In this article, we explore the behavioral phenomena of procrastination and precrastination. We’ll see how they differ, but how at the same time both lead to stress and hurry.
Procrastination
Procrastination is the deliberate, voluntary act of delaying or postponing a task even if we know that doing so will probably lead to negative consequences and make us feel bad.
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It has become quite a global habit. About 99% of adults admit to putting things off at least some of the time, but about 62% procrastinate habitually or chronically.
Now, the reason why so many people procrastinate is because they prioritize short-term emotional relief over long or longer term goals. In fact, when a task feels intimidating, tedious, or overpowering, it’s a normal human reaction to try to protect ourselves by avoiding it.
It’s important to understand that procrastination has nothing to do with laziness; it’s rather that we tend to avoid certain tasks because we have a hard time dealing with the negative emotions connected to them. Moreover, as we have so many things waiting for us on our to-do-list, just the single act of continuing with that list becomes an emotional burden.
However, the fact is that procrastination and hurrying have a very direct and cyclical relationship. You see, we procrastinate because we don’t like hurrying — we know that it tires us physical and mentally and we actually want to relax — but by procrastinating we don’t eliminate our tasks but rather end up having even less time to finish them.
So, there we have it: procrastinating leaves us with less “functional” time and the result is that we need to hurry even more to get things done. This again increases our mental and emotional exhaustion, which again makes us more likely to procrastinate on our next tasks.
Nonetheless, we need to realize that procrastinating is actually an intense cry for help from body and mind telling you that they need genuine well-deserved rest. And, unfortunately, if you don’t give them that, there comes a day they will take it.
Precrastination
Strangely enough, there’s also behavior that’s exactly the opposite of procrastination. It’s called precrastination.
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It’s defined as “the urge to complete a task as soon as possible, even if it requires extra, unnecessary physical effort, higher costs, or results in a lower-quality outcome.”
People who do this want to quickly take an item off their to-do list because it temporarily reduces cognitive load, relieves from anxiety, and internal tension and stress.
However, just like procrastination, pre-crastination has downsides. Because you’re hurrying to get things done now, you become highly vulnerable to the illusion of efficiency.
In addition, because you rush through tasks, you don’t take the time to look for better instructions, a better planning, or even for all the necessary facts to perform a task, which can lead to sloppy and costly mistakes. Moreover, you might start doing all kinds of unnecessary activities, just to get them off your mental to-do list.
In fact, many tasks shouldn’t have been on your to-do list anyway, or should have had very low priority. Yet, the result of exerting yourself in this way is that you might end up too exhausted for real high-priority projects, which, of course, brings you added anxiety and stress.
