Precrastination: The Very Human Response To Digital Demand

Apparently  procrastinating was just totally 20th Century. Putting stuff off was fine when the only mail was The Mail, when people wrote with physical implements like pens or pencils and when people actually paid to have real experiences not available on a small screen or at least digitally enhanced.

So here we are in the electronic wonderland we have created for ourselves, only to discover we have found a new means of procrastinating. Owing to our insatiable demand for action, however, it is being called precrastinating because it entails addressing myriad unimportant errands and tasks in order to avoid taking on the big, honking challenges like figuring out whether your digital media strategy is actually producing results.

As a result, emails get returned immediately, even those in which you were the forty-third person copied on the copy line rather than the address line and we dutifully take our tablets to the gym in order to scroll through all those articles we bookmarked when we were doing something else. We may be running in place but we are doing something about it. Sort of. JL

Matt Richtel reports in the New York Times:

Cellphones, computers and other technology are powerful tools that let people tackle a constant stream of tasks, but they can also become hard to ignore, given people’s powerful desire to want to complete those tasks, he said.

Since the advent of the deadline, procrastinators have suffered society’s barbs for putting off until later what needs doing now. But it turns out that many people appear to be finishing things sooner than they need to get them done. They are “precrastinators,” researchers say.

“There is an overwhelming tendency to precrastinate,” according to a paper published in May in the journal Psychological Science. The behavior might include answering trivial emails, for example, or paying bills far ahead of time. “It’s an irrational choice,” the paper said, but it also reflects the significant trade-offs people make to keep from feeling overwhelmed.

The paper described an experiment at Pennsylvania State University that was meant to explore decision-making when it comes to physical effort. Students were asked to carry a beach bucket down an alley. They were given a choice: They could pick up a bucket near the start of the alley and carry it to the end, or they could pick up a different bucket that was closer to the end of the alley, walk a few steps and put it down.

The researchers assumed that most of the subjects would choose the bucket that required the least amount of lifting time. Instead, most picked up the bucket that was closer to them, a decision that forced them to carry it longer than necessary. In other words, they gave themselves extra work for no apparent benefit.

“We couldn’t figure out what on earth was going on,” said the lead researcher, David Rosenbaum, a professor of psychology at Penn State. “We thought maybe we made a mistake with the instructions.”

To confirm their observations, and to better understand this seemingly counterintuitive habit, the researchers performed eight more experiments. For instance, in several of them, the buckets were filled with pennies, and thus heavier to carry — and still the subjects tended to pick up the first bucket, adding unnecessary work.

Through the experiments, the researchers homed in on a hypothesis: People appear wired to incur a significant physical cost to eliminate a mental burden.

In particular, Dr. Rosenbaum said, people are seeking ways to limit the burden to their “working memory,” a critical but highly limited mental resource that people use to perform immediate tasks. By picking up the bucket earlier, the subjects were eliminating the need to remember to do it later. In essence, they were freeing their brains to focus on other potential tasks.

The implications are widespread, scholars said. For one, the findings help explain the lure of self-help gurus who urge people to keep their inboxes empty and finish even trivial tasks as soon as they come in.

But there can be downsides to getting things done early, particularly in the digital era, said Alan Castel, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Cellphones, computers and other technology are powerful tools that let people tackle a constant stream of tasks, but they can also become hard to ignore, given people’s powerful desire to want to complete those tasks, he said.

“You’re constantly lured into answering email or answering a phone call,” Professor Castel said. But as the Penn State experiment indicates, getting small tasks out of the way might collectively consume significant resources.

“People who are checking things off the list all the time might look like they’re getting stuff done,” he said, “but they’re not getting the big stuff done.”