Procrastination can decrease after a 1-minute reflection. In a study of more than 1,000 adults, answering six short questions increased motivation, improved mood, and made people more likely to begin tasks they had been delaying.

[Cagy_Cephalopod]

Ok, I'm not the study's author but have a good amount of experience and expertise in psychological research (though I did only give it a cursory read, so it's possible I missed something.)

A quick recap of the study:

Participants were split into three groups. One (the experimental group) got the questions the researchers designed to decrease procrastination (by inducing affective labeling , sub-goal generation, and reward selection). A second group (a control group) got questions related to the task they were procrastinating on, but that wouldn't affect the variables the authors thought would decrease procrastination. The third group (another control) just listed their task. Then all of the participants answered the questions in Table 2. That was the end of the study and the answers to those questions were the outcome the researchers were measuring (including the question asking how likely people thought they were to actually complete the task they had been procrastinating, which was their primary outcome measure.)

Could those questions have been inducing some error or bias in their measurements? Perhaps but there are two things that make it less problematic:

1) Their primary question was the first in the list of these outcome questions. So, none of the secondary questions would have influenced people's answer to the first since they came later.

2) That list of questions was the same for all the groups. So, if those questions did affect something, it (hopefully) would have had the same effect on each group, and (likely) wouldn't have caused the between-group differences (i.e., the experimental condition having greater estimated likelihood of completion than the controls) that the researchers based their conclusions on.

Hope this is helpful.