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“你能在今天下班之前把它完成交给我？”这不是大多数员工想要听到的要求。但是对于很多人而言，缩短期限而不是拥有更长的期限实际上可能会帮助他们完成一项任务，比如“你觉得你能在本周末完成吗？”，你会看到他们的工作变得不再那么困难。
在最近发表在消费者研究杂志上的一项研究中，我的同事Rajesh Bagchi、Stefan Hock和我证明了更长的截止日可能导致员工认为工作比实际上的更难，这会使他们为了完成工作而投入更多的资源。也就是说，这会增加他们拖延的程度和放弃的可能性。虽然有时截止日是偶然的，比如场地或客人很长一段时间没有空，我们只能等。
在我们的研究中，我们要求当地社区中心的志愿者回答关于退休计划的简短问卷。我们设定了两个可能的截止日期。一组可以在接下来的七天内完成在线调查，而另一组则有14天。结果显示，有较长期限的参与者对调查的回复时间较长，并且花费了更多时间。我们发现的是：这些有较长期限的参与者比有较短期限的参与者更有可能拖延，并且不太可能完成任务。
在另一项研究中，较长的截止日期使参与者投入更多资金提交纳税申报表，虽然截止日期的长短是由偶然因素引起的，比如晚拿到W-2税表。在这项研究中，因为晚拿到税收表，因此这些参与者没有足够的时间来完成税收，他们承诺花费比同伴更少的资金来完成同样的工作，他们雇用税务专业人员或购买税务准备软件。
这两项研究为无论是为自己还是为他人设定截止日期的管理者和员工上了一课。这些研究同时也是建立在我们对帕金森定律的理解之上，该定律指出“工作的扩展是为了填满其完成时间。”我们的研究结果表明，管理者需要更全面地审视截止日。首先，帕金森定律表明，更长的期限导致人们设定更容易的目标，从而减少努力，我们发现更长的截止日增加了任务的感知难度。其次，虽然帕金森定律仅对时间承诺做出预测，但我们发现较长的截止日会增加货币承诺。因此，当工作设计预算时，最好设置较短的截止日。
这些发现只涉及一个截止日期，我们中的许多人会一次为不同长度的多个任务设置截止日。因此，我的同事杨洋、Chris Hsee和我设计了一项为个人设计的研究，以考虑个人如何应对多个最后期限。我们的结论是，当面临重要性不同的任务而需要设置多个截止日时，人们经常在较短期限内完成不太重要的任务，而不是去完成具有较长期限的更重要的任务。在我们的“消费者研究期刊”的文章中，我们称之为紧迫性效应，以反映时间窗口如何影响个人选择完成哪些任务的方式。
我们通过给完成快速截止日作业的大学生3个好时Kisses巧克力，或者给完成较长期限作业的学生5个好时Kisses巧克力。重要的是，低收益选项与虚假的紧迫性有关，因为学生可以在提供的截止日期内完成任务（在五分钟内自动结束）。只有当这种低收益分配的特点是这种过期幻觉时，更多的学生才愿意放弃高价值的奖品。在我们的另一项研究中，Amazon Mechanical Turk的专业合同工，他们的日常工作包括签约从事不同的人工智能任务来赚钱，他们愿意放弃等同于全部工资的8％的金额。仅仅因为他们合同的特点是紧迫感。
这些研究向我们表明，人们倾向于拖延完成重要的事，却迅速完成不太重要的事，这反映了一种基本的心理偏好。我们中的许多人直观地知道这一点; 我们会不断检查并回复电子邮件，而不是处理收入报告或我们的团队项目。我们选择推迟常规体检，而这可能是会救你生命的，例如，赶紧在查出的癌症早期做治疗。这种情况会发生，是因为重要任务更加困难，距离完成目标更遥远，紧急任务涉及更直接和更确定的回报，或者人们希望先完成紧急任务，然后再处理重要任务。然而，我们的研究更进一步地表明，我们可以优先考虑紧急但微不足道的任务，即使这些任务已经得到控制，以及我们知道如果拖延重要任务会在财务上变得更糟。我们似乎被追紧急任务的感受所吸引，而没有考虑后果会产生的影响。
这些模式对于管理者和其他设定截止日期的人来说很重要，这在很大程度上是因为我们的研究结果揭示了游戏系统的方式：比起更员工更长的截止日去完成工作，紧急任务的短期限更能引起人们的注意。那些负责任务的人更有可能完成任务，不太可能拖延工作，并且不太可能花费多余的资金。
但是，如果任务本身更复杂，或者外部因素会增加时间表，有时需要更长的截止日期。生产力仍能保持吗？我们的结果表明是的。
当最后期限很远时，管理者可以将人们的注意力从最后期限转移到日常任务的最终结果。提醒员工完成不同任务的最终收益是一种有效的方法。有时，更长的截止日期比短期限更有效，例如当个人有计划不足的自然倾向时，例如为大学储蓄做计划或计划退休。虽然有些人会拖延或放弃任务，但那些确实会接受任务的人会实现目标，因为他们认为需要为完成任务本身做出更多的努力。在这种情况下，最后期限的压力可以平衡计划不足。
Why
we procrastinate when we have long deadlines
“Can
you get that to me by the end of the day?” isn’t a request many employees like
to hear. But for many people, having shorter deadlines instead of longer ones —
“Do you think you can do that by the end of the week?” — might actually help
them complete a task and see their work as being less difficult.
In
a recent study published in the
Journal
of Consumer Research
, my colleagues Rajesh Bagchi and Stefan Hock and I
demonstrate that longer deadlines can lead workers to think an assignment is
harder than it actually is, which causes them to commit more resources to the
work. This, in turn, increases how much they procrastinate and their likelihood
of quitting. This is true even when the deadline length is incidental, such as
when a venue or guest isn’t available for an extended period of time.
In
our research we asked volunteers at a local community center to answer a short
survey about retirement planning. We set two incidental deadlines. In one
group, the online survey could be accessed throughout the next seven days, but
the other group had 14 days. Results showed that participants who faced the
longer deadline wrote longer responses to the survey and spent more time on it.
But there was a catch: Those same participants were more likely to
procrastinate and were less likely to complete the assignment than their
time-constrained counterparts.
In
another study, a longer deadline led respondents to commit more money to filing
their tax returns, even though the length of the deadline arose from an
incidental factor — the arrival of a lost W-2 tax form. In this study, those
whose tax form arrived later, and thus had less time to complete their taxes,
committed to spending less money than their peers to get the same job done,
hiring tax professionals or buying tax preparation software.
These
two studies offer lessons for managers and employees who set deadlines, whether
for themselves or for others. They also build on our understanding of
Parkinson’s law
,
which states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its
completion.” Our findings though suggest that managers need to view deadlines
more comprehensively. First, whereas Parkinson’s law suggests that longer
deadlines lead people to
set
easier goals
and therefore decrease effort, we found that longer deadlines
increase an assignment’s perceived difficulty. Second, while Parkinson’s law
makes a prediction only about time commitment, we found that longer incidental
deadlines increase monetary commitment. As a result, when an assignment
includes a budget, it might be better to set a shorter deadline than a longer
one.
These
findings related to only single deadlines, and many of us balance multiple
deadlines of varying lengths at a time. And so my colleagues Yang Yang and
Chris Hsee and I designed a separate study to consider how individuals respond
to a group of deadlines. We concluded that when faced with multiple deadlines
for tasks that vary in importance, people regularly pursue less-important
assignments with shorter deadlines than more-important assignments with longer
deadlines. In our
article
in the Journal of Consumer Research
, we called this the mere urgency effect to
reflect how limited time windows affect how individuals select what tasks to complete.
We
studied this by offering college students three Hershey’s Kisses to complete an
assignment with a quick deadline, or five Hershey’s Kisses to complete a
similar assignment with a longer deadline. Importantly, the low-payoff option
was linked to spurious urgency, because students could always finish the
assignments (which automatically ended in exactly five minutes) within the
deadline provided. More students were willing to give up a high-value prize
merely when the low-payoff assignment was characterized by this illusion of
expiration. In another of our studies, professional contractual workers on
Amazon Mechanical Turk, whose daily job involves signing up to work on
different human intelligent tasks in order to make money, were willing to give up
an amount equivalent to 8% of their full wage specified in their contract
merely because the low-payoff assignment was characterized by an illusion of
urgency.
These
studies showed us that people’s tendency to procrastinate on what is important
to finish less-important urgent assignments reflects a basic psychological
preference. Many of us know this intuitively; we constantly check and respond
to emails rather than work on the revenue report or our team project. We choose
to postpone a routine medical check-up that could be life-saving — say, by
diagnosing a cancer at an early, curable stage — in order to visit a store for
its soon-to-end sale. This may happen because important tasks are more
difficult and further away from goal completion, urgent tasks involve
more-immediate and certain payoffs, or people want to finish the urgent tasks
first and then work on important tasks later. However, our studies go one step
further by showing that we may prioritize urgent yet trivial tasks even when
these reasons are controlled for and when we would end up being worse off
financially. We behave as if pursuing urgent tasks has its own appeal,
independent of objective consequences.
