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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Does anchoring on deadlines cause procrastination? - Less Wrong
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It's important to distinguish between procrastination and delaying working on something because it's not urgent yet. Sometimes the latter is just a reasonable thing to do. From that perspective, deadlines tell people how urgent it is to do something. It's not surprising that they won't do it if it's not urgent, and it's unclear whether this is actually a bad thing.
It's bad if they're systematically underestimating the urgency (and thus placing the deadline too far out) which seems to be the rule with humans rather than the exception.
It is a bad thing, because you should do something at the best time, not when it's urgent. They won't usually happen to coincide.
For example, the best time to write essays for med school applications is over the summer, because you have free time; not near the deadlines which are around December, when you'll be taking classes.
I think it's missing the point to claim that the deadlines are causing you to procrastinate in this case. If there weren't any deadlines for med school applications, what would it even mean to procrastinate on them?
It's also not clear to me that the best time to work on med school applications is in fact over the summer. There are other things you could be doing with that luxuriously free summer time. During the school year you're working on various unpleasant things already, so you might as well lump one more unpleasant thing in there. (I did my grad school applications in November of the relevant year and that was fine.)
Hmm. The post title should probably be "Does anchoring on deadlines cause procrastination?"
I think the basic mechanism behind procrastination is hyperbolic discounting.