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Abstract
Precrastination has recently been studied due to its counter-intuitive nature. Precrastination is characterized by completing a task sooner rather than later at the expense of effort. VonderHaar et al. (2019) proposed the CLEAR hypothesis to describe the purpose of precrastination behaviors. The CLEAR hypothesis suggests that precrastination is a type of cognitive offloading behavior that clears one’s mental “to-do list”, leaving more cognitive resources for other tasks. Thus, if the CLEAR hypothesis is accurate, precrastination and other offloading strategies may be related. The current study was designed to test this prediction. My study sought to clarify the underlying mechanisms that drive this behavior through the association of precrastination and cognitive offloading. The results indicated that there was a significant association between individuals’ precrastination rates and their frequency of cognitive offloading. Furthermore, I found that participants who chose to offload their intentions performed significantly better in the current task compared to individuals who opted out of cognitive offloading. This finding shows that precrastination and cognitive offloading are related as both strategies are similar in in the form of reducing cognitive load. This study adds support for the notion that individuals order tasks based on their ability to free up cognitive resources for a current task. Additionally, the results did not show a spurious relationship between metacognitive confidence on precrastination rates and frequency of offloading. This result suggests that the relation between precrastination and cognitive offloading is robust.
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