Procrastination refers to a voluntary delay of a needed or committed task that might hurt productivity and wellbeing requirements such as self-acceptance, personal growth and positive relations with others. People might procrastinate due to a lack of motivation towards performing a task or a mismatch between the task and their skills. Social Networks Sites (SNS) are designed to provide users with the opportunity to socialise and feel relatedness despite being physically separated. SNSs design is typically equipped with a rich set of persuasive tools to encourage more social interaction. Such tools can entice procrastination when users have low self-regulation ability, and seek avoidance and mood modification. As a first step in designing persuasive features which would help people control their procrastination, there is a need to understand how existing SNS features persuade procrastination in the first place. In this paper, we conduct a multi-stage qualitative study to explore the occurrence of procrastination and the prominent features of SNS design that trigger and facilitate it. We use focus groups to explore SNS procrastination, and then get a more ecologically valid, detailed and in-context data via a ten days' diary study followed by clarification interviews. The findings shed light on prominent types of procrastination and features in SNS design that can persuade and increase, in certain contexts, the chance for procrastination.

Procrastination refers to a voluntary postponement that prevents people from performing their tasks and can hurt productivity and wellbeing. Procrastination might occur due to a lack of motivation to perform tasks or due to the low self-control that people might have over their time and task management. Social Networking Sites (hereafter SNS) are designed to enable their users to engage in online interaction for different purposes such as increasing popularity or exploring information. SNS embed influence and persuasion techniques to attract users which can make them a medium for procrastination where some users fail to maintain a desirable level of self-control over their usage. However, we argue that advances in persuasive technology and gamification techniques can be utilised to augment SMS and help users to regain self-control over their procrastination. Implementing these techniques correctly means that users can still enjoy accessing SNS while maintaining a desirable level of control over their procrastination. Building these antiprocrastination tools, however, is a challenging design activity due to their potential of triggering negative side-effects such as reactance and workarounds, and affecting the overall user experience. In this paper, we conduct user studies, consisting of an exploratory stage using focus groups, diary study and interviews and followed by a design stage based mainly on codesign sessions. Our studies' participants self-declared having a problematic degree of procrastination on SNS, to explore procrastination countermeasure techniques that can augment the future designs of SNS and how best to apply them.

Procrastination on social networking sites (SNS) can impact academic performance and user's well-being. SNSs embed features that encourage users to be always connected and updated, e.g., the notification features. Such persuasive features can exploit peer pressure as well and lead users to believe they are expected to interact immediately, especially for those who may have less impulse control and seek for relatedness and popularity. We argue that SNS can be built to host countermeasures for such behavior and help people regulate their usage and preoccupation about it better. In this paper, we presented a mixed-method study including a qualitative (i.e., focus groups, diary, interviews, and co-design) and a quantitative phase (i.e., a survey) with 334 participants. Through the qualitative phase, we identified: (1) features of an SNS seen by participants as facilitators for procrastination, e.g., notification, immersive design, and surveillance of presence, and (2) countermeasures, such as reminders, chat timer, and goal setting, can be facilitated via SNS design to combat procrastination, and (3) a pairing between the features and the countermeasures. We then (4) confirmed these results and the pairing through the survey phase. Our study showed that countermeasures could be implemented to be universal across all SNS on one or even more device.

Procrastination refers to the voluntary delay of urgent tasks and can have several negative consequences such as stress, health issues and academic under-achievement. Several factors including personality, culture and gender have been identified as predictors of procrastination, although there are some conflicting findings within the literature. Social networking sites have been identified as a possible facilitator of procrastination, in part due to their design features that encourage immersion and continual interaction. However, social networking sites also provide the opportunity for intelligent, real-time prevention and intervention strategies to be delivered that can reduce the experience of procrastination. In this paper, we build upon our research in which we used a mixed-method approach to explore the types, triggers and acceptance of countermeasures for procrastination on social media. Following a survey of 288 participants from the UK (n = 165) and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (n = 123), we conducted a series of multiple regression and binary logistic regression models to determine predictors of these factors. Several predictors such as self-control and conscientiousness were found to be significant predictors, but overall, the amount of variance explained by the regression models was relatively low. The results demonstrate that participants are receptive to countermeasures for procrastination being delivered through social networking sites but suggest that the predictors of procrastination related phenomena experienced in social networking sites are different than in offline settings.

While different variants of COVID-19 dramatically affected the lives of millions of people across the globe, a new version of COVID-19, "SARS-CoV-2 Omicron," emerged. This paper analyzes the public attitude and sentiment towards the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant on Twitter. The proposed approach relies on the text analytics of Twitter data considering tweets, retweets, and hashtags' main themes, the pandemic restriction, the efficacy of covid-19 vaccines, transmissible variants, and the surge of infection. A total of 18,737 tweets were pulled via Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) from December 3, 2021, to December 26, 2021, using the SentiStrength software that employs a lexicon of sentiment terms and a set of linguistic rules. The analysis was conducted to distinguish and codify subjective content and estimate the strength of positive and negative sentiment with an average of 95% confidence intervals based upon emotion strength scales of 1-5. It is found that negativity was dominated after the outbreak of Omicron and scored 31.01% for weak, 16.32% for moderate, 5.36% for strong, and 0.35% for very strong sentiment strength. In contrast, positivity decreased gradually and scored 16.48% for weak, 11.19% for moderate, 0.80% for strong, 0.04% for very strong sentiment strength. Identifying the public emotional status would help the concerned authorities to provide appropriate strategies and communications to relieve public worries towards pandemics.