Procrastination might feel like something only lazy or unproductive or “bad” language learners do. So when you find yourself procrastinating, it can feel like you’re not cut out to learn a language. Not true. Here’s why.

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What You Need to Know About Procrastination & Fluency

The literal meaning of the Latin etymology of the word is a good starting point here.

“Pro-” here means ‘forward, forth, to the front’ and “-crastinate” is to do with ‘tomorrow’. So when we procrastinate, we’re moving things to tomorrow.

The regularly understood meaning relates to this – we’re putting stuff off, postponing, and filling our time with other things instead.

And it’s not just you. Some studies into academic procrastination (aka, procrastination in school and university settings) have found students reporting procrastination to be as high as 70%.

Now for the less reassuring news – a lot of studies have found (perhaps not surprisingly) that procrastinators do worse in tests than habitual learners.

Procrastination Boosts Creativity

So far none of this may come as a surprise.

You probably already suspected that procrastinating happens to a lot of us, and hinders our progress when it does.

But! There’s a silver lining here.

Language learning can’t be crammed into your brain like an overpacked suitcase.

You need time to mull over ideas.

Time to let words linger and stick.

And time to switch off between digesting new information.

Procrastination can serve as that time.

And I know you probably don’t believe me just yet, so here’s something to back me up on this.

A study on procrastination by Shin and Grant from 2021 found some really interesting insights on this.

They gave participants a task – to come up with a business proposal for a student entrepreneur who just won $10,000 prize money.

They also left some procrastination bait, if you will, in the form of Jimmy Kimmel Mean Tweets videos in the bio of the student entrepreneur, stating his brother had come up with the segment.

What they found was this U-curve result.

When people were considered to have had low or high procrastination, their ideas were about as creative as each other.

But, when people were deemed as moderate procrastinators during the study, their ideas were more creative.

Why does this matter for language learners?

Because it shows us that procrastination isn’t evil, it isn’t all bad, and there’s actually a sweet spot when it comes to enhancing our creative ideas.

This is most useful for us when we’re doing creative language tasks – things like writing and speaking prompts.

Procrastination Hates Deadlines

We can likely all relate to that short-term procrastination we’ve experienced when we have a deadline for something.

Maybe you leave ordering a new passport to the very last day for guaranteed arrival before that trip.

You hold off on writing that essay until the night before.

Or perhaps you keep hitting snooze until there’s no time for the ‘perfect’ morning routine you planned and all that’s left is 5 minutes to roll out of bed and throw on the first clothes you see.

But when we’re talking longer term procrastination, the deadlines aren’t always as clear or as close.

Language learning is a big one here.

We don’t finish learning a language. It just…keeps going. So it’s easy to procrastinate if we don’t set deadlines along the way – in other words, goals and milestones.

Setting goals and milestones turns your long-term procrastination of “I’ll be fluent one day” into a short-term procrastination with an end point. It makes it much easier to get the stuff done you want to get done.

Procrastination Loves Multilingualism

Not only could your (so-called) procrastination actually be useful, passive and/or incidental learning (think watching videos, scrolling language-specific social media, or singing along to a song or two), but it could prove beneficial to act as a ‘brain break’ in between studying different languages.

In my experience, I’ve always found that a ‘lighter’ activity or a few minutes off task helps me perform better when I then come back to my languages but switch to studying another than what I was learning before.

Although, it does have to be said, there’s plenty of research that supports the idea of bi/multilinguals being good task-switchers as well as good language switchers so eventually this becomes less and less of a problem. A nice side effect of multilingualism!

Procrastination Lets Language Solidify

And finally (and we’ll talk more on this at Grace & Space), that sweet spot in the U-curve of procrastination could be just what’s needed to let your languages percolate and solidify.

I used to feel really annoyed with myself when I’d lose a streak on holiday or stop studying for weeks or months when big life stuff is happening.

But now, I actually look forward to those moments.

Because I know that a break is a good thing. Procrastination, distractions, taking a break can work wonders at helping language you’ve learnt seep into your long-term memory.

It sounds counter-intuitive, which is why so many people get stuck in an endless app streak even when they can’t say hello.

Surely to learn, you have to…well, learn, right?

And yes, of course you do. But breaks are equally as important.

Breaks and procrastination help to reduce cognitive overload.

So you’re not just cramming and cramming and trying to squeeze everything in and remember it all. Instead, you’re strategically using procrastination as breaks to give you space.

Join me at Grace & Space

At this year’s Grace & Space event, I’m teaching a whole session on this topic.

It’s called How to Learn Languages Even When You Get Distracted.

And that’s just one piece of what you get with your Grace & Space ticket.

Our topics this year are Expectations, Shame, Distractions & Seasons. You get a brand new session for each topic.

As well as that, you also get a week of Open Group Support Chat in Voxer with me, Lindsay.

This is a chance to ask your questions, learn from others & get the answers and support you need to go back to your languages with a renewed feeling of motivation, not stress. (The amount of times I’ve left a language event feeling overwhelmed and like I’m not good enough is too many! This is not that!)

Grace & Space is an annual event that I host online for language learners who want to learn languages better but don’t like the hustle of the hacks.

It’s your chance to take a moment to pause, reassess, and step back into better language learning, but with a fresh sense of self-compassion and support that will actually help you rather than stress you out.

To make things more flexible than ever for you, the sessions at this year’s Grace & Space aren’t live, so no worries about time zone translations and staying up late or getting up early.

Instead, you get access to all the Grace & Space sessions at once as well as the asynchronous Open Group Support Chat via Voxer for a whole week.

Grace & Space tickets cost just $35 USD and are available right now.