Original title: When do intentions predict action? The temporal dynamics of the intention–action gap
Peiyuan Zhang, Luisa Leonelli, Yijun Lin, Wei Ji Ma · September 2026
People often delay doing things they plan to do, which is known as procrastination. Researchers rarely measure this gap between intention and action directly over time. In this study, people had seven days to finish an online reading task, and some wrote down how much work they planned to do each day. The researchers then tracked exactly when participants did the work. They found that work happened later than planned. The gap between plans and actions grew through Day 4, stopped growing on Day 5, and shrank over the last two days. Daily intentions predicted when people started, but not when they finished. Finally, a person's general habit of procrastinating shaped when they worked across the task, especially in the middle.
Imagine you plan to clean your room over a week, deciding how many items to put away each day. You start strong, but by midweek you fall behind, and then you rush at the end to catch up. Your initial plan only predicted when you began, not when you finished—your general habit of putting things off was a better guide to your actual pace. Here, the researchers tracked reading tasks instead of cleaning, and found the same pattern: plans lose their power mid-task, while the habit of delaying takes over.
This matters because it reveals that your intentions only get you started, not finished. The gap between what you plan and what you do grows for the first few days, then shrinks at the end. That pattern means the middle of a task is when intentions stop working—and that's exactly when trait procrastination takes over.
The study only tracked one task (online reading) over one week, so the pattern may differ for other activities or longer periods. Only 67 of 127 participants reported intentions, which could bias results. The findings apply only to those who finished the task, and the measure of trait procrastination is not specified.
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When do intentions predict action? The temporal dynamics of the intention–action gap — Peiyuan Zhang, Luisa Leonelli, Yijun Lin et al. — PsyArXiv — doi:10.31234/osf.io/5djx6_v1
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.