Precrastination, defined as the act of completing tasks immediately, often at the expense of increased effort or diminished quality of outcomes, is a phenomenon observed in certain individuals. This approach is often adopted to avoid the anxiety and stress associated with last-minute work and procrastination.Rehman Iqbal (28 April 2023)" Opposite of Procrastination: Do It Now!" Aww Reads. 4 May 2023. Precrastination may be an unhealthy behavior pattern and is accompanied by symptoms such as conscientiousness, eagerness to please, and high energy.
People who precrastinate may try to find shortcuts to be more efficient and productive, but this may result in the application of non-effective energy management and cause the person to fulfill their tasks to an incomplete or insufficient degree. Precrastinators may be more likely to act impulsively instead of carefully planning ahead.
Etymology The word precrastination is a blend of pre- and -crastinus .
It is most likely a play on the word procrastination, which has an opposite definition.
Research Rosenbaum et al. coined the term precrastination in 2014. David A. Rosenbaum is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside. The study found evidence of human precrastination.
The bucket experiments The paper titled "Pre-crastination: Hastening Subgoal Completion at the Expense of Extra Physical Effort" consisted of nine different experiments that can be termed the bucket experiments. The goal of the research was "to get a better understanding of the evaluation of different kinds of costs in action planning". While confirming the belief that individuals would rather carry a load weight a shorter distance rather than an equally heavy load of weight a longer distance they found contradictory results. Most university students irrationally carried the closer bucket over a long distance, rather than the further bucket over a short distance to the endpoint. When interviewed, the participants answered that they wanted to "get the task done as quickly as possible". These surprising results from the first three experiments changed the goal of research to "describing and providing a theoretical interpretation of this astonishing phenomenon".
First three experiments The bucket experiments were conducted using Pennsylvania State University students as participants and started with a set of three experiments that involved having a participant walk down an alleyway and from there pick up one of two weighted buckets and carry it a distance further until a stop line. Contrary to the experimenters' expectations, participants would rather pick up and carry the bucket that was closer to them than pick up the bucket closer to the stop line, meaning that the participant would expend more energy to complete the task than necessary. When participants were questioned about their choice, they expressed the sentiment of wanting to get the task done as soon as possible.
Testing the new phenomenon The fourth experiment was used to confirm the finding of the previous three while reducing statistical variability by moving the starting position of the buckets further from the participants. Previous results were upheld and the statistical variability for the conclusion of the approach distance being the primary factor for picking up the bucket from the left or right was also upheld.
The fifth and sixth experiments were used to remove the aspect of foot–hand coordination from the task; this was done by placing the participants in wheelchairs while they completed the task. The results from this experiment were in line with the rest of the experiments.
In experiment seven, the researchers investigated "the possibility that participants actually preferred long carrying distances to short carrying distances". This was done by altering the total distance that a left or right bucket would need to be carried, rather than just altering the approach and carry distances of the buckets. The result of this experiment was that the theory that participants preferred long carrying distances was not supported and that the students still cared about the total distance of the task (approach + carrying distance), suggesting that when deciding task methodology, both approach and total distance are considered.
For the eighth experiment, the experimenters tested the hypothesis that "participants may have been attracted to the nearer object, grabbing it without considering the farther object because their attention was grabbed by the object that was closer at hand". This attention hypothesis was tested by placing a screen at the end of the alleyway that told the participants to wait before starting the task, this could be for a two or four-second interval. After this an okay message would appear and the participants could complete the task at their leisure. The researchers argue that the screen "was to get participants to look down the alley so they would see the far as well as the near bucket." and that their rationale for showing the wait message "was to discourage participants from impulsively initiating their excursion into the alley". Ultimately there were no significant deviations from the results of the previous experiments, meaning that the close-object preference was replicated.
Finally, the ninth experiment was to confirm that there was a noticeable difference in physical exertion between the two options for carrying distances and that the more labor-intensive option would be avoided. This was done by having light and heavy bucket options for the task while repeating the setup of experiments one through three. The results from experiment nine confirmed a general preference for the lighter bucket, thereby confirming to the researchers that exertion did matter to participants, and despite this would engage in close-object preference when performing the other experiments—even when it would result in a longer carrying distance, and thereby more exertion.
Further research
Sequencing preferences In April 2018 Lisa R. Fournier, Alexandra M. Stubblefield, Brian P. Dyre, and David A. Rosenbaum published a research article titled "Starting or finishing sooner? Sequencing preferences in object transfer tasks". This article examined task sequencing in regard to object-transferring tasks in which either of two possible tasks could easily or logically come before the other task. This was done in hopes of determining whether precrastination would generalize a consistent logic of which of the two tasks to do first.
For the experiment, they tested various conditions that differed in regard to "which task can be started sooner, finished sooner, or bring one's current state closer to the goal state". The testing of the experiment was to have participants transfer ping pong balls from two original buckets, one bucket at a time, into a bowl that was placed at the end of a corridor. The number of balls in the buckets, as well as the bucket distances along the corridor, differed between trials. An important factor for this experiment is the fact that the bucket selection didn't affect the total time to complete both of the transport tasks together. Also, participants walked, in grand total, an equal total distance and carried the buckets the same total distance regardless of which bucket was originally chosen.
The experiment's conclusion was that "We found that the chosen task order was strongly affected by which task or sub-goal could be started sooner", thus replicating the tendency to engage in precrastination that was first observed in 2014 Rosenbaum et al. The end conclusion of the article differed from the 2014 Rosenbaum study by stating that, instead of precrastination being fueled by the wish to complete sub-goals as quickly as possible, precrastination is more likely the result of the desire to initiate the sub-goals as soon as possible.
Precrastination and cognitive load On November 30 2018, Lisa R. Fournier, Emily Coder, Clark Kogan, Nisha Raghunath, Ezana Taddese, and David A. Rosenbaum published a research article titled "Which task will we choose first? Precrastination and cognitive load in task ordering". The article "examined the generality of this recently discovered phenomenon by extending the methods used to study it, mainly to test the hypothesis that precrastination is motivated by cognitive load reduction."
The researchers experimented using the basic experimental setup from the bucket experiments, with a few alterations. One, instead of participants having to pick up and carry one of two possible buckets along a corridor, participants in this set of experiments were instructed to pick up both buckets that were placed in the workspace. Two, the participants had to carry both buckets at the same time in order to complete the task. Due to the task requiring the participants to pass by the location of the first bucket twice, once while walking to the second bucket and once more while walking back toward the end goal, it was determined that the action of picking up the first bucket on the first walk constituted a display of precrastination. Three, the addition of having half the participants memorize digit lists on top of performing the base physical action task mentioned previously. Four, the experiment was broken into two separate experiments. In the first experiment, the objects to be carried were buckets with golf balls, with possible variations of the number of golf balls in the near bucket versus the far bucket. In the second experiment, the objects to be carried were cups that were either full or half-full of water.
The conclusion of the research is split into two parts. For experiment one, the researchers had the following statement: "The results of Experiment 1 showed that precrastination generalizes to the ordering of tasks (or task subgoals)." This resulted in another finding that replicates and extends the original findings of Rosenbaum et al. from 2014. The extension is seen with the findings that participants with a memory load showed a high probability of selecting the near bucket first—which was not the case for participants without a memory load. This means that while previous research is upheld, there is additional support to the claim that precrastination is the result of cognitive load reduction.
Regarding the results of experiment two, the researchers stated: "Participants in the water cup transport task largely abandoned the near-object-first preference". They believe this was the result of the participants having to "pay a great deal of extra attention to the task if they started with the near cup". This interpretation supports the hypothesis that precrastination is the result of a reduction of cognitive load—when cognitive load would be increased as a result of engaging in precrastination, precrastination does not occur.
End-state comfort and precrastination In January 2019, David A. Rosenbaum and Kyle S. Sauerberger published the research paper "End-state comfort meets pre-crastination", with the goal of resolving an apparent conflict between the observed phenomena of precrastination and end-state comfort. End-state comfort can generally be defined as the tendency to act in physically awkward ways for the sake of comfortable or easy-to-control final postures. Through the course of the paper, the researchers determine that the two phenomena are in fact not contradictory and can interplay between them, to determine the end course of action.
Studying precrastination in animals Precrastination has also been observed in animal behavior, as evidenced by Edward A. Wasserman and Stephen J. Brzykcy's 2014 paper "Pre-crastination in the pigeon".