RESEARCH PAPER Greater Mindfulness is Linked to Less Procrastination Nicola S. Schutte 1 & Andrea del Pozo de Bolger 1 Accepted: 18 December 2019/ # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 Abstract This study examined the relationships between trait mindfulness, a positive psycho- logical characteristic, attention and procrastination. One hundred and seventy-four Australian participants, 133 women and 41 men, with a mean age of 35.44, completed measures of trait mindfulness, ability for sustained attention and procrastination. Participants recorded a task they thought they might delay completing and were randomly assigned to a brief mindfulness exercise or a control exercise. Participants afterwards rated their intention to work on the task. Greater trait mindfulness was associated with better ability to sustain attention and with less procrastination. Attention mediated the relationship between mindfulness and procrastination. With engagement held constant, participants in the mindfulness exercise condition expressed more intention to work towards completing a task on which they tend to procrastinate than participants in the control condition. These findings have implications for better understanding procrastination and for the use of mindfulness to assist those who procrastinate. Keywords Attention . Mindfulness . Procrastination Procrastination consists of delaying a task for a maladaptively long time (Baumeister et al. 1994; Steel 2007). A substantial number of adults often procrastinate (Ferrari et al. 2005; Steel 2007) and harmful procrastination is especially prevelant among university students, with estimates of frequent procrastination in this group ranging from 50%– 95% (Kim and Seo 2015; Steel 2007). Individuals who procrastinate tend to recognize that their procrastination is harmful, and most of those who procrastinate would like to change this behavior (Steel 2007). Procrastination is associated with poor performance (Kim and Seo 2015), experience of stress (Beutel et al. 2016; Sirois 2014), and depression and anxiety (Beutel et al. 2016; Klein et al. 2017). International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology https://doi.org/10.1007/s41042-019-00025-4 * Nicola S. Schutte nschutte@une.edu.au 1 University of New England, Armidale, NSW 3351, Australia