Her words were echoed by many members of the online groups, who said the bad habit has made their lives worse. Some people lost their jobs because they couldn't finish the assigned work. Some couldn't graduate from university as they couldn't complete papers on time. A netizen known as Flyingcloud said that he missed a precious interview just because he couldn't get himself away from a computer game.

After the groups had been established for sometime, the members found that a large number of people who suffer from procrastination work in science or idea industries such as designers, writers and artists. This habit of putting off everything is partly the result of them believing that they are more inspired under the pressure of a deadline.

"I think it is just an excuse," said Qiu Rui, a film editor in Beijing. "We can't rely on this for inspirations."

Qiu said that the habit of putting off everything to the last moment has had a negative impact on his health. "Often I have to sit in front of computers to do editing 24 hours a day. My eyes get blurred and every time I finish it feels like I've been beaten. It takes me days to recover," he said.

Even so, Qiu hasn't succeeded in changing the habit of putting off tasks till the deadline is imminent. "I tried many ways such as cutting off the Internet, or asking other people to lock me in the room," Qiu said. "Such methods might work for a short time, but the function doesn't last long."

Tang Nana, a 26-year-old woman who is studying in England for a master's degree in law, admits that she has been suffering from procrastination for years. "It must be a disease, I can feel it clearly," said Tang, who was nicknamed Miss Deadline by her friends. "It is getting worse. One month ago, I once gathered five essays, which had the same deadline to the last day and got ready to work overtime to finish them. But even so, I spent a long time in cooking and cleaning the apartment. When I finally sat down to do them it was already 8 o'clock in the evening."

The result was that three of the essays didn't pass and Tang had to rewrite them. "My friends said it is a matter of attitude, but it is not exactly, I know something must be wrong but I can't figure out why I can't control myself at all," Tang said.

Whom to blame?

"People always regard laziness as the main reason for procrastination. This is the biggest misunderstanding of procrastination," said Harrison Yu, the founder of the group Fighting Against Procrastination on Douban.com. "To be lazy means you don't want to do anything. But procrastinators want to achieve things, they just cannot manage their time."

Yu, who is well-known in the group for his Web name Gaodi Qingfeng, compared the contradiction to driving by quoting a sentence written by another member of the group, "It is like we press one foot on accelerator and another foot on brake."

As a doctoral student, Yu in November 2008 came across the word procrastination when he failed to hand in the materials required to apply to be an exchange student at another university.

"I felt very depressed as collecting the materials was not a difficult task at all. The reason I failed is just because I didn't do it on time," said Yu, who, from then on started to fight against procrastination.

Tang revealed that she didn't have the motivation to work until the last day or even the last hour. "Most of the time I can meet my deadlines," Tang said. "So I solidify my belief that all these tasks can be finished in a very short time and I don't want to bother to work earlier."

"But things cannot always work like this," Qiu said. "When an antelope meets a lion for the first time, the antelope might escape by exhausting all its energy to run faster than the lion. But imagine if an antelope meets lions five times within one day. Can it still manage to escape?"

Tang admits that with a more intense study schedule she wouldn't be able to meet all her deadlines by squeezing all tasks into the final day. "And I cannot relax with all those tasks unfinished. I always regret on the final day that I wasted all the time I had and promise myself that I will definitely start early next time. But the moment I finish these tasks, I fall into bad habits again."

According to Zheng Yong, a psychological professor at the Chongqing-based Southwest University, there are various reasons for procrastination. "So far, we've found more than 10 causes," he said.

Xiao Xia, a student at Fudan University in Shanghai, said, "If I start working earlier but cannot complete my work to a high standard, I won't have any excuse."