Some of us may be guilty of procrastination, but we all are pre-crastinators at some level.
Procrastination is a serious problem to many of us that like to put off work and cram the night before. Not only is procrastination a behavioral problem, but also one with a psychological implication. Procrastination is the "thief of time". On the other hand, precrastination, discovered to be the complete opposite, is the tendency to do things ahead of time - and really ahead of time- just for the sake of completion.
Precrastination was found to be exhibited in pigeons as well. And the fact that we and pigeons have separated in phylogeny 300 million years ago suggests that precrastination is a behavior also found earlier in phylogeny. How has this behavior and why has it emerged so early in phylogeny marks an important point yet to be validated. It has been suggested that doing things earlier would eliminate the hectic nag at the back of your head to remember to do it later. And so sets our working memory free to remember and focus other things. Moreover, it has been shown that people that leave tasks for later perform worse on these tasks when they actually being doing them than when they have begun them earlier. Nevertheless, small tasks done quickly have been shown to not free up much of the working memory.
An alternative explanation suggests that completing a task has a reward-like effect on our neural circuitry. Similarly, all our physiological tasks want to go for completion. And so neural circuits for the tasks that get completed may last longer than those for tasks that do not get completed. Most importantly, since our learning is mostly by trial and error, finishing tasks earlier gives us more time to learn this way when the task fails to complete and so giving us more time to troubleshoot for later trials.
Precrastination may serve as a way to counteract the malfunction is procrastinating behaviors. Finishing small chunks of the task put off may pull us towards completing it slowly, with time, and effectively by stimulating our reward system with each small leap forward.
For further references: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pre-crastination-the-opposite-of-procrastination/
