He’s studied procrastination for 40 years. Here’s what he’s learned.

Joseph Ferrari has a nickname for procrastinators — procs — and he’s been studying them for 40 years. He became fascinated with procrastination when he was working on a Ph.D. in experimental psychology and realized that no one had studied the psychology of why some people put off completing tasks. Because he is not a proc, he immediately got to work, exploring what causes procrastination across various cultures and demographics.

He went on to write multiple books on the topic, including Still Procrastinating? in 2010. He now teaches at DePaul University and has found that 20% of people are chronic procrastinators — meaning they habitually, intentionally, and irrationally delay a target task, often to the point that they cause discomfort for themselves and others. “That’s high,” Ferrari said. “Higher than depression, phobia, panic attacks, alcoholism, substance abuse.”

And that’s a problem, he went on: “For 20 percent of people, they’re missing life. Life is too short. You need to get things done.”

Here’s what decades of studying procrastination have taught Ferrari, and the five things he’d like people to know.

According to Ferrari, neither gender nor age nor race makes someone more or less likely to procrastinate. Those who dwell in cities procrastinate as often as those who live in rural areas, and people who live in South Korea, India, Israel, and England are as likely to do it as Americans.

The one difference he noticed was between blue-collar and white-collar workers. “If I’m an electrician, a plumber, a carpenter, and I don’t work, I don’t get paid,” Ferrari said. “But if I am white-collar — a corporate person — I’m going to get my paycheck every two weeks or a month anyway.”

Ferrari often hears people blame their procrastination on technology. Similarly, he hears people say that modern lives are just busier than they used to be.

“Wow,” Ferrari said. “What an insult to our ancestors.” Our forebears were often farmers, for example, who “had to get up early in the morning and fix the fence, feed the animals, get the hay done, plant the seeds, get the roof done, can those goods. They had a lot to do.”

Ultimately, though, every excuse he hears is just that — and, as Ferrari said, “procrastinators are great excuse makers.”

Years ago, a reporter called Ferrari to ask him what he thought about the alarm clock snooze button, because, the journalist claimed, it was an example of how technology played a role in procrastination.

Ferrari responded, “What about the automobile that came out in 1885?” At one point in history, if you wanted to visit a friend five or seven miles away, you had to have a horse that you fed and took care of and then take time to harness the animal to a carriage and travel to see your friend. “Then this thing called the automobile comes along, and you can go quickly,” he said. Suddenly, there was no preparation involved; you could wait until the last second to get up and go.

These days, we carry our devices everywhere, which means distractions are ever-present, but so are shortcuts. We no longer need paper and pen and stamps to get in touch with people, for instance. And that’s why Ferrari isn’t buying this common excuse that technology is the reason you can’t get things done: Technology has an equal if not greater capacity to make our lives more efficient, not less, he said.

Some people say procrastination is not a problem for them; they simply need the pressure of an imminent deadline to do their best work. But Ferrari’s research over the years doesn’t support that claim. In one paper, Ferrari documented the results of two experiments that compared the performances of procrastinators and non-procrastinators who were given limited time to complete tasks. Then researchers asked the participants how they thought they did. Procrastinators, as it turned out, took longer and performed worse. And yet they thought they’d done well; in fact, they thought they’d done better than other participants.

In short, Ferrari said, “I found ‘working best under pressure’ was a myth, and they failed.”

“Procrastination is sabotage,” Ferrari said, and there are various reasons people engage in it. One is a lack of self-confidence: If a person is not sure whether they can complete a task, Ferrari said, they may introduce obstacles, such as a lack of proper preparation time. If they fail, then, they can blame the obstacle rather than themselves. “And imagine if I succeed with the obstacle,” Ferrari said. “Then I look even better.”

Because procrastination has emotional triggers, Ferrari doesn’t believe it’s a problem that can be solved with time management training. Instead, he recommends cognitive behavioral therapy, a goal-directed type of therapy that aims to adjust behavior to get a better result. “You have to change the way you think and the way you act,” he said.

“In our culture, we punish for being late,” Ferrari said. “We need to reward for being early.” He believes incentives could transform the collective tendency to put things off. What if, for example, the government gave people a discount if they filed their taxes early, or stores offered their biggest holiday sales on the day after Thanksgiving rather than Christmas Eve?

“People laugh when I tell them this,” he said. But he does it in his own classes: He tells his students that if they turn papers in early, they’ll get extra points. Not everyone will do it, of course, but if he can get half of them to take the incentive, then he’s conditioning them to embrace positive behaviors. Plus, he said, “that’s less work for me at the end.”