Procrastination is a barrier to achieving personal goals. This project sought to test the effectiveness of implementation intentions (plan for a time and location connected to an action), purposeful delay (delaying tasks to increase motivation), and intrinsic reasons (behavior that is driven by personal internal rewards) on procrastination. Our research consisted of two 2-week studies on ourselves: a non-experimental study examining the correlations between natural variations in the variables described above and an experimental study specifically testing the effect that implementation intentions has upon procrastination. Our correlational results supported the work of these previous studies by showing the ability to predict the degree of procrastination based on the amount of implantation intentions and intrinsic reasons that naturally occurred, with implementation intentions having the highest correlation with procrastination. However, our experimental results did not support a causal role of implementation intentions in minimizing procrastination. It is speculated that these results occurred because of the increased number of times implementation intentions were used and procrastination was measured and due to influences from external events during trials.
