833652

research-article2019
CDPXXX10.1177/0963721419833652Rosenbaum et al.Sooner Rather Than Later

ASSOCIATION FOR
Article PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Current Directions in Psychological

Sooner Rather Than Later: Precrastination Science

2019, Vol. 28(3) 229­–233
© The Author(s) 2019
Rather Than Procrastination Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0963721419833652
https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721419833652
www.psychologicalscience.org/CDPS

David A. Rosenbaum1, Lisa R. Fournier2, Shelly Levy-Tzedek3,4,5,

Dawn M. McBride6, Robert Rosenthal1, Kyle Sauerberger1,
Rachel L. VonderHaar6, Edward A. Wasserman7, and
Thomas R. Zentall8
1
Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside; 2Psychology Department, Washington
State University; 3Department of Physical Therapy, Recanati School for Community Health Professions;
4
Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; 5Freiburg Institute for
Advanced Studies, University of Freiburg; 6Department of Psychology, Illinois State University;
7
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Iowa; and 8Department of Psychology,
University of Kentucky

Abstract
Putting things off as long as possible (procrastination) is a well-known tendency. Less well known is the tendency to
attempt to get things done as soon as possible, even if that involves extra effort (precrastination). Since its discovery in
2014, precrastination has been demonstrated in humans and animals and has recently been revealed in an analogous
tendency called the mere-urgency effect. Trying to get things done as soon as one can may reflect optimal foraging,
but another less obvious factor may also contribute—reducing cognitive demands associated with having to remember
what to do when. Individual differences may also play a role. Understanding precrastination will have important
implications for explaining why hurrying happens as often as it does and may help reduce the chance that haste makes
waste.

Keywords
cognitive resources, foraging, hurrying, memory load, precrastination, procrastination, prospective memory

You have just driven home from the market with sev-
eral bags of groceries. You could carry one bag at a
time in several trips or you could carry several bags
at once in fewer trips. Which would you do? To get
the job done quickly, you could carry many bags
simultaneously, but you might drop a bag or overtax
yourself physically. Alternatively, you could carry one
bag at a time, but that would take longer. In such
circumstances, you might rush, but why would you
do so?
Consider the tendency to put things off as long as
possible—procrastination. Procrastination generally
applies to large-scale tasks such as writing term papers
or filing income taxes, not small-scale tasks such as car-
rying groceries. This article is about the opposite of
procrastination—precrastination—a term coined by
Rosenbaum, Gong, and Potts (2014). Precrastination is
the tendency to hurry to get things done as soon as
possible, even if that involves extra effort. Precrastination
is illustrated in behaviors such as carrying too many
bags in too few trips, answering e-mails immediately
rather than waiting to answer them with more fore-
thought, or paying bills right away rather than collecting
interest on funds in the bank for as long as possible.
Here, we review findings suggesting that precrastina-
tion is an important phenomenon. The most interesting
finding about precrastination is that it is not simply a
reflection of the desire to get instant gratification or
grab scarce resources (optimal foraging). Precrastina-
tion also reduces cognitive demands.
Corresponding Author:
David A. Rosenbaum, University of California, Riverside, Department
of Psychology, 900 University Ave., Riverside, CA 92521
E-mail: david.rosenbaum@ucr.edu
230 Rosenbaum et al.
The Discovery of Precrastination
Precrastination was found by accident in a study of the
planning and control of physical actions. Rosenbaum
et al. (2014) asked university students to walk down an
alley and pick up either of two buckets: one some
distance away on the left edge of the alley or one some
distance away on the right edge of the alley. The par-
ticipants were asked to take whichever bucket seemed
easier to carry to the end. It was expected that partici-
pants would pick up the bucket closer to the end of
the alley because that bucket would be carried a shorter
distance. The researchers’ plan was to explore the bio-
mechanical trade-offs between distance and weight:
How far would participants be willing to walk with a
relatively light bucket to avoid a relatively short walk
with a heavier bucket?
Surprisingly, most participants chose the bucket that
was closer to the starting point, not the one that was
closer to the end of the alley. This was odd because
the near-bucket choice resulted in a longer carrying
distance. When participants were interviewed about
their choices, they said they chose the near bucket to
get the task done as quickly as possible. Such a claim
made little sense from the point of view that the time
would presumably have been the same if subjects had
picked up the near bucket or the far bucket. On the
basis of nine experiments designed to test alternative
hypotheses, Rosenbaum et al. (2014) were led to the
hypothesis discussed in the next section.
Precrastination Reduces Cognitive
Demands
Rosenbaum et al. (2014) suggested that the near-bucket
preference stemmed from a desire to reduce cognitive
demands. The idea was that picking up and carrying a
bucket is nontrivial from a cognitive perspective
(Rosenbaum, 2017); witness the fact that robots still
have a very hard time with such tasks. In addition,
maintaining the intention to pick up a bucket loads
working memory. Therefore, picking up a bucket
sooner rather than later enables people to rid them-
selves of the cognitive load sooner rather than later.
This interpretation was supported by Fournier,
Stubblefield, Dyre, and Rosenbaum (2018), whose par-
ticipants performed a task similar to the one used by
Rosenbaum et al. (2014). Fournier et al.’s participants
picked up two objects at two distances and brought
them back to the start position in one trip. The question
was whether the participants would (a) pick up the
near object, carry it out to the far object, then pick up
the far object, and then return with both objects or (b)
walk past the near object, pick up the far object, and
then pick up the near object on the way back. Fournier
et al. found that participants opted for choice (a). The
researchers coded this choice as precrastination. In
another experiment, Fournier et al. found that when a
detail of the task was changed so that the objects to be
carried were cups filled with water that could easily be
spilled but were supposed to be prevented from spill-
ing, the near object was seldom picked up first; option
(b) was now preferred over option (a). Fournier et al.
concluded that precrastination is used to reduce cogni-
tive demands: When precrastination would have
increased cognitive demands (increasing attention to
the carried objects if the objects were cups filled with
water), precrastination was eschewed.
In another experiment, Fournier et  al. (2019) gave
participants a memorization task in conjunction with
less attention-demanding object carrying. These partici-
pants precrastinated at higher rates than participants
who were not given the added memorization. The
researchers observed that this result was again consis-
tent with the hypothesis that precrastination is associ-
ated with reducing cognitive effort.
In still other experiments, Fournier and her col-
leagues (2018) showed that precrastination is likely to
be automatically invoked, though it can be inhibited if
needed. Fournier et al. (2018) introduced manipulations
that revealed that precrastination is so strong that it
actually applies to the starting of tasks, not just the
completion of tasks. The results fit with an optimal-
foraging view, in which expressing a bias to grab poten-
tially scarce resources tends to increase fitness and in
turn encourages quick action (Yoon, Geary, Ahmed, &
Shadmehr, 2018). An optimal-foraging view and a
cognitive-easing view are certainly not inconsistent with
one another. Indeed, having a clear (or cleared) mind
should help one forage more effectively.
VonderHaar, McBride, and Rosenbaum (2017) pro-
vided more evidence for the hypothesis that reducing
cognitive demands gets high priority. They asked uni-
versity students to complete a computerized box-
moving task as well as a semantic item-generation task.
Their participants slid 10 boxes, one at a time, from
one place to another on a computer screen and also
generated items from various semantic categories. The
item generations had to occur without interruption but
could occur whenever participants preferred—before
the first box move, before the second box move, before
the third box move, and so on, all the way to after the
10th box move. A priori, the probability of doing the
category-generation task at any serial position was
1/11, but a full half of the 122 participants chose to do
all of the category generation before moving any box,
an outcome whose probability was 1/1161, or astro-
nomically small. Most other participants also did the
Sooner Rather Than Later 231
category generation earlier rather than later. This out-
come fits with the view that there is a strong preference
to unload working memory as soon as possible. The
conclusion supports the interpretations given above and
makes sense from the point of view that prospective
memory is mentally taxing (Einstein & McDaniel, 2005;
see also Kool, McGuire, Rosen, & Botvinick, 2010).
Yet another demonstration concerns a recently dis-
covered phenomenon called the mere-urgency effect
(Zhu, Bagchi, & Hock, 2018; Zhu, Yang, & Hsee, 2018).
Here, participants chose between tasks with short or
long deadlines. All of the tasks could be completed
within the available times, and the researchers showed
that the participants believed that the short-deadline
tasks were no harder than the long-deadline tasks. Nev-
ertheless, the participants preferred the short-deadline
tasks. Zhu, Bagchi, and Hock (2018) and Zhu, Yang,
and Hsee (2018) suggested that participants preferred
the shorter deadlines because those deadlines helped
them avoid the need to monitor the passage of time.
Keeping track of time is cognitively taxing (Grondin,
2008), as is the need to remember to do upcoming tasks
(Einstein & McDaniel, 2005).
Consistent with this interpretation, findings from
another study (Levy-Tzedek, Ben Tov, & Karniel, 2011)
revealed that participants “jumped the gun” by switching
from one mode of manual behavior (a discrete mode)
to another (a continuous mode) rather than staying the
course in the discrete mode until forced to switch to the
continuous mode. Premature switching was also observed
when the continuous mode was the first mode and the
discrete mode was the second. In other work, Levy-
Tzedek (2017) showed, much as Fournier et al. (2019)
did, that adding a cognitive task (counting backward)
affected the likelihood of precrastination. Levy-Tzedek
(2017) also found that older adults precrastinated less
than younger adults, for reasons still to be explored.
Individual Differences
Sauerberger, Rosenbaum, and Funder (2018) explored
individual differences in precrastination. They replicated
the original bucket-choice task of Rosenbaum et  al.
(2014) and found that most (59%) of the university-
student participants chose the near bucket rather than
the far bucket, a rate comparable with that seen by
Rosenbaum et al. (2014). Sauerberger et al. also found
that participants’ choices were stable: 22% of the par-
ticipants always chose the first bucket, and 13% of the
participants never chose the first bucket; 55% deviated
once, at most, from their choices in all other trials.
These results indicate stable individual differences
whose bases were revealed through personality ques-
tionnaires. Impulsivity did not predict precrastination,
an outcome that surprised us initially, considering
Fournier et al.’s (2018) conclusion that precrastination
is automatically invoked, subject to inhibition. Yet
Fournier and her colleagues found that precrastination
is used strategically, which was also shown in another
behavioral experiment by Rosenbaum and Sauerberger
(2019) involving choosing buckets to be carried over
long or short distances to platforms that were either
high or low; subjects made sophisticated trade-offs
between the preference for the near bucket and aver-
sion to bending down at the end. In their questionnaire
study, Sauerberger, Rosenbaum, and Funder (2018)
found, in addition to the noneffect of impulsivity, a
positive relation between precrastination and consci-
entiousness; people with high levels of conscientious-
ness may want to get things done as soon as possible.
Third, Sauerberger et al. (2018) found a positive relation
between precrastination and agreeableness. The basis
for this result is under investigation.
Animal Studies
If precrastination is a basic phenomenon, one would
expect to see it in nonhuman animals. That expectation
has been confirmed. Wasserman and Brzykcy (2015)
demonstrated precrastination in pigeons. Pigeons could
get food after making three pecks. The first peck was
made in a square in the center of a computer screen.
The second peck was made either in that same center
square or in a square that randomly appeared to the
left or right. The third peck was made in the just-shown
left or right square after a star appeared within it. Criti-
cally, food was given after the final peck regardless of
whether the second peck struck the center square or
side square. The pigeons overwhelmingly directed their
second pecks to the side square. In so doing, they
moved to the final position earlier rather than later,
though there was no obvious reason or extra reward
for doing so. By pecking on the side square, the birds
behaved in a manner consistent with precrastination.
The result cannot be ascribed to reducing errors,
because no errors were possible with this procedure;
reward was always obtained. The result also cannot be
ascribed to confusion, for then the birds would have
responded equally often to the center and side squares.
A related effect was found by Rayburn-Reeves, Molet,
and Zentall (2011), who trained pigeons to peck a red
light for 40 trials and then peck a green light for the
next 40 trials. Despite considerable training, the pigeons
tended to switch to the green light before the reversal
occurred. The pigeons precrastinated, anticipating the
switch to the green light, though they would have been
more accurate (made only a single error) had they
waited for the first trial in which a red-light peck would
232 Rosenbaum et al.
have been wrong. Recall that Levy-Tzedek et al. (2011)
obtained a similar result.
Zentall, Case, and Andrews (2018) got a somewhat
different result, which, interestingly, they took to reflect
procrastination rather than precrastination. They gave
pigeons a choice between (a) a 15-s green light fol-
lowed by a 5-s red light signaling food or (b) a 5-s blue
light followed by a 15-s yellow light signaling the same
food. All durations were fixed-interval schedules that
required pigeons to peck immediately at the end of
each interval. The pigeons preferred the long-short
sequence even though the total time from choice to
food was the same in both instances. Furthermore, the
pigeons pecked the terminal 5-s red light at twice the
rate of the terminal 15-s yellow light. Zentall et al. sug-
gested that it may be especially rewarding to have a
short cue immediately signaling reinforcement even if
one has to wait longer to receive it (cf. Fantino, 1969;
Fantino & Abarca, 1985).
Wasserman and Zentall here hypothesize that organ-
isms will precrastinate if reward will be available soon
(as found by Wasserman & Brzykcy, 2015) but will
procrastinate if reward will be available later (as found
by Zentall et al., 2018). This view, which was inspired
by and echoed by Rachlin and Green (1972), Rung and
Madden (2018), and Wasserman (2018), was previewed
earlier, when we indicated that one might hurry to bring
in groceries (precrastination) but delay working on
term papers (procrastination).
Conclusions and Future Directions
Precrastination is the tendency to hurry to get things
done and even to start as soon as possible, even if that
involves extra effort. As shown here, the tendency is
strong. It may be triggered automatically but can be
inhibited. The drive to act quickly may optimize forag-
ing. More interestingly, however, precrastination
reduces cognitive demands. The desire to unload work-
ing memory may be so strong that one is willing to
work hard physically to do so.
Questions remain. One pertains to cognitive-demand
reduction in animals. The studies described above
showed differential reliance on precrastination and pro-
crastination in animals, but cognitive demands were
not varied. Tools for doing so have been developed
(Wasserman & Zentall, 2006). It will be interesting to
see whether precrastination is undertaken to reduce
cognitive demands in animals.
A second question is whether the tendency to pre-
crastinate generalizes over tasks. If someone picks up
near buckets, will he or she answer e-mails immedi-
ately, finish work too soon, and hurry on physical tasks
that may lead to injury? If precrastination reflects stable
individual differences, one would expect such gener-
alization. Personnel-selection studies might be designed
accordingly. Cognitive abilities should also affect the
likelihood of precrastination according to the main
hypothesis offered here.
Finally, practical questions arise. Are accidents due
to procrastination, and how can they be prevented? Is
the fast-food industry a reflection of precrastination?
Do people interrupt others in conversation to reduce
mental workload and not just to exert power over them?
Do people multitask because of precrastination? Finally,
do people precrastinate to different degrees in different
cultures and social settings? These are all important
questions. We expect answers to be sought for them
sooner rather than later.
Recommended Reading
Rosenbaum, D. A., Gong, L., & Potts, C. A. (2014). (See
References). The first article to report on and name pre-
crastination.
Wasserman, E. A. (2018). (See References). A review of
evidence concerning precrastination that connects that
evidence with a long history of interest in anticipatory
learning, sensitivity to stimuli originating outside of the
body, and brain evolution.
Zhu, M., Yang, Y., & Hsee, C. K. (2018). (See References).
A description of the mere-urgency effect—the tendency
to choose less important tasks that must be completed
immediately rather than more important tasks that can
be completed later.
Action Editor
Randall W. Engle served as action editor for this article.
Acknowledgments
This article summarizes the results of a workshop on precras-
tination held at the University of California, Riverside (UCR)
on August 3, 2018, at which the authors were presenters. We
thank Randall W. Engle, Gil Einstein, and two anonymous
reviewers for helpful comments.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of interest
with respect to the authorship or the publication of this
article.
Funding
The workshop from which this article was adapted was sup-
ported by a University of California, Riverside (UCR) Teaming
Workshop Grant. The work was also supported by a Guggenheim
Fellowship and a UCR Committee on Research grant (to D. A.
Rosenbaum) and by the Helmsley Charitable Trust Agricultural,
Biological and Cognitive Robotic Initiative, the Marcus
Sooner Rather Than Later 233
Endowment Fund at Ben-Gurion University, the Borten Family
Foundation, the Promobilia Foundation, the Israeli Science
Foundation (Grants 535/16 and 2166/16), and the European
Union’s Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant 754340
(to S. Levy-Tzedek).
References
Einstein, G. O., & McDaniel, M. A. (2005). Prospective mem-
ory: Multiple retrieval processes. Current Directions in
Psychological Science, 14, 286–290.
Fantino, E. (1969). Choice and rate of reinforcement. Journal
of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 12, 723–730.
Fantino, E., & Abarca, N. (1985). Choice, optimal foraging,
and the delay-reduction hypothesis. Behavioral & Brain
Sciences, 8, 315–330.
Fournier, L. R., Coder, E., Kogan, C., Raghunath, N., Taddese,
E., & Rosenbaum, D. A. (2019). Which task will we choose
first? Precrastination and cognitive load in task order-
ing. Attention, Perception, & Performance, 81, 489–503.
doi:10.3758/s13414-018-1633-5
Fournier, L. R., Stubblefield, A. M., Dyre, B. P., & Rosenbaum,
D. A. (2018). Starting or finishing sooner? Sequencing pref-
erences in object transfer tasks. Psychological Research.
Advance online publication. doi:10.1007/s00426-018-1022-7
Grondin, S. (Ed.). (2008). Psychology of time. Bingley,
England: Emerald.
Kool, W., McGuire, J. T., Rosen, Z. B., & Botvinick, M. M.
(2010). Decision making and the avoidance of cognitive
demand. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,
139, 665–682.
Levy-Tzedek, S. (2017). Changes in predictive task switch-
ing with age and with cognitive load. Frontiers in Aging
Neuroscience, 9, Article 375. doi:10.3389/fnagi.2017.00375
Levy-Tzedek, S., Ben Tov, M., & Karniel, A. (2011). Early
switching between movement types: Indication of pre-
dictive control? Brain Research Bulletin, 85, 283–288.
doi:10.1016/j.brainresbull.2010.11.010
Rachlin, H., & Green, L. (1972). Commitment, choice and self-
control. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior,
17, 15–22. doi:10.1901/jeab.1972.17-15
Rayburn-Reeves, R. M., Molet, M., & Zentall, T. R. (2011).
Simultaneous discrimination reversal learning in pigeons
and humans: Anticipatory and perseverative errors.
Learning & Behavior, 39, 125–137.
Rosenbaum, D. A. (2017). Knowing hands: The cognitive psy-
chology of manual control. New York, NY: Cambridge
University Press.
Rosenbaum, D. A., Gong, L., & Potts, C. A. (2014). Pre-
crastination: Hastening subgoal completion at the expense
of extra physical effort. Psychological Science, 25, 1487–
1496. doi:10.1177/0956797614532657
Rosenbaum, D. A., & Sauerberger, K. S. (2019). End-state
comfort meets pre-crastination. Psychological Research.
Advance online publication. doi:10.1007/s00426-018-
01142-6
Rung, J. M., & Madden, G. J. (2018). Experimental reductions of
delay discounting and impulsive choice: A systematic review
and meta-analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
General, 147, 1349–1381. doi:10.1037/xge0000462
Sauerberger, K. S., Rosenbaum, D. A., & Funder, D. C.
(2018, March). When doing things later is the best choice:
Precrastination as an individual difference. Poster ses-
sion presented at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Society
for Personality and Social Psychology, Atlanta, GA.
VonderHaar, R. L., McBride, D. M., & Rosenbaum, D. A.
(2017, November). Precrastination effects in a prospective
memory task. Poster session presented at the 2017 Annual
Meeting of the Psychonomics Society, Vancouver, British
Columbia, Canada.
Wasserman, E. A. (2018). Precrastination: The fierce urgency
of now. Learning & Behavior. Advance online publication.
doi:10.3758/s13420-018-0358-6
Wasserman, E. A., & Brzykcy, S. J. (2015). Pre-crastination
in the pigeon. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 22, 1130–
1134. doi:10.3758/s13423-014-0758-3
Wasserman, E. A., & Zentall, T. R. (Eds.). (2006). Comparative
cognition: Experimental explorations of animal intelli-
gence. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Yoon, T., Geary, R. B., Ahmed, A. A., & Shadmehr, R. (2018).
Control of movement vigor and decision making during
foraging. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
USA, 115, E10476–E10485. doi:10.1073/pnas.181297
9115
Zentall, T. R., Case, J. P., & Andrews, D. M. (2018).
Procrastination in the pigeon: Can conditioned rein-
forcement increase the likelihood of human procrasti-
nation? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 25, 1952–1957.
doi:10.3758/s13423-017-1409-2
Zhu, M., Bagchi, R., & Hock, S. J. (2018). The mere dead-
line effect: Why more time might sabotage goal pur-
suit. Journal of Consumer Research, 45, 1068–1084.
doi:10.1093/jcr/ucy030
Zhu, M., Yang, Y., & Hsee, C. K. (2018). The mere urgency
effect. Journal of Consumer Research, 3, 673–690.
doi:10.1093/jcr/ucy008