The term “precrastination” is defined as the tendency to tackle subgoals at the earliest opportunity — even at the expense of extra effort.
In a study from 2018, led by Lisa Fournier, a professor of psychology at Washington State University, subjects were tasked with retrieving two buckets of balls. One was 6 to 12 feet in front of them, and the other was another 6 to 10 feet farther. Eighty percent of the subjects picked up the first bucket, carried it with them all the way to the second one, and then carried both back to the starting point.
“We tend to start with the task that can be done as soon as possible,” Dr. Fournier said.
Indeed, the longer your to-do list is, the likelier you are to precrastinate. To drive this point home, Dr. Fournier and her co-authors had some of the study participants increase their mental load by asking them to memorize a list of numbers that they would have to recall after retrieving the balls. The result: The percentage of precrastinators went up to 90.
What’s so hard about not jumping the gun?
One explanation is evolution. If you don’t grab the low-hanging fruit now, it might not be there later. You could run out of time to complete a task, or forget about it altogether. Carpe diem, right?
“I actually interrupt people a lot because otherwise I’m afraid I won’t remember what I was going to say,” Dr. Fournier said.