We all are too familiar with procrastination—putting things off until the last possible moment. But there’s a lesser-known cousin with an oddly similar name: precrastination. This is when someone rushes to start or finish a task far earlier than necessary, even when doing so costs them extra effort or inconvenience. A trivial, everyday example is grabbing a heavy grocery bag from the far end of the parking lot right away, instead of using a shopping cart until you’re closer to your car—just because it feels good to get started.
In 2025, Adam Fox, Ayesha Khatun, and Laken Mooney set out to answer two key questions about this peculiar behavior. First, is precrastination driven by trait impulsivity—the tendency to act quickly and prefer immediate rewards over delayed ones? Second, does the amount of physical effort required change how likely people are to precrastinate?
In Experiment 1, they measured people’s impulsivity using a “delay discounting” task (DD). [wherein participants make choices between a smaller, immediate amount of (hypothetical) money and a larger, delayed amount, and an adjusting-amount procedure is used to determine the subjective value of the delayed amount (Yeh, Y-H, Joel Myerson, J., & Green, J.L. (2021).] DD is regarded as a common way to see how much a person devalues a reward if it’s not immediate. They then observed how often participants engaged in precrastination. Surprisingly, there was no clear link. People who tended to choose instant gratification were not necessarily the ones rushing to complete low-effort tasks early.
Experiment 2 shifted focus to effort. The researchers designed tasks where participants could choose to do something early—at an extra physical cost—or wait until it was easier. As the effort increased, something interesting happened: the precrastination urge began to fade. People started behaving more “optimally,” waiting until the task required less work.
The takeaway? Precrastination doesn’t seem to be the same thing as impulsivity, at least not the kind measured by delay discounting. Instead, it may be more about a preference for reducing mental load—getting something off your mind—so long as the effort required isn’t too high. There’s a limit: when the physical cost becomes noticeable, even precrastinators start thinking twice. In short, this study helps map the boundaries of precrastination. It’s a quirk of human behavior that thrives in low-effort situations, but fizzles when the cost of acting early becomes too steep.
Some would conclude that precrastination isn’t just impulsivity in disguise. It’s something else—a mental itch to “get it over with” and free up cognitive space. But like most itches, it’s easier to scratch when it doesn’t hurt. Once the physical cost rises high enough, even the most eager precrastinators start holding back. So, the next time you find yourself rushing to complete something—hauling laundry up two flights of stairs when you could wait for the elevator—pause for a second. You might be scratching an itch your brain invented, not solving a real problem.
The idea of “impulsivity," however, was insufficiently addressed by Fox, et al. So, it’s worthwhile to “reflect” upon previous research regarding the difference between acting too fast, and pausing to first think thing through. There is, in fact, a long-standing idea that people vary in how they balance reflection—pausing to consider options before acting—and impulsivity—acting quickly, often without much deliberation. Psychologists sometimes measure that balance with tools like the Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFFT) that has been used to explain why some people think before leaping while others just leap.
On the surface, precrastination seems like it should live on the impulsive end of this spectrum. After all, starting a task unnecessarily early—especially when it costs extra effort—sounds like an act now, think later strategy. But the Fox, Khatun, and Mooney study throws a wrench into that neat assumption. In reflection–impulsivity research, impulsive individuals tend to act with minimal forethought, especially when tempted by an immediate reward. Yet in the precrastination experiments, impulsivity (as measured by delay discounting, a common proxy for reward-driven impulsivity) didn’t predict who precrastinated. People who usually jumped at instant gratification weren’t necessarily the ones dragging the grocery bag from the far end of the parking lot.
This suggests that precrastination isn’t just about a failure to reflect, at least not in the same way classical impulsivity is. Instead, it might be tied to cognitive load management. In other words, precrastinators might be trying to reduce mental “to-do list” pressure by knocking out easy tasks quickly—more a case of mental housekeeping than impulsive thrill-seeking.
The effort manipulation in Experiment 2 strengthens this distinction. In traditional reflection–impulsivity models, impulsive individuals might still go for the quick option even if it’s harder. But here, when the physical cost rose, precrastination faded and behavior became more optimal. That’s not typical impulsivity—that’s a calculated willingness to stop acting early when the price is too high.
So, while both impulsivity and precrastination involve quick action, they spring from different motives: Classical impulsivity is about chasing immediate rewards and avoiding delay, often at the expense of accuracy, efficiency, or long-term benefit. Precrastination seems to be about clearing cognitive space, but only when the extra cost feels small. From the perspective of the reflection–impulsivity spectrum, precrastinators might sit in an unusual spot: they appear “impulsive” in timing, but “reflective” in weighing physical cost—almost a hybrid strategy shaped less by reward-seeking and more by the desire to offload mental burdens. It is refreshing to find that the current study can be reconciled with long-established research concerning results from the Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFFT). That positive convergence is particularly encouraging, given how often similar and/or related behavioral science studies conflict-- a loose version of the so-called "replication crisis." in psychology.
REFERENCES
Fox, A. E., Khatun, A., & Mooney, L. A. (2025). Precrastination: The potential role of trait impulsivity and physical effort. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 51(9), 1224–1233. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0001348
Yeh, Y-H, Joel Myerson, J., Green, J.L. (2021) Delay discounting, cognitive ability, and personality: What matters? Psychon Bull Rev. Apr;28(2):686-694.
