Is Procrastination Immoral? The psychological causes and effects of procrastination have been extensively explored by scholars such as PT blogger Tim Pychyl .
But its ethical aspects have not been investigated as much, though several of the contributors to the new book , that I edited with Chrisoula Andreou (also a PT blogger ), do consider these relatively neglected issues. In this post, I offer a brief discussion of how the three major schools of philosophical ethics—utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics—look at procrastination. We'll see that all three approaches view procrastination as ethically wanting, but for very different reasons. The Autofocus Productivity Method: Stop Maintaining To-Do Lists and Start Getting Stuff Done. What we can learn from procrastination. Some years ago, the economist George Akerlof found himself faced with a simple task: mailing a box of clothes from India, where he was living, to the United States.
The clothes belonged to his friend and colleague Joseph Stiglitz, who had left them behind when visiting, so Akerlof was eager to send the box off. But there was a problem. The combination of Indian bureaucracy and what Akerlof called “my own ineptitude in such matters” meant that doing so was going to be a hassle—indeed, he estimated that it would take an entire workday. So he put off dealing with it, week after week. This went on for more than eight months, and it was only shortly before Akerlof himself returned home that he managed to solve his problem: another friend happened to be sending some things back to the U.S., and Akerlof was able to add Stiglitz’s clothes to the shipment.