Procrastination, deadlines, and performance: Self-control by precommitment

Procrastination is all too,familiar to most people. People delay writing zip their research (so we hear!), repeatedly declare they will start their diets tomorrow or postpone until next week doing odd jobs around the house. Yet people also sometimes attempt to control their procrastination by setting deadlines for themselves. In this article, we pose three questions: (a) Are people willing to self-impose meaningful (i.e., costly) deadlines to overcome procrastination? (b) Are self-imposed deadlines effective in improving task performance? (c) When selfimposing deadlines, do people set them optimally, for maximum performance enhancement? A set of studies examined these issues experimentally, showing that the answer is yes to the first Two questions, and no to the third. People have self-control problems, they, recognize them, and they try to control them by self-imposing Costly deadlines. These deadlines help people control procrastination, but they are not as effective as some externally imposed deadlines in improving task performance.