Precrastination: The Dark Side of Getting Things Done

The ultimate cause of precrastination is short-term, emotionally-driven decision-making.

Just like in procrastination, precrastination involves making a decision based on what feels good in the moment rather than what’s in our long-term best interest.

• Cheap satisfaction: we get immediate satisfaction from checking off the little things on our to-do lists.
• Survival instinct: going after the easy, low-hanging fruit in life probably made more sense in our history than putting things off in order to get a long-term payoff.
• Time management vs Energy management: most of us are taught to think about work and productivity in terms of managing our time well.

• Awareness is always the first step. It’s difficult to stop doing something if you’re not aware that you’re doing it in the first place.
• Practice emotional tolerance: precrastination is all about emotion. This means that working through precrastination will always involve working through difficult emotion.
• Start by improving on one small area of precrastination before moving on to more challenging areas.