993896

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MMC0010.1177/2050157921993896Mobile Media & CommunicationAalbers et al.

Article

Mobile Media & Communication

2022, Vol. 10(1) 115–135
Caught in the moment:
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© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/2050157921993896
momentary procrastination journals.sagepub.com/home/mmc

and passively measured

smartphone use?

George Aalbers
Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, Tilburg University, Netherlands;
Cognition and Communication, Tilburg University, Netherlands

Mariek M. P. vanden Abeele

Cognition and Communication, Tilburg University, Netherlands;
Culture Studies, Tilburg University, Netherlands

Andrew T. Hendrickson
Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, Tilburg University, Netherlands

Lieven de Marez
imec-mict-UGent, Department of Communication Sciences, Ghent University, Belgium

Loes Keijsers
Erasmus School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands

Abstract
Procrastination is an increasingly prevalent phenomenon. Although research suggests
smartphones might be involved, little is known about the momentary association
between different patterns of smartphone use and procrastination. In a preregistered
study, 221 students (Mage = 20, 55% female) self-reported procrastination five times
a day for 30 days (i.e., experience sampling method) while their smartphone use was

Corresponding author:
George Aalbers, Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, Tilburg University, Dante Building,
Warandelaan 2, Tilburg, 5037 AB, Netherlands.
Email: [email protected]
116 Mobile Media & Communication 10(1)

continuously monitored (i.e., passive logging). Using dynamic structural equation

modeling on 27,151 observations, we estimated momentary within-person associations
between procrastination and (a) total smartphone use and use of specific application
categories (social media, messaging, browsers, games, and video streaming), (b)
notifications, and (c) smartphone use fragmentation. Procrastination was positively
albeit weakly associated with all aforementioned patterns, and associations varied from
person to person. Collectively, our findings suggest these popular devices potentially
encourage dilatory behavior.

Keywords
procrastination, smartphone, passive logging, experience sampling

Introduction
Procrastination refers to the irrational, voluntary delay to starting or completing an
intended course of action (Steel, 2007). Examples of such dilatory behavior and its
adverse consequences abound (Steel, 2007; Steel & Klingsieck, 2016). For example,
people procrastinate when they delay doing their taxes, even though this will cause them
to rush, and potentially make errors and overpay (Kasper, 2004). Procrastination occurs,
for example, when people intend to make a doctor’s appointment but jeopardize their
physical health by failing to do so (Steel, 2011). Procrastination also commonly rears its
head when students delay studying, even though they will face greater workload and
stress as a result (Steel, 2007; Tice & Baumeister, 1997).
The prevalence of chronic procrastination has soared in the past decades (Steel, 2007)
and is projected to climb even further in the next (Steel, 2011). One potential explanation
for this trend might be the meteoric rise in the availability of smartphones (Rozental &
Carlbring, 2014; Steel, 2011). Smartphones are conducive to procrastination because
people are more likely to procrastinate when temptations are proximal (Duckworth et al.,
2016; Steel, 2011; Steel et al., 2018). Because people keep a smartphone close by, they
can easily succumb to the temptation of pursuing the device’s plentiful social and infor-
mational rewards rather than the task they intended to perform (Oulasvirta et al., 2012).
Supporting this explanation, several studies have established a link between smart-
phone use and procrastination. To date, most studies have used a cross-sectional self-
report survey design to demonstrate that individuals who excessively use their
smartphones also tend to procrastinate more (e.g., Im & Jang, 2017; Rozgonjuk et al.,
2018; Yang et al., 2019). While these studies are valuable in revealing between-person
associations between smartphone use and procrastination, they have at least two
limitations.
The first limitation is that self-report studies rely on the assumption that people are
capable of assessing their smartphone behavior accurately. This assumption is unwar-
ranted, however, as self-reported smartphone use correlates poorly with actual smart-
phone use (Davidson et al., 2020). This lack of accuracy means that self-reports are
unsuitable for capturing different facets of smartphone use that may be particularly rel-
evant to procrastination. For instance, as people fail to accurately self-report total
Aalbers et al. 117

smartphone usage, it is unlikely their self-reports will reliably distinguish between the
use of different applications or will be able to capture more dynamic usage patterns, such
as how quickly they switch back and forth between screen and “real life” activities
(smartphone use fragmentation as an indicator of smartphone multitasking, cf.
Hendrickson et al., 2019). The problematic validity of self-reported smartphone use is
further underlined by Sewall et al. (2019) who demonstrate that discrepancies between
self-reported and passively logged smartphone use can be predicted by psychological
well-being.
A second problem with cross-sectional self-report survey designs is that they model
smartphone use as a predictor of procrastination at the between-person level. While
establishing the between-person differences of heavy and light smartphone users is rel-
evant to understand who is more at risk of suffering the consequences, more fundamental
questions about when and how procrastination manifests itself within individuals remain
largely unanswered. To our knowledge, only a recent daily diary study by Schnauber-
Stockmann et al. (2018) explored the situation-specific nature of procrastinatory media
use, showing that it occurs more often when motivation for behavioral control is low. To
date, however, we know little about the specific forms that procrastinatory smartphone
use takes, and how person-specific these manifestations of procrastination are. Answers
to these questions have great societal value as they can inform about how procrastination
treatment can be optimally tailored to an individual’s idiosyncratic smartphone usage
patterns and linkages with procrastination.
The overarching aim of our study was to determine how momentary procrastination
is associated with three different smartphone usage patterns, namely (a) received notifi-
cations, (b) fragmentation, and (c) dynamic content application use. This was investi-
gated by examining (a) which specific smartphone usage patterns actually co-occur with
procrastination within the same person and (b) how this coupling differs between indi-
viduals. To this end, our study estimated person-specific statistical models of the link
between momentary (self-reported) procrastination and these smartphone usage patterns
measured objectively using a dedicated logging application. The present study is the first
to assess how these measures are associated, answering recent calls for methodological
improvements in smartphone research, both at the measurement (Davidson et al., 2020)
and statistical level (Beyens et al., 2020).

Procrastination and smartphone use

What is procrastination?.  People procrastinate when they delay beginning or completing
an intended course of action. Such behavior is quintessentially irritational, as it repre-
sents voluntary activities that do not maximize material (e.g., monetary) or psychologi-
cal (e.g., emotional well-being) utility (Steel, 2007). Commonly, procrastination means
that individuals succumb to temptations in their environment, such as the gratification of
social and entertainment needs, electing their short-term rewards over the long-term ben-
efits of tasks that are less enjoyable but require completion (Duckworth et al., 2016). For
instance, a student intends to study but spends most of the week before an exam chatting
to friends on messenger applications and scrolling through social media. The student
then has to plow through all their study materials in the night before the exam. The day
118 Mobile Media & Communication 10(1)

after, they are tired and stressed. Some weeks later, their grade turns out to be insuffi-
cient, requiring a resit or worse, failing their year’s requirements.
Procrastination can take on many forms, differing in aspects such as why (i.e., trig-
gers) and how (i.e., behavioral manifestation) it occurs. With respect to the why, research
suggests procrastination might be triggered by internal feeling states (e.g., fatigue; Steel,
2007), task characteristics (Steel, 2007), and temptations in our environment (e.g., smart-
phones; Duckworth et al., 2016). These triggers evoke different behavioral manifesta-
tions of procrastination, such as using social media (Meier et al., 2016) and binge
watching television series (Merrill & Rubenking, 2019). These behavioral manifesta-
tions arguably have two modes: (a) brief bursts of task-irrelevant behaviors that inter-
sperse intended tasks (e.g., multitasking between media and tasks; Meier et al., 2016), or
(b) behaviors that displace to-be-completed tasks for an extended period (e.g., binge
watching; Merrill & Rubenking, 2019).

How might smartphone use relate to procrastination?.  There are different aspects of smart-
phone use that could potentially relate to procrastination. First, notifications might trig-
ger smartphone use. Second, smartphone use may be a behavioral manifestation of
procrastination, either reflected in a fragmented mode of usage, or in the displacement of
tasks by prolonged consumption of (dynamic) smartphone content. In what follows, we
discuss empirical research suggesting potential links between these aspects of smart-
phone use and procrastination.

Smartphones trigger procrastination. A smartphone can draw its user to look at the
screen by notifying them of events, such as a received message, through popups, sounds,
and vibrations. Such notifications can be useful, as they may alert smartphone users
to important information. However, researchers have proposed notifications might be
harmful in that they distract individuals from tasks (for a brief overview, see Johannes,
Dora, et al., 2019). Given that distraction might delay task completion, it is conceiv-
able that notifications might promote procrastination. Evidence on the distracting poten-
tial of notifications is mixed, however. It should be noted that whereas ample studies
indicate notifications have an attentional cost (e.g., Stothart et al., 2015), recent experi-
mental work suggests auditory and visual notifications are fairly benign (e.g., Johannes,
Dora et al., 2019; Johannes, Veling, et al., 2019). However, this may have been because
the stimuli under investigation did not contain personally relevant information such as
sender name, while experimental work suggests that more personally relevant stimuli
more strongly interfere with attention (Wingenfeld et al., 2006). As argued by Bayer
et al. (2016), in real life, smartphone notifications are very personally relevant stimuli:
they are “connection cues” that trigger the habit of digitally interacting with others. Criti-
cally, such social habits may conflict with ongoing tasks, possibly setting up users to
procrastinate frequently. As such, an in situ examination may reveal the potential of
notifications to trigger procrastination.

Smartphone use fragmentation as a manifestation of procrastination.  When smartphone

use is triggered repeatedly (e.g., by notifications) and users try to multitask between a
“real life” task and smartphone use, this fragments an individual’s task-related activity,
Aalbers et al. 119

which can delay task completion. For instance, students commonly cannot resist using
their smartphone every few minutes while studying (Rosen et al., 2013), potentially due
to the widespread habit of smartphone checking (Bayer et al., 2016; Oulasvirta et al.,
2012). Meier et al. (2016) speculate such media-induced task switching could increase
how frequently individuals report media-based procrastination. As a corollary, we might
expect individuals to report a greater level of procrastination when they more intensively
alternate between smartphone and other activities. That is, when their use of one applica-
tion tends to be followed by the use of another application more quickly (smartphone use
fragmentation; Hendrickson et al., 2019).

Smartphone content consumption as a manifestation of procrastination.  When people are

triggered to use their smartphone, whether it be in a fragmentary mode or for a longer
period, they consume dynamic content that resembles or is identical to content available
on other media technologies. For instance, individuals can use social media on smart-
phones as well as personal computers. As research into “traditional” technologies sug-
gests procrastination can manifest as media behavior, we might similarly expect dynamic
smartphone content to lure individuals into dillydallying.
In recent years, several media behaviors have been associated with procrastination.
First, studies have consistently found self-reported social media use to be positively
associated with self-reported procrastination (Meier et al., 2016; Rozgonjuk et al., 2018).
For instance, participants in a survey study commonly confirmed they use Facebook to
procrastinate (Meier et al., 2016). Possibly, this is because people often browse through
social media content without interacting with other users (Aalbers et al., 2019), a behav-
ior similar to procrastinating on the Internet (Lavoie & Pychyl, 2001). Second, research
shows that people with a greater tendency to procrastinate (i.e., unconscientious indi-
viduals) also tend to spend more time on WhatsApp (Montag et al., 2015). As social
needs are an important motive for procrastination (Steel & Klingsieck, 2016) and mes-
sengers (e.g., WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger) are among the most frequently used
applications (Hendrickson et al., 2019), messengers might be a common outlet for people
to not do what they had intended. Third, procrastination is likely to manifest as video
streaming and gaming application use, as watching television and gaming are considered
common procrastination modes (Pychyl et al., 2000; Steel, 2011). Use of video stream-
ing applications (e.g., Netflix, Hulu, Disney+) might contribute to procrastination, in
particular. Binge watching series on these platforms is highly common (Flayelle et al.,
2020), frequently motivated by a desire to procrastinate (Merrill & Rubenking, 2019),
and often results in the postponement of other activities (De Feijter et al., 2016). Finally,
ample research has linked Internet browsing to procrastination, a phenomenon known as
“cyberslacking” (e.g., Lavoie & Pychyl, 2001).

Aims and hypotheses

While the overall aim of this study is to examine the link between procrastination and
different smartphone use patterns, an aggregate level association will not convey much
information on how person-specific the association between procrastination and smart-
phone use is. For instance, recent work indicates the relationship between social media
120 Mobile Media & Communication 10(1)

use and psychological well-being might differ between individuals—that is, some indi-
viduals might potentially benefit from these platforms whereas others might experience
adverse effects (Beyens et al., 2020). Knowing for how many people this association
exists is an important aim of our study. A powerful approach to answering this question
is to estimate the associations between momentary procrastination and smartphone usage
patterns for each individual and explore the patterning of these associations. Such per-
son-specific associations are important to report, as theoretical and empirical work sug-
gests human subjects research to be fraught with limited group-to-individual
generalizability (Fisher et al., 2018; Molenaar, 2004). Hence, associations within persons
(e.g., whether the same person procrastinates more after having used the smartphone)
should be separately examined from associations between persons (e.g., whether persons
who score higher on smartphone use compared with others also procrastinate more than
others).
Our first set of hypotheses were tested at the within-person level, to assess how a
person’s own fluctuations in smartphone use are linked to fluctuations in procrastination.
We expected that individuals would report a greater level of procrastination (a) after they
had received more notifications (H1), (b) after their smartphone use had been more frag-
mented (H2), (c) after they had spent more time on smartphone applications in total (H3),
and (d) spent more time on social media applications (H4a), messengers (H4b), video
streaming applications (H4c), games (H4d), and browsers (H4e). Above and beyond these
average within-person effects (“fixed effects”), we expected these associations to differ
across individuals (H5; “random slopes”). Finally, at the between-person level, we
expected that individuals with a greater level of procrastination on average would (a)
receive more notifications and spend more time on smartphone applications in total
(H6a), (b) use their smartphone in a more fragmented manner (H6b), and (c) spend more
time on smartphone applications in total (H6c) and on all application categories (H6d–H6i;
“between-person effects”).

Methods
Preregistration
This article presents results from a larger study with multiple research aims. We sepa-
rately preregistered the full study (https://osf.io/6fs92/, see Online Supplementary
Materials 1), and the hypotheses and data analysis for this specific paper (https://osf.io/
r4jtc/, see Online Supplementary Materials 2). We declare that, at the time of writing (1
July, 2020), we only observed and analyzed variables relevant to the present study.

Participants
We recruited participants via the Tilburg University participant pool management sys-
tem. A priori power analysis using Monte Carlo simulation showed that a sample of N =
200 with a compliance rate of 80% (i.e., 120 out of 150 assessments) would be sufficient
to detect a very small momentary association (<0.10). We oversampled to enable the
other aims of our research (i.e., machine learning).
Aalbers et al. 121

We included 247 participants, who were required to own an Android smartphone.

After removing 26 participants for whom no smartphone usage data were registered, our
dataset comprised 27,151 complete observations in 221 participants with an average age
of 20.87 (SD = 3.05), 122 (55%) of whom were female. On average, we analyzed t =
123 observations per person, which is sufficient for person-specific or n = 1 analyses
(Voelkle et al., 2012).

Procedure
Participants followed online instructions to install an application for experience sam-
pling (Ethica) and an application for smartphone usage logging (mobileDNA). The
majority of participants attended a group information session in which a researcher
explained the procedure and motivated participants to complete as many surveys as pos-
sible. A minority of students were instructed and motivated individually via a telephone
call or a WhatsApp conversation. Participation credits were assigned proportionally to
survey completion. Participants who completed all surveys 3 days in a row were entered
into a €15 raffle.
For 30 days, Ethica notified participants five times a day at pseudo-random times
between 8:30 a.m. and 10:30 p.m. to complete a brief survey on procrastination and
other constructs. Participants had 50 min to complete each survey and were sent a
reminder 45 min following the first notification. Participants could compensate for one
expired survey per day by self-starting a survey to catch up on missed surveys. The
median number of completed surveys per person was 141 (94%, M = 128.42, SD =
32.58, min = 0, max = 176).

Measures
General Procrastination Scale – Experience Sampling Method.  The General Procrastination
Scale – Experience Sampling Method (GPS-ESM) is based on the General Procrastina-
tion Scale-Screening, a scale that represents a pure measurement of procrastination
(Klein et al., 2019). The GPS-ESM comprises three items on a 7-point Likert scale (1
“Not at all”, 4 “Moderately”, 7 “Very much”). The items were preceded by the statement
“Please report to what extent the following statements applied to you since the last sur-
vey.” We presented items in the following fixed order: “I delayed before starting on
work I have to do”, “I wasted time by doing other things than what I had intended to do”,
and “I thought: ‘I’ll do it later’.”
We conducted a small-scale pilot study (Online Supplementary Materials 3; all mate-
rials, data, and code are openly available at OSF, https://osf.io/qvj8g/) to validate the
GPS-ESM (N = 30, t = 25). Our validation work indicates the GPS-ESM has convergent
and divergent validity, is not susceptible to a socially desirable response tendency, has
adequate internal consistency, and is sufficiently sensitive to pick up on within-person
variability.

Smartphone usage patterns.  We used the smartphone logging app mobileDNA to continu-
ously log smartphone application use and notifications from the moment participants
122 Mobile Media & Communication 10(1)

Table 1.  Smartphone Usage Patterns and How we Calculated Each.

Smartphone usage pattern (per hour) Calculation

Time on smartphone in total Sum of total time on applications
Time on each application Sum of total time on each category (social media,
category (5×) messengers, browsers, games, video streaming)
Received notifications Sum of received notifications
Smartphone usage fragmentation Inverse of the median time lag between closing
and opening different applications

activated the application. If participant X completed a survey at time Y and time Z, we

extracted usage patterns that occurred between these timestamps (see Table 1). For
instance, if a participant completed a survey at 10:00 a.m., missed one at 11:00 a.m., and
completed a survey at 1:00 p.m., we took the sum of all application use durations to
compute “time on smartphone in total.” We followed this procedure for time intervals
within the same day and across days (e.g., last measurement of Day 1 and first measure-
ment of Day 2). We converted all usage patterns to represent units per hour. As the night
interval may be different not only in length but also in characteristics, in an additional
sensitivity test, we tested whether correcting for the night interval (in which smartphone
use is expected to be much lower) influenced results, and found differences in parameter
estimates to be negligible. For comprehensibility, we computed fragmentation as the
inverse of its preregistered metric, so larger values represented higher fragmentation.

Strategy of analyses
To test H1 through H4, we estimated momentary associations between procrastination
and smartphone usage patterns, using the dynamic structural equation modeling (DSEM)
framework in Mplus v8 (Asparouhov et al., 2018; McNeish & Hamaker, 2019). Following
McNeish and Hamaker (2019, p. 18–25,), we estimated two-level autoregressive models
of procrastination with smartphone usage patterns as a time-varying covariate. We
applied latent person-mean centering (for an explanation see McNeish & Hamaker,
2019). We further estimated between-subject associations between the random intercepts
of procrastination and each smartphone usage pattern. See Figure 1 for a visualization of
the full model. To prevent multicollinearity between predictors, we estimated a separate
model for each smartphone usage pattern.
We estimated momentary associations using DSEM because it enabled us to take into
account the autoregressive temporal structure of procrastination (i.e., when a person’s
current procrastination level depends on their previous procrastination level) by includ-
ing autoregressive parameters, while controlling for the non-equidistant measurements
due to pseudo-random sampling (i.e., when one pair of measurements are 2 hrs apart and
another pair 5 hrs; de Haan-Rietdijk et al., 2017), by using the TINTERVAL OPTION –
here set to 3 hrs. By applying the TINTERVAL setting, we instructed Mplus to create a
grid of time intervals and to assign each survey to the time point closest in time (see
Online Supplementary Materials 4 for more information). We tested to what extent
Aalbers et al. 123

Figure 1.  Visualization of the dynamic structural equation model estimated in this study. P stands
for procrastination, S for smartphone usage pattern, t for time (i.e., the current time point),
t−1 for time minus one (i.e., the previous time point), e for error. Parameters are represented
by Greek lowercase letters: αi represents the intercept of procrastination in person i, βi the
association between procrastination and smartphone use in person i, φi the autoregression of
procrastination in person i, and τ for variance (e.g., variance in βi).

smartphone use between the current and previous surveys (e.g., between 11:45 a.m. and
2:00 p.m.) was associated with changes in procrastination reported in the current survey
(e.g., procrastination between 11:45 a.m. and 2:00 p.m.), as we controlled for procrasti-
nation in the previous survey (e.g., procrastination between 9:00 a.m. and 11:45 a.m.).
DSEM decomposes the total variance of variables into within- and between-person
variance (i.e., the nested structure of data is taken into account). Between-person vari-
ance represents the extent to which individuals differ in their stable mean of, for exam-
ple, procrastination (i.e., the green horizontal lines in Figure 2), whereas within-person
variance represents the extent to which procrastination fluctuates around this stable mean
(i.e., total distance between each purple dot and the green line in Figure 2). Figure 2
shows that individuals with similar mean levels of procrastination (rows) can strongly
differ in terms of the within-person variance of procrastination (columns). The more a
variable fluctuates around the mean level of each participant, the greater the within-per-
son variance. The more a variable’s mean level differs across individuals, the greater the
between-person variance. The decomposition of the total variance into within- and
between-person variance was done by latent person-mean centering the data for each
person (see McNeish & Hamaker, 2019). This treatment of the data conceivably leads to
more accurate estimates by removing stable, idiosyncratic response styles (i.e., tendency
of a person to over- or underestimate procrastination).
Separating within- and between-person variance means that we estimate two “types”
of associations, which are used to address different hypotheses. Within-person associa-
tions are the associations we estimate to test H1 through H4. For instance, a positive
within-person association between procrastination and total smartphone use (H1)
124 Mobile Media & Communication 10(1)

Figure 2.  Within-person and between-person variance. Each panel depicts one participant’s level
of procrastination plotted against its timestamp (actual data, not simulated). The green horizontal
line represents a participant’s average level of procrastination. Participants A and B have similar
average procrastination levels, which are lower than those of Participants C and D, whose average
levels are also similar. Between-person variance is driven by such differences in the average
procrastination levels. Within-person variance is low in Participants A and C (small fluctuations
around average level), and high in Participants B and D (large fluctuations around average level).

indicates that participants tended to report a greater-than-usual level of procrastination

after spending more time than usual on their smartphone. To test H5, we estimated the
variance between persons (or person-to-person differences) in each of the above within-
person associations. That is, the extent to which people differ in how strongly procrasti-
nation and smartphone use tend to be synchronized. We used the metaviz package in R to
visualize these differences as a forest plot (for a list of all software we used to create this
manuscript, see Online Supplementary Materials 5). Finally, we estimated between-per-
son associations to test H6a–H6i. They represent the extent to which a person with a high
(low) mean level of procrastination also tends to have a high (low) mean level of each
smartphone usage pattern compared with other individuals. For example, a positive
between-person association between procrastination and total smartphone use indicates
that individuals who, averaged across their participation, reported a higher level of pro-
crastination than others, also tended to spend more time on their smartphone compared
with others.
Aalbers et al. 125

Table 2.  Descriptive Statistics.

Meana SD Min Max ICC

Procrastination (PR) 2.88 1.16 1.06 6.54 0.393
Total (TO) 12.44 5.54 0.14 33.94 0.205
Social media (SM) 3.58 2.47 0.00 11.85 0.221
Messenger (ME) 2.33 1.75 0.00 10.36 0.195
Videostream (VS) 2.56 2.55 0.00 14.18 0.159
Browsers (BR) 1.00 1.05 0.00 9.04 0.121
Games (GA) 0.88 1.65 0.00 10.88 0.183
Fragmentation (FR) 0.18 0.16 0.01 1.19 0.014
Notifications (NO) 0.76 0.68 0.00 4.95 0.193

Note. aAverage over the person-specific means; ICC = intraclass correlation.

Results
Descriptives
Table 2 shows descriptive information. As all intraclass correlation values (final col-
umn) are below 0.5, this indicates that more than 50% of the variance in each variable
represents fluctuations within a person. On average, students reported a relatively low
level of procrastination. However, 40 out of 221 students (18.10%) reported an average
procrastination level corresponding to the GPS-ESM scale value of “Moderate” or
greater. Students used their smartphone for 12.44 min per hour, on average. Participants
spent most time on social media applications (M = 3.58, SD = 2.47), followed by video
streaming applications (M = 2.56, SD = 2.55), and messengers (M = 2.33, SD = 1.75).
Assuming our participants were awake for approximately 14–16 hrs a day, this trans-
lates to a daily average of 2.90–3.32 hrs on the smartphone, and a daily average of
0.83–0.95 hrs spent on social media, 0.60–0.68 hrs spent using video streaming applica-
tions, and 0.54–0.62 hrs spent messaging. Table 3 presents the within-person and
between-person zero-order correlations between all variables. At the within-person
level, procrastination was positively correlated with all smartphone usage patterns.
Total smartphone use most strongly correlated with social media and video streaming.
Smartphone usage features were weakly associated with each other. Messenger use and
notifications were most strongly correlated. At the between-person level, procrastina-
tion was positively correlated with some smartphone usage patterns and negatively with
other patterns. Again, messengers and notifications were the most strongly associated
smartphone usage patterns.

Within-person associations
The autoregressive effect of momentary procrastination was positive and significant in
all DSEM models (Bayesian p-values < 0.05). Parameter estimates were highly similar
across models and ranged between 0.37 (95% credible interval (CI) [0.36, 0.38]) and
0.38 (95% CI [0.37, 0.40]). This indicates that when participants reported procrastinating
126 Mobile Media & Communication 10(1)

Table 3.  Within-Person (Below Diagonal) and Between-Person (Above Diagonal)

Correlations.

PR TO SM ME VS BR GA FR NO
PR – −0.062 −0.035 0.038 −0.079 0.020 −0.051 −0.087 0.036
TO 0.153 – 0.668 0.555 0.579 0.404 0.309 0.221 0.209
SM 0.124 0.555 – 0.343 0.160 −0.004 0.038 −0.098 0.222
ME 0.063 0.442 0.140 – 0.037 0.188 0.053 −0.033 0.370
VS 0.078 0.556 0.055 0.021 – 0.287 −0.050 0.329 −0.050
BR 0.055 0.322 0.083 0.050 0.013 – −0.042 0.235 −0.007
GA 0.055 0.322 0.030 −0.002 −0.021 0.005 – 0.179 −0.005
FR 0.005 0.154 0.094 0.048 0.103 0.027 0.056 – −0.168
NO 0.025 0.190 0.085 0.297 0.027 0.036 0.010 0.052 –

Note. PR = Procrastination; TO = Total; SM = Social media; ME = Messenger; VS = Videostream; BR =

Browsers; GA = Games; FR = Fragmentation; NO = Notifications.

during the previous time window, they tended to also do so during the next. The converse
held as well: when participants did not report procrastinating in the previous time win-
dow, they tended not to in the next.
While controlling for these autoregressive effects, we examined momentary associa-
tions between changes in procrastination and smartphone usage patterns. As shown in
Figure 3 (upper panel), momentary procrastination was positively associated with all
usage patterns for the average person (H1–H4). For instance, momentary procrastination
was positively associated with total smartphone usage, standardized beta = 0.128, 95%
CI [0.115, 0.142], p < 0.001. Thus, on average, when individuals spent more time on
their smartphone, they were somewhat more likely to report a greater procrastination
level in the next survey. All observed associations were statistically significant, ranging
from 0.017 for fragmentation to 0.128 for total smartphone use. However, the 95% CI for
the association with fragmentation ranged from 0.000 (but larger than 0) to 0.035, sug-
gesting this association might be negligibly larger than zero at the group level. The
abovementioned associations represent within-person statistics that have been aggre-
gated across individuals.

Person-to-person differences
Moreover, all aforementioned associations varied across participants (H5), indicating the
link between procrastination and smartphone use was not equal for all. As illustrated
with three cases in in Figure 3 (bottom panels), the patterning of effects was also differ-
ent from person to person. For instance, whereas for Person A, gaming (GA) was the
strongest correlate, for Person B, this was video streaming (VS), and for Person C this
was browsers (BR).
Figure 4 visualizes the magnitude of person-to-person differences, by presenting all
person-specific, momentary associations of procrastination with different smartphone
patterns. The majority of person-specific associations were positive (93.78%), which is
Aalbers et al. 127

Figure 3.  Radiance plots of within-person associations (upper panel) and person-specific
associations for three individuals (bottom panels). The green lines represent associations
between procrastination (diamond) and various patterns of smartphone use (circles; see Table
2 for a legend of the variable labels), with thicker lines representing stronger associations.
Numerical values inside the lines denote point estimates and 95% credible intervals.

in line with the abovementioned group-level estimates (i.e., the black solid line). In terms
of effect sizes, these ranged from β = –0.184 to β = 0.573. For 13.18% of all person-
specific associations the CI did not contain zero, which highlights that this is significant
at the n = 1 level of analysis. Even though some person-specific associations (6.22%)
were negative, for only one of all negative person-specific associations (between pro-
crastination and video streaming), the 95% CI excluded zero. Combined, these findings
show (a) person-to-person differences exist (H5), (b) variance is mainly due to differ-
ences in the strength of the positive effect (Figure 4), and (c) individuals differ in the
patterning of which aspects of smartphone use are related to procrastination (Figure 3).

Between-person associations
We also estimated between-person associations between self-reported procrastination
and passively logged smartphone usage patterns (H6a–H6i). That is, the extent to which
individuals who report a higher average procrastination level also tended to have a higher
128 Mobile Media & Communication 10(1)

Figure 4.  Person-specific associations between momentary procrastination and each

smartphone usage pattern. Each horizontal gray line represents one person’s association
between momentary procrastination and a given smartphone usage pattern. Each horizontal
line represents the 95% credible interval for that specific association. Associations with
95% credible intervals containing zero (i.e., the dotted line) are considered not statistically
significant. See Table 2 for a legend of the variable labels.

average level of smartphone usage pattern. Associations ranged from −0.08 to 0.04, but
none were statistically significant: p-values ranged between 0.13 and 0.36 and all CIs
included zero.

Discussion
The first aim of this study was to empirically test the assumption that smartphone use is
a momentary manifestation of procrastination. Overall, the findings support this assump-
tion: Momentary procrastination was positively associated with passively logged smart-
phone usage patterns, ranging from application usage to notifications to fragmentation.
That is, after spending more time on their smartphone applications, receiving more noti-
fications, and using their smartphone in a more fragmented manner, students tended to
report an increase in procrastination. Notably, these within-person associations were
very weak (e.g., fragmentation: 0.017) to weak (e.g., social media: 0.10). Our second aim
Aalbers et al. 129

was to examine the person-specificity of the associations between smartphone use and
procrastination. The observed person-specific associations varied weakly (e.g., fragmen-
tation) to moderately (e.g., social media) across individuals and were relatively strong in
some cases (range −0.184 to 0.573). The vast majority (93.78%) of person-specific asso-
ciations was positive, suggesting a rather homogeneous impact. The remaining person-
specific associations had a negative sign. Generally, however, the person-specific
associations in this study should be interpreted with caution. Although with a median of
141 assessments per person, we did have substantially more assessments than recom-
mended for drawing person-specific conclusions (i.e., 50–100; Voelkle et al., 2012), the
majority of n = 1 estimates were not statistically significant. The person-to-person differ-
ences in the strength and sign of associations suggest subtle differences in how individu-
als use their smartphone or appraise their behavior on these devices. The third aim of the
study was to test the relationship between procrastination and smartphone usage patterns
at the between-person level. At this level, we found individuals’ average procrastination
levels were not associated with their average level of any usage patterns.
An important question to address is whether our findings point toward smartphone
use constituting, or toward smartphones promoting procrastination. In our view, the data
support both. On the one hand, smartphone application use appears to constitute procras-
tination, as time periods in which smartphone use manifested itself overlapped with pro-
crastination, albeit generally to a mild extent. That is, time spent on smartphone
applications might reasonably be considered time that is not invested in intended actions,
such as studying. This interpretation matches the consensual definition of procrastination
(i.e., an irrational, voluntary delay to starting or completing an intended course of action;
Steel, 2007) and sits well with research showing that both procrastination (Steel &
Klingsieck, 2016) and (passively logged) smartphone use (e.g., Amez et al., 2019) are
associated with poorer study outcomes.
On the other hand, the association between smartphone notifications and procrastina-
tion suggests that smartphones might potentially also promote procrastination. As the
estimates were controlled for prior procrastination, they reflect within-person changes in
procrastination in the interval of smartphone use. After all, notifications may promote
procrastination by luring users into the consumption of an imminent short-term reward
in the form of a like, message, or update. However, as our data are observational, this
causal link is subject to alternative explanations. For instance, our descriptive statistics
suggest that a higher number of notifications tended to co-occur with increased messen-
ger use. Thus, when students spent more time on messengers, they tended to receive
more notifications (and vice versa). A greater number of notifications might therefore
simply reflect procrastinatory messenger use triggering an increase in notifications rather
than notifications triggering procrastination.
An alternative (but not mutually exclusive) interpretation of our general findings
could be that students appraise smartphone use to be problematic, mislabeling limited
smartphone use to reflect a high level of procrastination. That is, students attach subjec-
tive labels (i.e., intensity of procrastination) to objective behavior (i.e., actual time spent
on the smartphone) and these labels might be more severe than appropriate if the actual
behavior is innocuous or even beneficial. Such an observation might lead to the paradig-
matic question of whether procrastination is an inherently subjective experience (albeit
130 Mobile Media & Communication 10(1)

with consistent themes, such as that of delayed behavior), rather than an objective behav-
ior that people may perceive and interpret differently, and may therefore also misinter-
pret. This latter explanation of procrastination dovetails with recent scholarly work that
argues smartphone users have internalized media narratives that smartphone use is com-
monly problematic and fail to acknowledge the positive aspects of their smartphone use
(Lanette et al., 2018). For instance, students might judge their smartphone use to be a
waste of time, even if it has salubrious effects, such as recovering from the wear and tear
of daily life (cf. Reinecke & Hofmann, 2016), and serves other long-term aims that stu-
dents might not be fully aware of, such as strengthening ties with friends (Vanden Abeele
et al., 2017). If such misappraisal at least partially explains the associations observed in
this study, it is our view that the culprit in the story may not always be the smartphone
use itself, but the negative self-evaluations related to smartphone use. After all, when
smartphone use is misappraised as procrastination, this might unnecessarily induce feel-
ings of guilt that could contribute to a downward spiral of psychological problems caus-
ing other problems (cf. Aalbers et al., 2019). To investigate this “misappraisal” hypothesis,
future studies could, for instance, test whether perfectionistic students are more likely
than non-perfectionistic students to label smartphone usage patterns as procrastination
(i.e., a stronger person-specific association) and experience negative affect (e.g., guilt) as
a result.
An important feature of our study is the large number of assessments, making it pos-
sible to detect rather small short-term within-person associations between procrastina-
tion and smartphone usage patterns in daily life. Three factors might explain the limited
association strength. First and foremost, smartphone use conceivably represents only a
portion of most individuals’ total procrastination. For instance, participants might pro-
crastinate on their laptop, by watching television, or away from their screens. Second, by
taking a stringent test and modeling the autoregression of procrastination, we assessed
how smartphone use predicted changes in procrastination, which potentially limits the
strength of associations. It should be noted, however, that the zero-order within-person
associations (i.e., not corrected for autoregression of procrastination) did not deviate
much from our estimates. Hence, this analytical choice did not influence the strength of
associations much. Third, procrastination self-reports conceivably not only depend on
the participants’ actual procrastination, but also on their (fluctuating) motivation and
ability to accurately recall and report it. Such measurement error, the extent of which we
do not know, could have resulted in underestimated association strength. Finally, we
have assessed short-term effects within persons in daily life. In dynamic system theories
of development, such small effects may pile up and lead to larger longer-term effects.
Whether this is the case when it comes to the effects of smartphone use on procrastina-
tion is yet to be determined. However, this question is an important direction for future
research.
The present findings might be viewed as encouraging to the field of smartphone
research, which has been criticized for its lack of rigor in the measurement domain (e.g.,
Davidson et al., 2020). Recent work in the field suggests previously observed associa-
tions between procrastination and smartphone use might have been (strongly) driven by
questionable measurement practices, as this appears to have been the case for the asso-
ciation between smartphone use and psychological well-being (cf. Davidson et al., 2020;
Aalbers et al. 131

Sewall et al., 2019). However, resolving several of the methodological issues in previous
work, our study shows that the association between smartphone use and procrastination
is not restricted to (partial) correlations between cross-sectional surveys (Im & Jang,
2017; Rozgonjuk et al., 2018; Yang et al., 2019), but generalizes to conservatively esti-
mated within-person associations between repeated in vivo measures of procrastination
and passively logged smartphone usage data.
Our findings have implications for future research on procrastination. Although we
set out to find out whether procrastination treatment could possibly be optimized by tai-
loring interventions to an individual’s idiosyncratic smartphone usage patterns, our data
did not directly suggest that such personalized interventions are warranted. This is
because person-specific associations did not vary much across our participants.
Furthermore, an exclusive focus on smartphone use may not suffice, considering the
generally weak associations between smartphone use and procrastination. To conceptu-
alize the (potentially) idiographic nature of procrastination with the aim of tailoring
treatment, a different, more holistic approach might be more fruitful. First, like the daily
diary study by Schnauber-Stockmann et al. (2018), research should investigate person-
specific associations between procrastination and multiple (media) behaviors (e.g.,
watching television), in addition to smartphone usage patterns. Such behaviors would
ideally be passively logged or sensed (e.g., face-to-face conversations; Harari et al.,
2016) rather than self-reported. Second, when assessing the idiosyncrasy of procrastina-
tion, research should take into account the profile of person-specific associations between
procrastination and different behaviors and test whether separable clusters of procrasti-
nators can be found. For instance, whereas some people might procrastinate on social
media as well as messenger applications, others might do so by watching television and
using gaming applications. By taking into account associations between procrastination
and multiple (passively logged) behaviors, we might more completely map how an indi-
vidual procrastinates.
Notwithstanding the large dataset and the combined use of the experience sampling
method (ESM) and passive tracking, our findings should be interpreted in light of three
limitations. First, procrastination was measured using self-report, which likely intro-
duced measurement error that might have led to over- or underestimation of associations.
Follow-up research could limit self-report inaccuracies by reducing the time window of
procrastination ESM items (e.g., “In the past 15 minutes, I wasted time by doing other
things than what I had intended to do.”). Second, our study assumed linear associations
for all individuals in our sample. Future research could take into account non-linear asso-
ciations by first applying machine learning algorithms as an exploratory data analysis
step. Third, as this study was conducted in an international student sample, it is unsure
how findings generalize to other populations. A next step could be test whether they
apply to individuals who currently do not attend college.
To conclude, in this preregistered study, we applied DSEM analyses to a large hybrid
dataset consisting of in vivo procrastination measures and passively logged smartphone
usage data. The results indicate that (a) procrastination was positively associated with sev-
eral smartphone usage patterns at the within-person level but not at the between-person
level, and (b) that the within-person associations strongly differed in strength across indi-
viduals. For the vast majority of people, procrastination and smartphone use seem to be
132 Mobile Media & Communication 10(1)

positively linked, although a minority might potentially experience benefits (i.e., reduced
procrastination). Given the scale of our data collection and the expertise required for the
present study—from developing this study to preprocessing, analyzing, and interpreting
the data—we encourage interdisciplinary, multi-laboratory studies into (within-person)
associations between psychological variables and passively logged smartphone use.

Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Ghaith Al Seirawan, Andrei Oprea, Ethel Pruss, Marieke van der Pol,
and Kyle van Gaeveren for their outstanding help during the data collection of this study. The
authors further thank two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments that strongly improved
the present article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: Funding was received from the Tilburg University IMPACT program
as well as a VIDI grant (NWO VIDI grant no. 452.17.011) awarded to Loes Keijsers.

ORCID iD
George Aalbers https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7140-1536

Supplemental material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.

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Author biographies
George Aalbers is a PhD student at Tilburg University in the Department of Cognitive Science and
Artificial Intelligence. He holds a research master's degree in Clinical Psychology from the
University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands). His research focuses on modeling psychopathology
and psychological well-being using network analysis, time-series analysis, and machine learning.
Mariek M. P. vanden Abeele is an associate professor in Digital Culture at imec-mict-UGent, Ghent
University (Belgium). Mariek studies communication and social relationships, problematic smart-
phone uses and digital wellbeing, mobile media and childhood, and the implications of health and
fitness wearable use.
Andrew T. Hendrickson is an assistant professor at Tilburg University in the Department of
Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Science and Psychological
& Brain Sciences from Indiana University, USA. His research focuses on modeling learning and
well-being using cognitive modeling and machine learning techniques.
Lieven de Marez is a full professor at the dept of Communication Sciences of the University of
Ghent, where he teaches Innovation Research and Media, Technology & Innovation. He is the
research director of research group for Media, Innovation & Communication Technologies, affili-
ated to imec (imec-mict-UGent). His research focuses on monitoring digital adoption and use. In
order to grasp these shifting patterns, he relies on a mix of self-reporting (e.g. Digimeter) and log-
ging tools (e.g. MobileDNA).
Loes Keijsers is full professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and chair of Clinical Child and
Family Studies. Her research focuses on improving well-being of future generations, through stud-
ying the daily lives of adolescents and their parents, using Experience Sampling Methods.