A 2002 paper in Psychological Science asks whether deadlines help people overcome procrastination. In its second study, sixty participants were paid to proofread three ten-page documents over 21 days, twenty in each of three conditions: one document due each week, deadlines they chose themselves, or all three due on the last day. Participants with evenly spaced deadlines made about 136 corrections on average, against about 71 with a single final deadline, and were also less late and earned more; those who chose their own deadlines fell in between. The authors conclude that people recognise their self-control problems and impose costly deadlines on themselves, and that these deadlines help but are not as effective as evenly spaced external ones. The paper is widely taught and has been cited more than 2,000 times.
Feynman
Spaced deadlines plausibly raised output, but the design cannot separate self-control from reminders, pacing and planned lateness, the self-set deadlines may have cost almost nothing to choose, and the in-between result rests on groups of twenty.
06 claims /08 objections /12 of 14 sources cited / lenses: Bounded search, Mechanism, Formal model
Each square is an objection. Larger means heavier. Every claim was challenged by at least one lens.
01With twenty paid participants per condition, evenly spaced deadlines produced about 136 corrections on average against about 71 under a single final deadline, along with less lateness and higher earnings.
02Evenly spaced deadlines raised performance because they overcame procrastination, a failure of self-control, rather than through some other feature of the schedule.
03Participants who set their own deadlines did so because they recognised their own self-control problems.
04The deadlines participants set for themselves were genuinely costly, so choosing them cannot be explained without a self-control motive.
05Self-chosen deadlines improve performance over a single final deadline but less than evenly spaced external deadlines, and this in-between ordering is a real effect rather than noise in samples of twenty.
06Results from sixty paid proofreaders over 21 days generalise to how people in general procrastinate and respond to deadlines.