[white-flame]

As a procrastinator, I can tell you that mine has NOTHING to do with anxiety, or the fear of failure, or the scope of the task at hand. There is similar projection in this article, that anybody dealing with procrastination is struggling with overcoming fear.

While I can certainly force myself into doing things better as I'm older and sick of the failures that procrastination leads to, I've not heard much useful advice for plain ol' (non-anxiety related) procrastination, where the person simply has inertia at rest and is disinterested at all levels from disrupting that. Stuff like the pomodoro method is probably the most relevant.

[codezero]

Yep, I made the comment to call out anxiety as a factor many people are unaware of. It does not mean everyone who procrastinates has clinical anxiety, but if one finds themselves often unable to make progress or having a decreased quality of life from failures, it doesn't hurt to get a professional opinion.

[white-flame]

Well, the statement "but it's important to remember that procrastination is a form of anxiety" is much more absolute than that. Putting people under broad umbrella terms certainly can be counterproductive to dealing with individual issues.

[codezero]

That wasn't my intention. I've edited the original comment.

[white-flame]

As a pedantic as I am :-), editing "procrastination" into "chronic procrastination" while leaving it absolute simply gets into the technical definitions of the terms (especially "anxiety"), and how agreeable the formal psych terms are to the common populace.

In general lay terms, "anxiety" is associated with fear-type responses, not disinterest. A lack of stress indicators would tend to indicate a lack of anxiety. A begrudging compliance when breaking through procrastination is not overcoming anxiety, but overcoming disinterest. A post-response to getting something done being "Fine, it's done, did I really have to do that?" is not indicative of overcoming fear or anxiety, because fear and anxiety are about future unknowns and would be relieved ex post facto, while procrastination still is disgruntled at having had to do it. I would present all of these as informal disagreements to blanketly equating even chronic procrastination with anxiety, as the latter tends to be understood.

Of course, that's in full acknowledgement that behavioral medicine tends to use ridiculously broad terms that tend to lead to overdiagnosis and overmedication issues we're currently dealing with (especially in schools), and they might use "anxiety" far more broadly than I am above.

[codezero]

Regardless of the semantics of how procrastination is defined, any behavior that affects your quality of life is one which is worth discussing with a professional to get actionable third party advice.