Task Initiation

Task initiation is not only the ability to initiate (start) a task, but it also the “activation energy it takes to stop what you are currently doing and do something else.”^​1​

Successful task initiation relies on many factors, including other executive functions, such as working memory, planning, self-monitoring, and cognitive flexibility.

“Understand that difficulties with task initiation have many causes—difficulty understanding the task, challenges with knowing where to start, problems with visualizing the end product and planning how to get there, lagging skills in time awareness and management, etc. The process of switching gears to do something new is not automatic or seamless for [people] with executive functioning problems.”^​1​

Procrastination

Task initiation is often conceptualized by it’s dysfunctional state, which is procrastination.

Procrastination is the (usually irrational^​2​) avoidance of starting or engaging in any task, both intentionally and unintentionally.^​3​ While everyone engages in minor task avoidance sometimes, procrastination in psychology is usually conceptualized as a self-regulatory failure,^​4​ which is harmful to one’s life due to the “delay of an intended and necessary and/or personally important activity, despite expecting potential negative consequences that outweigh the positive consequences of the delay.”^​5​

“Procrastination is also identified as a behavioral pattern that leads to ineffective time management, reduced performance levels, delayed study behaviors, lowered levels of frustration tolerance, maintaining task avoidance, ego depletion, speed-accuracy tradeoffs, and an inability to regulate negative emotions”^​4​

Across the Lifespan

Childhood

Problems with task initiation become more apparent as a child progresses through school. Up until second grade (approximately age 8), teachers tend to provide significant guidance and structure on tasks, but from then on “teachers begin to decrease their support in an effort to build independent-learning skills.”^​1​ As that support from the teachers is reduced, students with impaired task initiation ability will start to have more and more trouble with studying and starting and completing assignments and their grades may begin to suffer. At the same time they may be gaining more and more responsibilities at home, and have similar problems with doing their chores, causing increasing family conflict.^​1​

Adolescence

If children aren’t able to learn strategies and coping mechanisms to deal with poor task initiation ability as a child, then adolescence will bring even more problems at school and home.

Many teenagers do their assignments late at night, hours before they are due, because they are trying to use  the time crunch to “activate” them into action on the task. This, and difficulty getting to bed (a task in of itself) even without assignments to do, can lead to chronic sleep deprivation. They may never do their chores without constant reminders or fights.^​1​ Teenagers tend to resent close parental monitoring, and thus may have more independence in how and when they do their homework, but this can also lead to more opportunities to use technology to distract themselves from what they need to do.^​1​

Teens who are not taught ways to improve their task initiation may feel hopeless about their performance in school, conflict at home, and at their inability to change their behavior. This can lead to low self-esteem and low self-worth, which can lead to mood disorders in some teens and adults (and sometimes even children).^​1​

Adulthood

Without help, the problems with impaired task initiation ability usually increase as teens graduate high school. In college students lose the structure of high school classes, and live without parental supervision for the first time. Procrastination therefore unsurprisingly increases significantly during the undergraduate years and peaks in the mid-twenties.^​4​ By that time many, but not all, adults are able to learn at least some strategies to improve their ability to initiate tasks.

OLDER ADULTHOOD

By older adulthood, people have learned enough skills that task initiation may no longer be a significant problem in their lives. Key to this appears to be a “gain in motivational competence regarding the selection of goals,” which increases goal facilitation through prioritization.^​6​

A lifetime of experience also brings more skill in approaching tasks, including organizing them into clear and achievable sub-tasks,^​6​ reducing the overwhelm and confusion-based task avoidance that is common though young adulthood.

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