However,
the opposite of procrastination can also be a serious problem — a tendency we
call “pre-crastination.” Pre-crastination is the inclination to complete tasks
quickly just for the sake of getting things done sooner rather than later.
People answer emails immediately rather than carefully contemplating their
replies. People pay bills as soon as they arrive, thus failing to collect
interest income. And, people grab items when they first enter the grocery store,
carry them to the back of the store, pick up more groceries at the back, and
then return to the front of the store to pay and exit, thus toting the items
farther than necessary. Familiar adages also warn of the hazards of
pre-crastinating: Measure
twice, cut once. Marry in haste, repent at leisure.Look
before you leap.
We
first found striking evidence of pre-crastination in a laboratory
study exploring the economics of effort. College
students were asked to carry one of a pair of buckets: one on the left side of a
walkway and one on the right side of the same walkway. The students were
instructed to carry whichever bucket seemed easier to take to the end of the
walkway. We expected students to choose the bucket closer to the end because it
would have to be carried a shorter distance. Surprisingly, they preferred the
bucket closer to the starting point, actually carrying it farther. When asked
why they did so, most students said something like, “I wanted to get the task
done as soon as possible,” even though this choice did not in fact complete the
task sooner.
Nine
experiments involving more than 250 students failed to reveal what might have
been so compelling about picking up the nearer bucket. Although some hidden
benefit may await discovery, a simple hypothesis is that getting something done,
or coming closer to getting it done, is inherently rewarding. No matter how
trivial the achievement, even something as inconsequential as picking up a
bucket may serve as its own reward.
Is
pre-crastination — exhibited by college students, bill payers, e-mailers, and
shoppers — a symptom of our harried lives? The other
study from our laboratories suggests it is
not: that experiment was done with pigeons. The birds could earn food by pecking
a touchscreen three times: first, into a square in the center of the screen;
second, into the same square or into a square that randomly appeared to the left
or right of it; and third, into a side square after a star appeared within it.
Critically, food was given after the final peck regardless of whether the second
peck struck the center square or the side square where the star would be
presented. The pigeons directed their second peck to the side square, hence
moving to the goal position as soon as they could even though there was no
obvious or extra reward for doing so. Thus, the pigeons pre-crastinated.
Finding
pre-crastination in the pigeon is particularly important because the
evolutionary ancestors of pigeons and people went their separate ways 300
million years ago. Following a popular line of thinking in comparative
psychology, the fact that both pigeons and people pre-crastinate suggests that
this behavioral tendency may have emerged even earlier in phylogeny.
Why
would our evolutionary kin have pre-crastinated, and why do we humans and our
pigeon contemporaries do so now? It is possible, as suggested above, that
pre-crastination amounts to grabbing low-hanging fruit. If grain is nearby or if
a bucket is close at hand, then it may be best to get it while it’s available.
Another explanation is that completing tasks immediately may relieve working
memory. By doing a task right away, you don’t have to remember to do it later;
it can be taxing to keep future tasks in mind.
Requiring people to delay
performance of a task often worsens their performance of it. Yet, we doubt
this is the whole story. Lifting a bucket doesn’t tax working memory very much,
and it’s not obvious why directing the second peck to the future goal location
would reduce the load on the pigeons’ working memory. A simpler account is that
task completion is rewarding in and of itself.
Tasks
that can be completed quickly woo us more than tasks that must delayed. All
potential tasks, or their underlying neural circuits, compete for completion.
Neural circuits for tasks that get completed may endure longer than neural
circuits for tasks that don’t.
Another
benefit of completing tasks as soon as possible is to provide us with as much
information as possible about the costs and benefits of task-related behaviors.
Trial-and-error learning is the most reliable way we discover what does and
doesn’t succeed in everyday life.
Such learning can
even prompt practical behavioral innovations. Given these benefits, it may
be better to gain experience from several trials than only a few.
Pre-crastination
clearly adds to the challenge of coping with procrastination. Not only must
procrastinators start sooner to begin tasks they’d rather defer, but they must
also inhibit the urge to complete small, trivial tasks that bring immediate
rewards just for being completed. The discovery of pre-crastination may suggest
a way to counter the ills of procrastination. Break larger tasks into smaller
ones. Such smaller tasks, when completed, will promote a sense of
accomplishment, will bring one closer to the final goal, and, via
trial-and-error learning, may support the discovery of even more adaptive or
innovative ways of behaving.
