People Choose more Difficult Tasks to get them Completed Sooner

Would you rather hurry to complete a task in order to get it over with more quickly? 

A recent study shows that in an effort to avoid procrastination, many will start something as soon as possible (otherwise known as pre-crastination) just to get it over with more quickly and efficiently.

"Most of us feel stressed about all the things we need to do - we have to-do lists, not just on slips of paper we carry with us or on our iPhones, but also in our heads," said psychological scientist and study author David Rosenbaum of Pennsylvania State University, via a press release. "Our findings suggest that the desire to relieve the stress of maintaining that information in working memory can cause us to over-exert ourselves physically or take extra risks."

For the study, researchers explored the trade-off between the weight of a load and how far people would carry it. Their experimental setup showed that participants often chose the action that takes more physical effort if it means less time is involved.

Researchers conducted a total of nine experiments, each with the same general setup, according to the release: College student participants stood at one end of an alley, along which two plastic beach buckets were stationed. The students were instructed to walk down the alley without stopping and to pick up one of the two buckets and drop it off at the endpoint.

The study authors varied the positions with the two buckets, with participants either picking up and carrying the left bucket with the left hand or picking up and carrying the right bucket with the right hand.

For the first three experiments, participants were likely to choose whichever bucket was at the shorter approach distance, which resulted in a longer carrying distance. Researchers ruled out reasons for choosing certain routes based on hand-foot coordination and differences in attention.

"Our findings indicate that while our participants did care about physical effort, they also cared a lot about mental effort," Rosenbaum added, via the release. "They wanted to complete one of the subordinate tasks they had to do, picking up the bucket, in order to finish the entire task of getting the bucket to the drop-off site."

Picking up a bucket may seem like a trivial task, but Rosenbaum speculates that it still stood out on participants' mental to-do lists:

"By picking up the near bucket, they could check that task off their mental to-do lists more quickly than if they picked up the far bucket," he explains. "Their desire to lighten their mental load was so strong that they were willing to expend quite a bit of extra physical effort to do so."

More information regarding the findings can be seen via the journal Psychological Science.