“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.
Source:
HBR 29 Aug, 2018
