the notion of discounting future rewards, also known as temporal discounting.
The problem is that future rewards seem less attractive to us than immediately available ones. I guess this should not surprise us too much. From an evolutionary perspective, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Our brains seem programmed to prefer immediate rewards. This stone-age brain is not so adaptive in our modern world, where we need to meet distant deadlines by doing things today.
The Planning Fallacy
It is also human nature to be overly optimistic. We assume we can get more done in less time than is reasonable, and we assume tasks will take less time than they usually do. This is at the heart of the issue-we are not really thinking about how long things usually take based on experience. We focus on the singular event we are facing without taking into account distributive information about past experience or similar events. What results from this optimistic bias is poor planning.
Self-Handicapping to Protect Self
To self-handicap is to provide an excuse for oneself. For example, if you were to wear weighted shoes and have a running race with a friend, your ability or competence as a runner would never come into question. If you lose the race, it was the fault of the handicap, the heavy shoes. If you win the race, however, that is extraordinary meritorious. It is win-win for the individual's sense of self. Certainly, self-esteem is never threatened.
A similar situation can arise with procrastination. To the extent that we delay work on a task to the last moment, we can be creating another form of self-handicapping. As with the running race, a task done at the last minute can be excused if not done well because it was done in such a short amount of time. And, of course, if the task is done very well, it looks exceptionally good for the individual.
This implies that the needless delay of a task that we defined as procrastination may in fact fill a need. It can protect self-es
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