Abstract
Procrastination is defined as voluntarily delaying an intended course of action, yet the gap between intention and action is rarely measured directly, and little is known about how it unfolds over time. We gave 127 adults seven days to complete 180 units of a self-paced online reading task and recorded the timestamp of every completed unit. Before the task began, 67 of them reported how many units they intended to complete on each of the seven days, so that intended and actual work were expressed in the same units on the same days. Among those who finished, work was concentrated 0.59 days later than intended, although the day people finished did not differ from the day they had planned. The gap widened through Day 4, stopped growing on Day 5, and narrowed over the final two days. Intentions predicted when people started but not when they finished, and their influence faded after the first half of the task. Trait procrastination showed the opposite pattern, predicting actual but not intended work and shaping the timing of work throughout the task, most strongly in the middle.