- People with high self efficasy may have confidence in their capabilities, allowing them to procrastinate more often
- Personal preference for high pressure and high performance before deadlines may increase level of confidence in creative problem solving
- High self efficasy is related to high creative ideation which is benefited by active procrastination

Grinnell College

Also known as "deadline seekers", Active procrastinators prefer to delay tasks in order to self-induce pressure, motivate, and challenge themselves. Active procrastinators exhibit the following behaviors and characteristics:
- Strong perception and control of time.
- High reports of self-efficacy.
- High reports of extrinsic motivation, but low reports of intrinsic motivation.
- Preference for task-oriented coping strategies.

Unlike Passive procrastinators, Active procrastinators are more likely to report lower levels of stress and depression, while reporting higher levels of task completion and satisfaction. Active procrastinators may be hard to distinguish from non-procrastinators without proper learning analytics tools.

Active Procrastinators

Liu, W., Pan, Y., Luo, X., Wang, L. & Pang, W. (2017). Active procrastination and creative ideation: The mediating role of creative self-efficacy. Personality and Individual Differences, 119, 227-229. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.07.033

Active procrastination and creative ideation

Factors of high self efficasy in active procrastinators

Using surveys issued to an undergraduate class (n=230) with regression analysis and ANCOVA, a subset of well-performing procrastinators were found within what would normally be defined as procrastinators. These high-achieving procrastinators were found to have similar characteristics and academic performance to non-procrastinators, despite their tendency to delay tasks. Chu and Choi propose that the following characteristics and behaviors could be used to separate procrastinators into "Active" and "Passive" groups:
- Perception and control of time
- Measure of Self-efficacy
- Levels of Intrinsic/Extrinsic motivation
- Preference in stress-coping strategies

Further analysis shows that when using these characteristics to separate procrastinators, Passive procrastinators exhibit usual side-effects of their behavior (such as poor academic performance) while Active procrastinators performed as well as non-procrastinators (and exhibited similar characteristics).

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