Is there a job you’re putting off finishing so you can read this story? Well, if new research into procrastination is anything to go by, you’d better get back to it.
Scientists studying the psychology of people who leave things to the last minute have found that work that is submitted late tends to be judged more harshly than when a deadline is met.
The findings suggest that, while you might be tempted to take the maximum allotted time to put the finishing touches to a report, submission or piece of work, the extra effort might not be appreciated by colleagues if it comes at the expense of punctual delivery.
Work completed late was viewed as significantly lower quality than the same piece of work delivered on time, the study found.
“All the research that we could find looked at how deadlines impact the minds and actions of workers. We wanted to know how a deadline impacts the minds and actions of others when they look at those workers,” said Prof Sam Maglio, who researches at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Rotman School of Management.
The study surveyed thousands of people in the US and UK, including managers, executives, human resources personnel and others whose jobs included an element of evaluating others.
Participants were asked to rate pieces of work, such as advertising flyers, art, business proposals, product pitches, photography and news articles. But first, they were told it was either submitted early, on deadline or late. “Late” work was consistently rated as worse in quality than when people were told the same work was completed early or on time. The difference was equivalent to including an objective shortcoming such as not meeting a word count.
A missed deadline led evaluators to believe an employee had less integrity, and they reported they would be less willing to work with or assign tasks to that person in the future.
“Everyone saw the exact same art contest entry, school submission or business proposal, but they couldn’t help but use their knowledge of when it came in to guide their evaluation of how good it was,” said Maglio, who co-authored the study with David Fang of Stanford University.
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Those who eagerly submit work early should be advised that this does not appear to earn a boost in opinion, according to the report in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. It also didn’t matter how late the work was submitted, with one day or one week delays viewed just as negatively – and that remained the case if the employee gave their manager advance warning.
Previously psychologists have identified a phenomenon known as the “planning fallacy”, a tendency to underestimate the time and challenges involved in completing a task even when it directly contradicts our past experiences.
The latest study suggests that it is this inability to plan realistically that is frowned on, with factors beyond an employee’s control, such as jury duty, not viewed as negatively. “If the reason why you missed the deadline was beyond your control, you as the employee should let your manager know,” said Maglio. “That seems to be one of the few instances in which people cut you a break.”