Whether we want to admit it or not, we all know about procrastination: waiting until the end to accomplish an important task often leads to poor performance or failure. Easier said than done. The solution is to start your work early, before the deadline, so that your work reflects your abilities. 

Unlike procrastinators who leave an inbox full of emails until the next day, precrastinators read each email and respond first thing in the morning. Even if you know that most of your emails are not important, you prefer to delete them as quickly as possible. In some cases, this may mean draining valuable energy that may be needed later for more urgent tasks.
Here is what Shayla Love reported more in-depth on the topic for The Guardian:

You are probably familiar with the perils of procrastination – putting things off until the last minute until there’s a mountain of emails, chores or homework to get through. Advice on productivity and time management often covers procrastination, understanding why you waited so long to do something and how to start on a project sooner.

 

Yet, there’s another way we manage our tasks that can get overlooked: precrastination, considered by some psychologists to be the opposite of procrastination.

 

Precrastination is when a person does a task as soon as they can, so they don’t have to think about it any more – often before it needs to be completed. If you’re a procrastinator, this might sound like a goal to work towards, but precrastination comes with its own downsides.

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“One can envision precrastination and procrastination as two extremes,” said Christopher Gehrig, a psychology professor at Helmut Schmidt University in Germany. In order to check something off their to-do list, precrastinators expend extra energy on a task, or rush through projects to arrive at the relief of having it be over.

 

Here’s how to know if you have precrastinating tendencies and when it can be the right time to slow down.

 

What is precrastination?

 

You’re at the airport waiting for your flight to board. Even though Group 4 isn’t going to be called for 20 more minutes, you hover near the gate, holding your heavy duffel and suitcase. This is a classic case of precrastination: wanting to get something over with (getting on the plane) so that you don’t have to anticipate doing it any longer. This comes at a cost: carrying all your stuff – rather than sitting and relaxing in a chair, reading a book.

 

Precrastination is when you do something early “at an extra expense”, wrote the psychologist Kyle Sauerberger in a 2019 paper about the phenomenon. The expense might be physical, as in the airport example, financial or mental.

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