How do we deal with our daily tasks? Precrastination and its relationship to personality and other constructs

Abstract

Putting off a task until the last second, whether in academia, school, or work is called procrastination and is widely researched. However, there are also many people who prefer to complete their tasks immediately instead of postponing them. There is hardly any research in this area and no instruments to measure this behaviour of so-called “precrastination”. The present study aims at exploring whether it is a separate construct or is it just the opposite of procrastination. To investigate this, data from a sample of (N = 324) German adolescents were collected including a repeated measurement for a subsample (N = 201). Based on existing work, a scale of 10 items was created to measure the precrastination. An initial classification of precrastination was made by analyzing associations with procrastination and Big 5 personality dimensions. Results indicate that precrastination is more than simply the opposite of procrastinating. Model comparisons including precrastination show a significant increase in the explained variance of personality traits over procrastination alone, which shows the independent contribution of the construct.