precrastination precrastination precrastination (also written as pre-crastination) is the act of completing tasks as soon as possible even if it costs extra effort or the quality of the outcome deteriorates. this approach can help you avoid the anxiety and stress of last-minute work. precrastination is considered an unhealthy behavior pattern and is accompanied with symptoms such as conscientiousness, eagerness to please, and high energy. not to be confused with procrastination. people who precrastinate try to find shortcuts to be more efficient and productive, but this mostly results in application of non-effective energy management and causes the person to fulfill their tasks to an incomplete or insufficient degree. precrastinators tend to act impulsively instead of planning carefully. etymology the word precrastination is a blend of pre- (before) and -crastinus (until next day). research into precrastination rosenbaum et al. coined the term "precrastination" in 2014. david a. rosenbaum is a professor in the department of psychology at the university of california, riverside. the study found evidence of human procrastination and coined the term procrastination. the bucket experiments the paper titled "pre-crastination: hastening subgoal completion at the expense of extra physical effort" consisted of nine different experiments that can be termed as the bucket experiments. the goal of the research was “to get a better understanding of the evaluation of different kinds of costs in action planning”. while confirming the belief that individuals would rather carry a load weight a shorter distance rather than an equally heavy load of weight a longer distance they found contradictory results. most university students, irrationally carried the closer bucket over a long distance, rather than the further bucket over a short distance to the end point. when interviewed, the participants answered that they wanted to "get the task done as quickly as possible". these surprising results from the first three experiments changed the goal of research to "describing and providing a theoretical interpretation of this astonishing phenomenon". the first three experiments the bucket experiments were conducted using pennsylvania state university students as participants, and started with a set of three experiments that involved having a participant walk down an alleyway and from there pick up one of two weighted buckets and carrying it a distance further until a stop line. contrary to the experimenters’ expectations, participants would rather pick up and carry the bucket that was closer to them than pick up the bucket closer to the stop line, meaning that the participant would expend more energy to complete the task than necessary. when participants were questioned about their choice they expressed the sentiment of wanting to get the task done as soon as possible. testing the new phenomenon the fourth experiment was used to confirm the finding of the previous three while reducing statistical variability by moving the starting position of the buckets six feet further from the participants. previous results were upheld and the statistical variability for the conclusion of the approach distance being the primary factor for picking up the bucket from the left or right was also upheld. the fifth and sixth experiments were used to remove the aspect of foot-hand coordination from the task, this was done by placing the participants in wheelchairs while they completed the task. the results from this experiment were in line with the rest of the experiments. in experiment seven, the researcher investigated “the possibility that participants actually preferred long carrying distances to short carrying distances”. this was done by altering the total distance that a left or right bucket would need to be carried, rather than just altering the approach and carry distances of the buckets. the result of this experiment was that the theory that participants preferred long carrying distances wasn't supported and that the students still cared about the total distance of the task (approach + carrying distance). suggesting that when deciding task methodology, both approach and total distance are considered. for the eighth experiment the experimenters test the hypothesis that “participants may have been attracted to the nearer object, grabbing it without considering the farther object because their attention was grabbed by the object that was closer at hand”. this attention hypothesis was tested by placing a screen at the end of the alleyway that told the participants to wait before starting the task, this could be for a two or four second interval. after this an okay message would appear and the participants could complete the task at their leisure. the researchers argue that the screen “was to get participants to look down the alley so they would see the far as well as the near bucket.” and that their rationale for showing the wait message “was to discourage participants from impulsively initiating their excursion into the alley”. ultimately there were no significant deviations from the results of the previous experiments, meaning that the close-object preference was replicated. finally, the ninth experiment was to confirm that there was a noticeable difference in physical exertion between the two options for carrying distances and that the more labor-intensive option would be avoided. this was done by having a light and heavy bucket options for the task, while repeating the set up of experiments one through three. the results from experiment nine confirmed a general preference for the lighter bucket. thereby confirming in the researchers’ mind that exertion did matter to participants, and despite this would engage in close-object preference when performing the other experiments. even when it would result in a longer carrying distance, and thereby more exertion. sequencing preferences in april 2018 lisa r. fournier, alexandra m. stubblefield, brian p. dyre, and david a. rosenbaum published a research article titled ‘starting or finishing sooner? sequencing preferences in object transfer tasks’. this article examined task sequencing in regards to object transferring tasks in which either of two possible tasks could easily or logically come before the other task. this was done in hopes of whether precrastination would generalize a consistent logic of which of the two tasks to do first. for the experiment they tested various conditions that differed in regards to “which task can be started sooner, finished sooner, or bring one’s current state closer to the goal state”. the testing of the experiment was to have participants transfer ping pong balls from two original buckets, one bucket at a time, into a bowl that was placed at the end of a corridor. the number of balls in the buckets as well as the bucket distances along the corridor differed between trials. an important factor for this experiment is the fact that the bucket selection didn't affect the total time to complete both of the transport tasks together. also participants walked, in grand total, an equal total distance and carried the buckets the same total distance regardless of which bucket was originally chosen. the conclusions from the experiments can be summed up with this statement extracted from the publication “we found that the chosen task order was strongly affected by which task or sub-goal could be started sooner." and thus replicating the tendency to engage in precrastination that was first observed in 2014 rosenbaum et al. the end conclusion of the article differed from the 2014 rosenbaum study by stating that, instead of precrastination being fueled by the wish to complete sub-goals as quickly as possible, precrastination is more likely the result of the desire to initiate the sub-goals as soon as possible. precrastination and cognitive load on november 30 of 2018 lisa r. fournier, emily coder, clark kogan, nisha raghunath, ezana taddese, and david a. rosenbaum published a research article titled ‘which task will we choose first? precrastination and cognitive load in task ordering’. the article quote, “examined the generality of this recently discovered phenomenon by extending the methods used to study it, mainly to test the hypothesis that precrastination is motivated by cognitive load reduction.” the researchers experimented using the basic experimental setup from the bucket experiments, with a few alterations. one, instead of participants having to pick up and carry one of two possible buckets along a corridor, participants in this set of experiments were instructed to pick up both buckets that were placed in the workspace. two, the participants had to carry both buckets at the same time in order to complete the task. due to the task requiring the participants to pass by the location of the first bucket twice, once while walking to the second bucket and once more while walking back toward the end goal, it was determined that the action of picking up the first bucket on the first walk constituted a display of precrastination. three, the addition of having half the participants memorize digit lists on top of performing the base physical action task mentioned previously. four, the experiment was broken into two separate experiments. in the first experiment, the objects to be carried were buckets with golf balls, with possible variation of the number of golf balls in the near bucket versus the far bucket. in the second experiment, the objects to be carried were cups that were either full or half full with water. the conclusion of the research is split into two parts. for experiment one the researchers had the following statement: “the results of experiment 1 showed that precrastination generalizes to the ordering of tasks (or task subgoals)." this result in another finding that replicates and extends the original findings of rosenbaum et al. from 2014. the extension is seen with the findings that participants with a memory load showed a high probability of selecting the near-bucket-first something that wasn't the case for participants without a memory load. this means that while previous research is upheld, there is the additional support to the claim that precrastination is the result of cognitive load reduction. the following quote highlights the researchers interpretation of their results for experiment two: “participants in the water cup transport task largely abandoned the near-object-first preference". they believe this was the result of the participants having to "pay a great deal of extra attention to the task if they started with the near cup". this interpretation supports the hypothesis that precrastination is the result of reduction of cognitive load. as when the cognitive load would be increased as a result of engaging in precrastination, precrastination doesn't occur. end-state comfort and precrastination january of 2019, david a. rosenbaum and kyle s. sauerberger published the research paper ‘end-state comfort meets pre-crastination’, with the goal of resolving an apparent conflict between the observed phenomena of precrastination and end-state comfort. end-state comfort can generally be defined as the tendency to act in physically awkward ways for the sake of comfortable or easy-to-control final postures. through the course of the paper the researchers determine that the two phenomena are in fact not contradictory and can have interplay between them, to determine the end course of action. studying precrastination in animals precrastination has also been observed in animal behavior, as evidenced by edward a. wasserman and stephen j. brzykcy publishing their paper ‘pre-crastination in the pigeon’ in 2014. in order to test the possibility of pigeons displaying precrastination, the researchers devised a basic two-alternative forced-choice task, where the pigeons had to at one time or another switch from pecking the center of three horizontally aligned buttons to pecking one of two side buttons. for the differing trials left or right was cued by red or green colors. the pigeons’ center-to-side button switch could be completed sooner (in second step) or later (in the third step) in the sequence, with the difference between these two sequences resulting in no effect on the effort required to complete the task, the distance traveled over the course of the task, or the reward received from the task. as a result of this experiment the researchers determined that pigeons displayed precrastination. this is due to the fact that despite the lack of any difference in the reward given for doing so, all of the pigeons “quickly came to peck the side location in step 2 on which the upcoming star would next be presented in step 3”. explanations evolutionary perspective precrastination often involves hasty and sudden behavior as well as split second decision-making. evolution played an important role in making precrastination the “default response option” as animals' quick reactions and decisions might have been significant to their