Is there a job you’re putting off finishing so you can read this story? Well, if new research on procrastination is anything to go by, you better get back to it.
Scientists who study the psychology of procrastinators have found that work submitted late tends to be judged more harshly than when a deadline is met.
The findings suggest that while you may be tempted to take the maximum allotted time to complete a report, presentation or piece of work, the extra effort may not be appreciated by colleagues if it comes at the expense of punctuality delivery not coming.
Work completed late was perceived as significantly lower quality than the same piece of work delivered on time, the study found.
“All the research we could find looked at how deadlines affect the thoughts and actions of workers. We wanted to know how a deadline affects the thoughts and actions of others when they look at those workers,” says Prof Sam Maglio, who conducts research at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Rotman School of Management.
The study surveyed thousands of people in the US and the UK, including managers, executives, human resources professionals and others whose work included an element of evaluating others.
Participants were asked to rate pieces of work such as advertising flyers, art, business proposals, product proposals, photography and news articles. But first they were told that it was either submitted early, on deadline or late. “Late” work was consistently rated as poorer in quality than when people were told the same work was completed early or on time. The difference was equivalent to the inclusion of an objective shortcoming such as not reaching a word count.
A missed deadline led evaluators to believe that an employee had less integrity, and they reported that they would be less willing to work with or assign tasks to that person in the future.
“Everyone saw the exact same art competition entry, school presentation, 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,” says Maglio, co-author of the study with David Fang of Stanford University.
to newsletter promotion
Those eager to submit work early should be advised that it doesn’t seem to be getting a boost in opinion, according to the journal report. Organizational behavior and human decision-making processes. It also didn’t matter what time the work was submitted, with delays of one day or one week being viewed as negative – and this remained the case if the employee had given their manager advance warning.
Previously, psychologists have known a phenomenon as the “planning error”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 realistically plan that is frowned upon, with factors beyond an employee’s control, such as jury duty, not seen as negative. “If the reason you missed the deadline was beyond your control, as an employee you should let your manager know,” Maglio said. “This seems to be one of the few cases where people cut you a break.”
