Procrastination in practice: examining impacts and interventions for community development students in Thailand

Academic procrastination remains a widespread challenge in higher education, often reflecting predictable lapses in self-regulation that undermine learning, performance, and well-being. Addressing that issue, the study examined procrastination in a Community Development program where delays affect grades, report quality, and community relationships. A mixed-methods approach, a questionnaire with 80 students and interviews and observations of 17 key informants, integrating descriptive statistics, inferential statistics with qualitative content analysis to generate a comprehensive, context-sensitive understanding. Findings revealed moderate overall impacts, with stress highest, accompanied by moderate declines in work quality and efficiency, and interpersonal effects that, whereas lower, remained meaningful. Interviews showed that accumulated tasks, last-minute starts, and deadline pressure created cycles of rushed work, reduced concentration, superficial analysis, and disrupted collaboration, sometimes affecting academic progression. Student-endorsed strategies included identifying causes, prioritizing tasks by urgency and difficulty, setting short-term goals, segmenting work, scheduling balanced routines, and seeking support politely and clearly after demonstrating effort. These components informed a NO-DEIAY framework linking consequences, origins, task decomposition, prioritized execution, goal setting, help-seeking, and disciplined routines, providing practical guidance for instructors, supervisors, and program leaders in field-based community courses.