Is Procrastination an Optimizing Behaviour?

Procrastination. We all do it. And we all have those pangs of regret at the wee hours of the morning trying to finish something that we should have been working on a long time ago. Ask just about anyone, they would probably say procrastination is a bad thing. But if it is so bad, why do we do it all the time? The short answer is, we do it because it is the best choice for us to make!

If we consider the work that must be done as dreadful and we would do anything to avoid it, which is to say that work is a cost, then we can think about our decision to do work as a decision about how to pay a cost over time. Procrastination in this case would be to delay paying the cost until as late as possible.

To understand how we make decisions over time, we must first understand what possible choices there are to make, and the possible trade-offs. At any moment, there are two choices: to do work now or to put it off. The trade-offs in either case are clear: on the one hand, we get the work out of the way and forgo leisure at the present; on the other hand, we enjoy leisure now, knowing that we will have to pay the cost eventually.

When faced with the choice of paying the cost now or in the future, for most people it is in fact optimal to pay later. To delay paying the cost is optimal because experiments show that we tend to "discount" the future, in the sense that we tend to place more importance on the present than on the future. As a heuristic example, consider whether you would prefer to receive $200 today or $200 next year. (In the case of doing work, we can consider the choice of delaying work as preferring to enjoy leisure today over leisure in the future).

There are a few theories as to why we discount the future. One reason is simply that we are impatient and do not look very far ahead into the future. Surely, we've all experienced these kinds of moments. For those that demand a rational-choice reason, however, we discount the future because we lack immediate control and perfect foresight over the future, whereas we can manipulate and have close to full knowledge of the present. For example, there is no guarantee that hyperinflation won't hit and $200 will become entirely worthless by this time next year. Also, if you were give $200 today instead, you could do whatever you want with it, including putting it in the bank and getting the $200 (plus interest) back the next year. Therefore, consumption in the future is worth less than consumption today because we cannot access the future immediately and because there is uncertainty over the future.

The above seems to suggest then, that procrastination is in fact optimizing behaviour because at any given moment, we would want to delay doing work as much as possible. Indeed if there was no deadline, it would be optimal to delay work indefinitely (keeping in mind our assumption that this work is only costly and does not bring any benefits when completed).

The problem is that most work have a deadline so we cannot put it off indefinitely. In this case, two contradictory incentives act. Far ahead of the deadline, when we plan how we will do the work, it is optimal to enjoy leisure now and delay work to later. This incentive to delay paying the cost will be present at all times leading up to the deadline. However, the deadline represents a hard limit at which time the entire project must be done, and forces us to work, against our desire to procrastinate. Given that it is optimal to delay as much as we can, and that we are constrained to finish the project on time, the optimal behaviour would in fact be to start the project as late as possible such that we would still expect to finish on time.

The story is a little more complicated than this though. Since finishing the entire project at once can be physically taxing, and usually involves no leisure at all in those few hours, the fact that we generally like to "smooth consume" is actually incentive for some people to pace out their work more evenly. Smooth consumption means we tend to prefer to have a few hours of free time everyday (and perhaps to sleep a decent amount every night) than to have no free time and no sleep one day, and a lot of free time and sleep the next, i.e. we prefer consumption in an evenly paced way. The other complication is expectations. Notice I wrote it would be optimal to start the project as late as possible while still expecting to finish on time. Since our expectations are rarely, if ever, perfect, we often overestimate our abilities and have to ask for extensions or else sacrifice in quality.

The negative consequences of not smoothing consumption of leisure (just think about the sleepy day after the deadline) and incorrect expectations often lead us to think that procrastination is a bad habit, when in reality it is arguably optimal given our preferences of discounting the future. So next time you get the urge to procrastinate, just be sure that you can finish the work under the pressure of a deadline and feel good in the fact that you're just optimizing your leisure consumption.

Or perhaps we just need to take on less projects.