Time attitude refers to thoughts and attitudes toward the past, the present, and the future and may underlie adolescents' decisions and behaviors about school and work. Multiple associations between time-related variables and several educational outcomes have been established previously. However, of these time-related variables, the majority have focused on attitudes and perceptions related to the future, but not to the present or the past. Academic procrastination is the act or tendency to procrastinate in learning activities, which has a great harm to students' academic performance, emotions, and subjective well-being. Recent theory suggests that procrastination is a form of temporal self-regulation failure, representative of high impulsiveness and reflecting a primacy of present self over the needs of the future self. Given the intrinsic temporal nature of procrastination, we expect that individual differences in time attitude are associated with academic procrastination. Achievement motivation is the internal motivation for people to achieve success in the process of completing tasks, including the pursuit of success and the avoidance of failure. Previous studies have found that achievement motivation is associated with time attitudes and academic procrastination. However, few studies use a multi-dimensional approach to examine the relationship between academic procrastination and time attitudes towards past, present and future. And the mechanism of time attitude's influence on academic procrastination is unclear. In the present study, we examined the relationship of time attitudes to academic procrastination, and whether achievement motivation can be a mediator variable between time attitudes and academic procrastination. We hypothesize that individuals with a positive time attitude have a stronger motivation to achieve the goals and thus have less academic procrastination. A total 733 middle and high school students participated in the questionnaire survey on Time Attitude Scale, Achievement Motivation Scale and Academic Procrastination Scale. The sample ages ranged from 12 to 19 years old (15.72 ± 1.26), with 316 boys and 417 girls. All the data was analyzed with the software SPSS 22.0 and Amos21.0. The structural equation model and bootstrap method were used to analyze the relationship between time attitudes and procrastination and the mediating roles of achievement motivation. The results showed that (1) past negative, present negative and future negative were positively correlated with academic procrastination, while past positive, present positive and future positive were negatively correlated with academic procrastination. (2) Past negative, present negative and future negative were negatively correlated with achievement motivation, while past positive, present positive and future positive were positively correlated with achievement motivation. And achievement motivation was negatively correlated with academic procrastination. (3) Achievement motivation partially mediates the relationship between present negative and academic procrastination, and completely mediates the relationship between future positive, future negative and academic procrastination. This study supports the important role of time attitude in adolescents' school-related variables. In addition, intervention programs aimed at improving students' motivation for achievement can effectively prevent adolescents from procrastinating.