Precrastination

My colleagues and I called this tendency “precrastination.” The term was meant to connote the opposite of procrastination, the tendency to put off until later what you can do right away. Pre-crastination is the tendency to do too soon what might be better done later.

Lanyun Gong and Cory Potts, the two students with whom I did this work, and I conducted a number of experiments to check our precrastination interpretation.

It is foreseeable that if we do not enjoy the process involved in completing a task, we will choose procrastination or precrastination to minimize the time we need to spend to do a task.

The precrastination effect is the finding that individuals complete actions earlier to "get it out of the way" (Rosenbaum, Gong, & Potts, 2014). In the current study, we tested precrastination with a prospective memory (PM) paradigm to determine if this phenomenon generalizes to PM tasks that can be completed at a time chosen by the participant.