Challenge B – Prototype
Procrastination: What, why and how?
Updated: Oct 8th, 2025
Authors: Emma Lee, Yiran Han, Justin Scott
Brief Project Intro
Our group consists of Emma Lee, Yiran Han, and Justin Scott. For this project we have decided to make our Video presentation on procrastination. More specifically, we will be examining 3 aspects: What is procrastination? Why do we procrastinate? and 5 tips to stop procrastinating. We decided on this topic due to the fact it is a challenge that nearly everyone faces at some point in their life. By turning this topic into a multimedia learning project, we aim to make strategies for managing procrastination more accessible, engaging and relatable for the viewer.
Our goal of this project is to help learners better understand all the factors due to procrastination and to share ways and solutions to work around it. Whether it is someone who actively knows they struggle with procrastination, or it someone who does not know what procrastination is. We want viewers to walk away feeling like they have learned something new about the topic. So far we have worked well together with quick response times and organized planning sheets.
Describe the Challenge
Individuals of all ages need to learn strategies to overcome procrastination in order to manage their time better and accomplish personal or academic goals.
Context and Audience
Our target audience includes individuals of all ages, however, procrastination likely impacts older students and adults more than children. In the case of older students, procrastination most likely occurs within middle school aged students to post-secondary students. The needs and goals of these students are to manage their time in order to balance their school life, social life, and potential work life at the same time. For high school and post-secondary students it is especially important to learn how to manage procrastination as their workloads are a lot bigger. They may also be juggling chores and responsibilities at home, applications for more school and/or day-to-day activities and hobbies. With the freedom of being a teen/younger adult comes the responsibility to complete necessary tasks on time which leaves lots of room for procrastination, especially with tasks that aren’t appealing as parents/guardians and teachers are leaving it up to students to motivate themselves.
Younger children are likely to experience procrastination to a lesser extent as they often have parents, guardians and teachers to encourage and motivate them to complete their necessary tasks such as school work or extracurricular activities. Though there may be times where they do not particularly want to complete an assignment, the adults in their life likely make it harder for them to procrastinate.
In terms of adults, their needs and goals are fairly similar. They also need to balance their work life, social life and potentially the lives of children as well, along with responsibilities at home. Goals for them may involve career advancement, financial stability, and becoming a home owner, and/or starting a family. Procrastination as an adult can be common as, similar to high school and post-secondary students, the individual needs to find the motivation to complete tasks with nobody encouraging or pushing them to do so.
As mentioned earlier, procrastination impacts the majority of age groups and these tips to prevent it are easy tasks and strategies that anyone struggling with procrastination can implement into their day-to-day life.
POV Statement
A student who often struggles with procrastination needs practical time-management and motivational strategies so that they can maintain focus, reduce stress, and accomplish their academic goals more effectively.
Learning Objectives
This program aims to help learners identify common causes of procrastination and apply practical strategies to manage their time more effectively. Specifically, learners will identify different types of procrastination, practice time management techniques (such as breaking tasks down into smaller steps), and develop self-motivation strategies (such as setting realistic goals and rewarding progress). In addition to these skills, learners will reflect on their personal procrastination habits, build resilience by recognizing the commonality and controllability of procrastination, and enhance self-regulation skills that are transferable to other areas of learning and personal growth.
Ideation
Our most promising prototype involves using the explainer video format in order to describe what procrastination is, why we do it, and give tips on how to stop procrastinating.
Script
What is procrastination? (Yiran) – explainer video
- Definition
- Everyday examples
- How it looks in real life
- Short-term comfort vs. long-term cost
- Why it matters
5 tips to stop procrastinating (Emma) – explainer video
- Tip #1: Break large tasks into smaller chunks
- Tip #2: Create a to-do list
- Tip #3: Use the Pomodoro Technique
- Tip #4: Set realistic goals
- Tip #5: Practice positive self-talk
Why do we procrastinate? (Justin) – explainer video
- Background / Science of why?
- Fear of messing up / not being perfect
- Dopamine
- Overwhelming
- Breaking the Cycle
Principles Applied
When designing our explainer videos, we will try and apply several of Mayer’s Multimedia Learning Principles in order to make our message about procrastination both clear and memorable.
The Coherence Principle will be used by us removing visuals that might distract the learners from the key idea of the videos being: What is procrastination? Why do we procrastinate? and 5 tips to stop procrastinating. We will use the Signaling Principle to highlight important information within the video. The Modality Principle will also be used by using narrated audio instead of making the viewer read the prompts on the screen; they will have visuals to pair with the audio, helping them be able to process the information more effectively.
The Segmenting Principle was especially important for this topic; we decided to break the topic into 3 separate parts to make it easier to digest: What is procrastination? Why do we procrastinate? and 5 tips to stop procrastinating. This will also allow the learner to pause and reflect between the videos to make sure they understand fully. Lastly, the Redundancy Principle ensures text and narration do not repeat the same information more than once unnecessarily.
When applying these principals, we will aim to create a resource that not only teaches the viewer strategies but also follows effective, learner-centered multimedia design.