Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment

Authors: Ariely, Dan¹; Wertenbroch, Klaus²

Source: Psychological Science, Volume 13, Number 3, May 2002 , pp. 219-224(6)

Buy & download fulltext article:

The full text article is not available for purchase.

The publisher only permits individual articles to be downloaded by subscribers.

Abstract:

Procrastination is all too familiar to most people. People delay writing up their research (so we hear!), repeatedly declare they will start their diets tomorrow, or postpone until next week doing odd jobs around the house. Yet people also sometimes attempt to control their procrastination by setting deadlines for themselves. In this article, we pose three questions: (a) Are people willing to self-impose meaningful (i.e., costly) deadlines to overcome procrastination? (b) Are self-imposed deadlines effective in improving task performance? (c) When self-imposing deadlines, do people set them optimally, for maximum performance enhancement? A set of studies examined these issues experimentally, showing that the answer is “yes” to the first two questions, and “no” to the third. People have self-control problems, they recognize them, and they try to control them by self-imposing costly deadlines. These deadlines help people control procrastination, but they are not as effective as some externally imposed deadlines in improving task performance.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00441

Affiliations: 1: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2: INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France

Publication date: 2002-05-01