Several years ago, a new buzzword emerged: pre-crastination.
It was defined in Psychological Science as “hurrying to complete a task as soon as possible just to get it off your plate.”
Sound familiar?
If you’ve ever jumped on a task the moment it appeared—just to avoid adding it to your already-long to-do list—you’ve lived it. And It feels like a win… but it’s not.
While it may offer short-term satisfaction, pre-crastination drains valuable time and leads you to spend time on lower-priority tasks simply because they’re right in front of you—but not because they’re the best use of your time.
This reactionary approach will leave you feeling:
- Scattered from switching between unrelated tasks
- Frustrated by slower progress on bigger goals
- Exhausted by the pressure to “just get it done”
- Overwhelmed from managing too much at once without direction
- Disempowered: your day is running you instead of the other way around
When you work on tasks as they appear, you’re not in the driver’s seat of your workday. You’re reacting instead of effectively prioritizing or planning.
The result? Lower productivity, stalled progress, and rising stress.
Let’s flip that script—first by understanding what’s happening behind the scenes and then addressing how to fix it.
THE HIDDEN POWERS YOU LOSE WHEN YOU PRE-CRASTINATE
When you pre-crastinate, you give up power in 3 ways that support the most effective management of your work.
💡THE POWER OF CLARITY
If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you’ve heard me say this over and over: there are more than 10 different sources of tasks your workday, including email, phone calls, texts, IMs, DMs, CRMs, meetings, conversations, social media, teams chats, and more.
And those are just the SOURCES. Now let’s talk about the TOOLS.
Tools are the things you grab to try to keep up with the tasks from all of those aforementioned sources, including legal pads, steno pads, notebooks, planners, post-it notes—any kind of paper. Then you might use a whiteboard, an excel spreadsheet, a word document, your calendar, or a task app on your phone for tracking tasks.
What this forces you to do is try to keep your most important tasks top of mind and then you try to prioritize them—in your head! Which is an indicator of trouble down the road.
Without total clarity of tasks, you lose visibility of what you’re responsible for. Awareness drops. Certainty drops. And this means you’re apt to…
- Miss, forget, or duplicate tasks
- Miss deadlines and due dates
- Miss out on conversations, team decisions, and meetings
- Miss or lose information
- Miss out on important opportunities
- And so much more.
Without full visibility of tasks, awareness and certainty drop. You’ll lack confidence that you’re using your time wisely and this will ultimately impede PROGRESS and RESULTS for both you and your company.
🧠⚡THE POWER TO MAKE SMART DECISIONS
Pre-crastination skips over the decision-making process entirely. It’s too easy to just assume that you have to do everything.
Instead of asking…
- Is this task important?
- Is it mine to do?
- Is now the right time?
- Is this something I can delegate?
…you just do it.
You take action before you’ve even had a chance to think about whether it’s even WORTH doing. And that’s not decisiveness. It’s blind, but consistent action. And it’s a recipe for burnout, not progress.
⚖️ THE POWER TO PRIORITIZE
You might start working on a task only to remember something “more important.” Or someone pops in with a request they say is “urgent.” So you jump ship and chase the next thing.
When everything feels urgent, nothing gets prioritized. You chase the loudest task, not the most important one. Without a clear priority, you can’t confidently decide where to spend your time—and that creates doubt and delay.
Take Your Power Back and Stay in the Driver’s Seat of Your Workday
To stop the cycle of pre-crastination and reclaim control, here’s what to do:
✔️ Create a Central, Digital, and Complete Task List
The key word there is “COMPLETE.” I’m not kidding. You MUST centralize tasks and responsibilities—ALL of them. Pull tasks AWAY from their sources. Consolidate tasks from all the tools you use and get them all into ONE favorite digital tool. Build a COMPLETE inventory—a SYSTEM, not just a long—but partial—list on a legal pad.
✔️ Assign DO Dates (Not Due Dates)
Keep track of due dates and deadlines, of course, but DRIVE your productivity and progress with target dates of action on each and EVERY task. (Yes, EVERY!) This isn’t meant to lock you in. it’s just a place to start so you can…
✔️ Prioritize with Precision
Centralize tasks into ONE system and choose target action dates for every task. This means you’re automatically prioritizing and grouping tasks by day, where the highest priority will easily float to the top of each day. Full awareness of tasks means you can make smart decisions about how to spend your time and you’ll be more confident that your energy is focused where it matters most.
✔️ Keep the number of tasks planned per day LOW ( it’s lower than you think!)
Everyone thinks they can do more in a day than what’s really possible. Prevent “task overload” on any given day by planning fewer tasks per day. The white space you see on your calendar isn’t ALL for tasks. Be sure to take into account the time for scheduled meetings, email, interruptions, distractions, and the unexpected. A firm grasp on tasks that are centralized also helps to avoid over-promising and under-delivering.
The Result? Progress with Confidence
When you start managing tasks intentionally without pre-crastination…
- You feel calmer, because you know nothing’s been missed or forgotten.
- You feel confident, because you’re working on the right things.
- You feel energized, because your time has purpose and your progress is real.
Don’t let the pressure to “get it done now” steal your time, energy, and power to prioritize. Pre-crastination might FEEL productive, but it’s not. It’s just a very distracted and random use of your precious time.
Instead, centralize your tasks. Then prioritize with precision, plan with purpose, and make decisions with total clarity. That way, you’ll always work with intention, not reaction.
As you avoid the urge to pre-crastinate (as well as to procrastinate), aim for the productive middle ground—where YOU are in charge of your day, your time, your tasks, and ultimately, your progress, achievement, and peace of mind.
