The Difference Between a Procrastinator and a Lazy Person

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The deadline for your homework is a week from now, but you’re so busy with other things that you don’t get to do it until the very last minute. You then get a low grade, and an inner voice tells you, “You need to stop being lazy and actually do things on time.”

But are you lazy? Or did you do something called procrastination?

People often confuse putting things off for the meantime and not doing them at all, which often leads to people calling themselves lazy.

There are quite a few differences between someone who procrastinates and a person who’s simply lazy, and that’s what we’ll tackle in this article.

What is Laziness?

According to Psychology Today, a person is lazy if their “motivation to spare themselves effort trumps their motivation to do the right or expected thing.”

In other words, if your urge to purposely be idle instead of doing the expected thing overweighs the simple effort of it, it’s being lazy.

Here’s a simple example. You’ve got dishes to do, but you purposely decide not to do it.

You not only leave the dishes for other people to do, but you sit around doing nothing while knowing full well you can finish the task in minutes.

The key word here is “idle,” or in another definition by Psychology Today, “engaging in other less strenuous or less boring activity.”

Doing things that aren’t productive or have no aid in advancing your betterment is another way of putting it.

The Definition of Procrastination

If you ever put off an important task by, for example, cleaning your room, we both know it wouldn’t exactly be fair to describe yourself as lazy.

Cleaning your room takes effort and focus, and you’ve probably even gone the extra mile and changed your bed sheets or arranged your clothes in order.

You’re not sitting around watching Netflix or doing absolutely nothing and staring off into space. It’s certainly not laziness or bad time management.

This is called procrastination.

Very Well Mind, a website focused on all things psychological, defines procrastination as the “act of delaying or putting off tasks until the last minute, or past their deadline.”

But while delaying, you’re doing other things such as reading a book, working out, doing errands, or anything else that is still considered productive.

To put simply, the difference between being lazy and procrastinating is in what you do in the time frame between waiting and achieving the task.

Recommended read: How Do I Stop Procrastinating? (An In-Depth Guide)

Why Do People Procrastinate, and Why Are Others Lazy?

Dr. Fuschia Sirois, a professor of psychology at the University of Sheffield explains that “people engage in this irrational cycle of chronic procrastination because of an inability to manage negative moods around a task.”

In other words, the reason why people procrastinate is because of the negative emotions they know will come along with the task at hand, so they do other things first.

In short, we procrastinate because of bad moods, and that’s very different from being lazy.

Dr. Tim Pychil and Dr. Sirois are professors of psychology from the Carleton University of Ottowa who did a study on this, and they found something interesting.

According to Dr. Pychyl, procrastination is “an emotion regulation problem, not a time management problem.”

He goes on to say that procrastination can be understood as “a short-term mood repair, over the longer-term pursuit of intended actions.”

To put simply, it’s more focused on the immediate urgency of managing negative moods. Thus you clean your room because it makes you happier rather than submit a research paper on time because it causes stress and anxiety at the moment.

When it comes to laziness, it often comes from a deeper sense of indolence, which is a word derived from the Latin indolentia, which means “without pain” or “without taking trouble.”

People often become lazy because they simply don’t want to be bothered by the task, and that leads to it being delayed or not being done at all.

Or since there’s nothing to do, the feeling of doing nothing while waiting overrides the urge to accomplish the task on the deadline, and they become used to the feeling of letting things pass without being bothered.

Related article: 9 Reasons Why You Avoid Things You Need to Do

The Difference Between the Two

Now that we’ve defined the two terms, it’s important to know the four main points to differentiate them both.

Procrastination is an active process, and laziness is apathy or inactivity.
Procrastination is a momentary relief of achieving other things before the said task, and laziness is an unwillingness to act.
Procrastination is a series of productive things being done, and laziness is having nothing done with the extra time.
Procrastinators often get the job done in the end, and lazy people often stop caring about the task altogether.

What’s similar about them is that both laziness and procrastination stem from a lack of drive or enthusiasm at the moment pertaining to that task.

Another thing is that both are vicious cycles that are often hard to break out of. Procrastination has the thrill of achieving tasks and still getting the intended job done in the end, and laziness has simply let go of caring whether it’s done or not.

When people procrastinate, they do other things to fill the time. For lazy people, oftentimes there’s nothing left to do, but they still don’t have the will to finish the task.

So even if procrastination has a larger cost than laziness, the procrastinator is more likely to accomplish the work than the lazy person is.

A procrastinator has the drive and motivation to accomplish a task, and a lazy person sometimes doesn’t even bother.

Final Thoughts

Even though procrastination sounds a lot better than being lazy, it’s important to always try to rise above it, instead of being stuck in a vicious cycle of temporary relief before the actual task.

If you find yourself relating to laziness more, try to find the root of why you’re not motivated or driven to do things and try to face it.

It’s often caused by burnout or depression, so it might help to talk with a professional about how to get back on the horse.

Don’t let “not now” turn into “never,” and don’t let an opportunity pass by before you realize it’s gone.

Remember, you may delay, but time will not.