Precrastination, Revisited

Although I’ve been a professor for nearly three decades, I have also been a dog driver (dog sledder) and I have owned horses for over two decades. All joking aside, I shovel a lot of crap!

Manure, canine and equine, is a daily job. In fact, my two horses alone create a full wheelbarrow of that wonderful fertilizer daily. At best, I consider it part of my daily meditation. At worst, it’s a challenging chore when the temperatures are well below zero and I have to scrape it off the ice and snow.

I no longer have a sled dog team who were also prodigious producers of excrement, but I still have two dogs which involve picking up their droppings daily. And, it was in the contrast of picking up my dogs’ feces and the horses’ manure that I had an insight about some research published about “precrastination” back in 2014.

You can read my previous post about precrastination here. The gist of the argument is that at times people will act to “get the task done sooner” even if it means doing a little more work. Instead of putting things off, participants in the study published by Rosenbaum and colleagues (2014) actually did work before it was necessary. They didn’t take the easier route, at least not physically. If you read my previous post, you’ll see that I critique the study and the authors’ reasoning arguing that I think the experimental task lacked some features important to the results, specifically how arduous the task was. However, my recent experience and reflections provide a more nuanced account.

That brings me back to my role as CEO (lest you forget, that’s Chief Excrement Officer, although I am at least metaphorically the “executive officer” around the farm as well). As I was gathering up both the dog feces and horse manure the other morning, I noted a distinct difference in my approach. I would walk around unnecessarily with dog feces on my shovel as I collected it off the yard. In other words, I wasn’t methodical in my approach. If I saw some feces near me, I would pick it up and then continue to carry it as I walked to yet further fecal material, much further from the disposal bucket so it involved unnecessary work. As had the participants in the study I referenced, I actually picked up the stuff before I needed to. I wasn’t particularly strategic. I was a precrastinator!

Now, contrast this with the horse manure. When I approached this task, I walked by the near manure and took the wheelbarrow to the furthest point from the tractor (that I use to dispose of the manure in the field later). I didn’t unnecessarily carry the manure around just because I was walking by it. I strategically worked from furthest to nearest dung piles. Why? I reasoned because it’s simply too much work. While I could have picked up the first pile I encountered, I delayed doing this (not exactly procrastination I would add) in favor of more distant piles.

All this is to say that my experience provides a little everyday support for Rosenbaum’s assertion that “..we can say that holding a goal in mind loads working memory and that, if there is a way to reduce that working memory load, people will do so. The urge to reduce the working memory load may be so great that people are willing to expend extra physical effort” (p. 9).”

And yet at the same time, this experience supports my notion that the amount of physical effort is also important. How so?

Well, when picking up the dog feces, there is a greater cognitive load of finding and remembering where the stuff is. We have a big yard. So, once I see it, it’s actually easier to pick it up and carry it than it is to have the memory task. In contrast, the horse manure is more contained in the paddock, a whole lot more obvious to see, and a whole lot more physical work – that wheelbarrow gets heavy, so unnecessary physical work is more of a burden than the “cognitive load.”

Ok, so if that’s what I learned about precrastination, what has my role as CEO taught me about procrastination? Spring is approaching, and as the record snowfall amounts recede, I feel a sense of relief that I kept up my morning meditation and duty as CEO. The costs of procrastination would loom large to future self as I face the much more daunting task of weeks of manure, not to mention the wet messy state of affairs in the spring. Oh, there’s no doubt, while present self might benefit from procrastination on a cold winter morning, future self just hates that guy! Does future self hate the precrastinator? No, not really, it’s the strategic investment of one type of energy (physical) to save mental energy.

This experience and my reflections on it provide a reason to see precrastination as an opposite of procrastination. Precrastination is a voluntary rational act (although apparently needless work, it does make sense and benefit the self). Procrastination is a voluntary irrational act (a truly needless delay that defeats the self). What kind of choice will you make today?

Procrastination Essential Reads

From Procrastination to Productivity in the New Year

Breaking Bad: Procrastination

Carpe diem!