In 2014, three psychologists at Penn State set out to run a boring experiment. David Rosenbaum, Lanyun Gong and Cory Adam Potts put two yellow beach buckets on platforms along a short alley, one on each side, and asked university students to walk down the alley, pick up whichever bucket seemed easier, and carry it to the end. They expected people to grab the bucket closer to the finish, because that meant carrying it a shorter distance.
People did the opposite. Across nine experiments and 257 participants, students reliably picked up the bucket nearest to where they started and lugged it farther. Asked why, virtually all of them said some version of the same thing: “I wanted to get the task done as soon as I could.” The researchers named it pre-crastination: completing, or at least starting, a task as soon as possible, even when it costs you extra effort.
If you manage people, you already know this bucket. It’s the inbox you clear before you open the budget model. It’s the three approvals you knock out before the hard conversation you’ve been circling since Tuesday.
Why the easy task wins
The Penn State team’s explanation was not laziness or impatience. It was memory. Holding a goal in mind takes up working memory, and picking up the bucket early gets one item off the mental list. In their words, “the urge to reduce the working memory load may be so great that people are willing to expend extra physical effort.”
A follow-up study tested exactly that. In 2019, Lisa Fournier and colleagues at Washington State, with Rosenbaum, ran a cup-carrying version of the task and found that participants given an extra memory load were more likely to pre-crastinate than those without one. The more your head is carrying, the harder you grab for whatever task will let you set something down.
That’s the uncomfortable part for managers. The days you’re most loaded are the days you’re most likely to spend your best hour on your least important work. It feels like momentum. It’s actually relief. (It is related to, but not the same as, the pull of urgent work over important work; pre-crastination happens even when nothing is urgent at all.)
The emergency room data
Buckets are a lab curiosity. A study of emergency physicians shows what the habit costs at work.
Diwas KC, Bradley Staats, Maryam Kouchaki and Francesca Gino looked at six years of data from an East Coast emergency department: 84 doctors treating more than 233,000 patients, choosing their own next case from the queue. As a doctor’s workload rose, so did the odds of picking an easier one; each additional patient under a doctor’s care was linked to an 8 percent higher chance of selecting a lower-acuity case. The authors call this task completion preference.
In the short run, it looked great. Doctors who took more easy cases saw more patients per shift. But in the published paper in Management Science, once the researchers adjusted for the complexity of the work, the habit was linked to worse throughput and to slower learning. The doctors who took on harder cases got faster over time and generated more value per patient. A companion online experiment with 365 people found 76 percent of the high-workload group chose an easy follow-up task, against 64 percent of the low-workload group, and the drivers were fatigue and a craving for a sense of progress. Stress didn’t explain it.
“When we are overwhelmed and busy, we just go with easier tasks, and the difficult tasks tend to pile up,” Kouchaki told Kellogg Insight. That sentence describes most management calendars I’ve seen.
What I changed, and what I’d tell a new manager
I am a natural pre-crastinator. Running IT operations at a large telecom, I could clear forty emails before 8 a.m. and feel like I’d earned the day. What I hadn’t done was the vendor contract review that was going to decide our next three years, which kept sliding to “this afternoon” until it was due. The emails were the near bucket. I picked them up every morning and carried them all day.
Three adjustments held up over time:
Decide the order the night before, while you’re not carrying anything. Pre-crastination is strongest under load, so don’t make the choice at 7:45 a.m. with a full inbox staring at you. Write the one hard item at the top of tomorrow’s list before you leave, and start there.
Give the hard work its own small finish lines. Kouchaki’s suggestion was to break big work into milestones so people still get the satisfaction of completion. “Draft the three assumptions in the cost model” is something you can finish in forty minutes. “Do the budget” isn’t, so your brain will route around it toward something it can finish.
Watch what your team picks from the queue, not just how much they close. If you run a shared work queue, the ER pattern applies directly. A team member with a high close count and a steady diet of easy tickets is not your top performer; they are just the person learning the least. Rotate the hard work deliberately, and say out loud that you’re doing it for their development, not as a punishment.
One honest caveat: getting small things off your plate isn’t always wrong. Adam Grant, who has called himself a pre-crastinator, wrote in the New York Times about teaching himself to delay creative work so ideas had time to develop, which tells you the cure isn’t “always do the hard thing first” either. If a quick task genuinely frees your head, as with closing open loops that keep nagging at you, do it. The test is simpler than any framework: when you reach for the easy task, ask whether you’re choosing it because it matters, or because it’s close.
Most mornings, it’s because it’s close.