Pre-Crastination
Hi,
This week’s email is about a common phenomenon that causes us to mismanage our time and effort, in a way that’s opposite to procrastination.
The information here is from my article on the topic (published in my other website/newsletter, Solving Procrastination).
Here are the key practical points you should know:
Precrastination involves rushing to do things too early.
For example, a person is precrastinating if they rush to complete a task as soon as it’s assigned to them, even though they don’t have all the relevant information yet, so they end up working harder and doing a worse job than if they waited.
Precrastination can cause various issues, including worse decisions, worse performance, and lower efficiency.
People precrastinate for various reasons, including that it frees up their mental resources (by getting the task out of the way), reduces the amount of time they have to worry about tasks that they dread, and increases their feelings of immediate satisfaction.
To avoid precrastinating, you can prioritize and schedule your tasks, write down your tasks in a place that doesn’t require you to actively remember them (e.g., a to-do app), question your choice to get started now, consider the pros and cons of waiting with the task, and find alternative things to focus if you do decide to postpone the task.
If you want a relevant exercise for this week, try identifying one thing that you precrastinate on, and then find a way to avoid this behavior. Of the techniques listed above for achieving this, the two key ones that I generally recommend are to write down tasks instead of holding them in your mind, and to find alternative things to focus on instead of the task that you should be postponing.
As always, I'm happy to hear your thoughts.
Have a great week,
Itamar