Pre-crastination and how to recognise it

Recent research suggests that rushing to complete projects might actually harm our productivity – a phenomenon that is called “pre-crastination,” or the desire to choose more difficult ways to complete tasks, just to be able to mark the task complete.

According to researchers, we’re constantly trying to check off tasks to free up our working memory – the information that we remember in the short-term. They theorise that we desire the mental relief of getting a task done so much that we expend extra effort to get it.

When it comes to structuring our work, many of us pre-crastinate in these ways:

1. Rushing to complete a task ahead of time, only to find that you need to go back and fix common errors you should have known not to make.

2. Spending the first few minutes of the workday constructing a plan for how to best use the next eight hours.

3. Tackling the easy stuff first, rather than focusing on the most meaningful assignment on your list and dedicating your peak hours to completing that task.

4. Spending a whole day responding to emails and simple tasks, only to find at 5 pm that no progress has been made on the work that really brings value to you and the organisation.

Rushing to completion too often means having to go back and revise and refine work that was done in haste. Instead of being eager to get things done quickly, perhaps we need to focus on getting things done more slowly, but with better quality and fewer revisions down the road.

In association with Harvard Business Review