People will expend extra physical or cognitive effort to complete a task sooner, even when waiting would be easier.
Rosenbaum's subjects, asked to carry one of two buckets to a far end, repeatedly chose the nearer bucket and carried it further, against the obvious economy. The proposed explanation is that holding an unfinished subgoal in working memory is itself costly, so people pay in effort to discharge it. It is the opposite failure to procrastination and much less discussed.
In practice
- An employee answers the trivial email immediately and defers the report, having optimised for closing items.
- A team ships the easy sub-feature first, in an order nobody would have chosen deliberately.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- The catalogue of predictable errors