My team and I are looking at how people delay responding and completing social micro-responsibilities (tasks that take less than 5 minutes to complete like texting or emailing back to people). Each of the personas we create represents very unique behaviors related to our studies, in which mine, Anxious Anna, pursues a unique role of students who avoid responding to social micro-responsibilities due to emotional responses and accumulated stress. As a high-achieving pre-med student, she places a strong emphasis on being perceived well by others, being respectful, and competent. As a result, in addition to her workload, she finds micro-responsibilities to feel emotionally loaded. She sees messages and delays them because she wants to be careful in crafting perfectly worded messages with the right tone and timing. The longer she delays responding, the more overwhelmed she becomes, which creates more anxiety and avoidance. However, she still feels a need to be perceived well, so she also gets stressed by others viewing her as ignorant or disrespectful, in which the delayed tasks linger in her mind all day until she gets to them. She is unique because she exists in a state of emotional stress and reflects students who find social micro-responsibilities as stressful for students who hold themselves at a high standard and fear negative evaluation.
Key differentiator: The longer they delay tasks, the more of a burden it is for them. Avoidance causes their delay, impacting their emotional responses.
