastinate until the deadline
  • a habit of procrastinating

Family procrastination (noun) · procrastinator (noun)

04Relations

=delay, dawdle, stall, dither, postpone

≠act, expedite

06TOEFL & IELTS

A gift for Speaking Part 2 (describe a habit you want to change) and study-skills writing, where the noun does the heavy lifting: chronic procrastination, a tendency to procrastinate. Keep the register in mind — it is faintly self-critical, so use delay or postpone for neutral scheduling. Stress the second syllable, pruh-CRAS-ti-nate, and mind the spelling: pro-cras-tin-ate, with the 'cras' of Latin cras, tomorrow. The agent noun is procrastinator.

07Asked
What does procrastinate mean?
To put off something you know you should be doing, usually against your own interest. The scene above is the anatomy of it: four presses of the snooze button, each buying nine minutes of warmth at the price of the morning, and then the panic of the fifth ring. Note what it is not — the sleeper means to get up every single time, which is exactly why it feels so bad.
Why do people procrastinate?
Research points to emotion rather than time management: starting means facing something uncomfortable — boredom, fear of doing it badly, uncertainty about the first step — and postponing relieves that feeling instantly, while the cost arrives much later. Psychologists call the trade short-term mood repair, and it explains the paradox that procrastinators often work extremely hard, only always at the wrong hour.
What is the difference between procrastinate, delay, and postpone?
Delay is neutral and often external — the flight was delayed. Postpone is deliberate and usually reschedules to a stated time — the meeting was postponed to Friday. Procrastinate is neither: it is you putting your own task off with no new time set and no good reason, which is why only this one carries a wince. Nobody boasts of procrastinating.
Is procrastination the same as laziness?
No, and the difference shows in the guilt. A lazy person is content not to act; a procrastinator wants to act, plans to, feels worse by the hour, and frequently produces a heroic burst at the deadline — hardly the signature of low effort. That is also why 'just be disciplined' advice tends to fail: the obstacle is avoidance of a feeling, not absence of energy.
Where does the word procrastinate come from?
From Latin procrastinare — pro-, 'forward', plus crastinus, 'of tomorrow', from cras, 'tomorrow'. So the word means, exactly and literally, to move something to tomorrow. It entered English in the sixteenth century with the moral tinge intact, and it explains why the Spanish mañana joke lands: every language seems to need a word for the day the work is always assigned to.
How do you pronounce procrastinate, and what are its other forms?
pruh-CRAS-ti-nate, /prəˈkræstɪneɪt/, stress on the second syllable, with the 'cras' saying the Latin root aloud; British speakers usually keep a full first vowel, proh-CRAS-ti-nate. The noun is procrastination — pruh-cras-ti-NAY-shun, stress moving to the fourth syllable — and the person is a procrastinator. Two real spelling traps: the agent noun ends in -or (procrastinator, never 'procrastinater'), and the second syllable is cras-, not scras-.