Is the rush of the deadline blurring your priorities?
Suppose you have two tasks before you.
One isn’t that important but needs to be done quickly. The other is important but isn’t urgent.
Often, people will choose against their self-interest to do the urgent but less important task, a new study has demonstrated. What’s more, the busier and more overwhelmed you feel, the more likely you are to pick the urgent task.
The study, published recently in the Journal of Consumer Research, confirms some of our worst fears: we are often horrible at setting and following priorities, and the modern world is only making the problem worse.
“Sometimes, we are so busy thinking about the time frame and urgency of things that we forget or lose sight of the outcomes,” said Meng Zhu, a consumer behaviour researcher at Johns Hopkins University and lead author of the study. “We don’t ask why or whether we even need to do things.”
The paper grew out of Zhu’s frustrations with her own decisions in life. She found herself putting off important personal things on her to-do list — such as going to see her doctor — and cluttering up her days with pressing tasks such as responding to emails, which often amounted to little.
She received a wake-up call a few years ago, she said, when several close friends discovered they had latestage cancer — conditions that possibly could have been caught with earlier diagnoses, she said. It made her look hard at how she prioritizes the tasks in her life.
“If you think about it, an annual checkup could save your life, but we — or at least me — I always delay it because there’s no deadline,” Zhu said. “There are always presentations or papers that are due tomorrow.”
Trying to understand the psychological mechanisms behind this behaviour, Zhu and her co-authors at two other universities designed a series of experiments.
Over several sessions in a lab, they presented124 people with two tasks, both of which involved writing product reviews. The only difference between the tasks, the subjects were told, was the reward randomly assigned to each — three Hershey’s Kisses for completing one task and five Hershey’s kisses for the other. Almost everyone picked the task yielding the most chocolates.
But then, researchers added the element of urgency. They told another group of subjects that one task had to be completed in the next 10 minutes and the other in the next 24 hours. And the researchers made sure that what the volunteers thought was a “randomizing” program on a computer always assigned the more urgent task the lesser amount of chocolates. Despite that, 31 per cent chose to work on the more urgent but less rewarding task.
In followup experiments, the researchers used money instead of chocolates. Again, once the element of urgency was introduced, many started choosing the more pressing task even though it earned them less.
And in surveys, the authors found that people who felt especially busy in their lives were much more likely to choose the urgent task.
“It suggests that people who feel busy all the time become chronically sensitive to time pressure,” Zhu said. “It’s as if they lose sight of objectives and pursue tasks simply to get them done.”
This idea of urgency bias, of course, is not new to consumer and behavioural research. It is, for example, why stores offer limited-time sales, and why hosts on Home Shopping Network say, “Call now while supplies last.”
“The interesting finding here isn’t just that time durations are a factor in decision-making but that they can actually change the calculus of decisionmaking,” said Ashwani Monga, who played no role in the new study but is a longtime consumer researcher at Rutgers University.