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Do you park as soon as you see an empty spot, even if it’s still a good block of walking distance from that spot to your destination? When you get home from the supermarket with a trunk full of groceries, do you want to take three bags in each hand and a couple more in your teeth, just so as not to return to the car a second time? Congratulations, you are a precrastinator.
Keep in mind: this word does not come from the word “beautiful” at all. It is not yet included in the dictionaries, although it may soon appear there – with the light hand of David Rosenbaum, professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University (USA). With this term, he proposed to designate a property that is the opposite of procrastination: the desire to do everything as quickly as possible, regardless of the effort expended.
In a series of experiments conducted by Rosenbaum and his colleagues, a group of 257 students were asked to complete a simple task. The subjects were placed at the beginning of the track, which had to go to the end. At the same time, two buckets filled with a weighting load were located along the edges of the track: one on the right, the other on the left, and one of the buckets was placed closer to the start, and the other to the finish line. Students were free to pick up any of the buckets of their choice on the go – and carry them to the end of the path.
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Rosenbaum actually wanted to explore the features of motor skills in this experiment, but quickly changed the direction of thought, discovering an amazing thing. A significant majority of the subjects preferred to pick up the bucket closest to them – that is, the one farthest from the finish line. And they carried it, completely ignoring the obvious fact that they obviously spend more energy.
When, after the completion of the experiment, the psychologist tried to find out from the students the reason for such a strange choice, it turned out that they conditionally divided their task into two parts. The first is to lift the bucket, and the second is to carry it to the finish line. And, probably, they were in a hurry to quickly finish the first task in order to move on to the second.
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David Rosenbaum is inclined to explain this behavior by the desire to unload short-term memory. In this case, it can be conditionally likened to the RAM of a computer: it does not store our “files” themselves, but commands regarding what should be done with these files. And the desire to quickly release short-term memory as quickly as possible, the scientist proposes to call it precrastination.
It is clear that in terms of the degree of “usefulness” this quality may well compete with procrastination. In an effort to get the job done as soon as possible and at any cost, we run the risk of exhausting our strength, and even making many mistakes due to the fact that we did not have time to think everything over properly. Not to mention other troubles – say, if you still drag a bunch of shopping bags home from the car, then there is a good chance that one of them (and certainly with something beating!) will slip out and crash on the asphalt. Well, or on your feet.
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- Procrastination: why the “carrot and stick” method does not work
David Rosenbaum, however, admits that his hypothesis needs additional testing, and the term itself needs to be clarified. For example, if you come to the office and spend an hour answering all the letters, then this can be considered a sign of precrastination – you are in a hurry to free up short-term memory so that the thought of letters does not distract you from work in the future. But with the same success, such behavior can also be a sign of procrastination – answering letters, you put off until later the more difficult and important things that await you.
In the near future, Rosenbaum intends to conduct a new series of studies, complicating the experiment with buckets. Before it starts, participants will also be asked to memorize a list of 10 words that will have to be repeated at the finish line. If the subjects begin to pick up the bucket closest to them even more often, then, according to the scientist, this will be evidence that we really are striving with all our might to unload short-term memory from the information stored in it. Therefore, precrastination still exists.