Does anchoring on deadlines cause procrastination?

The best strategy known, if I'm recalling Dan Ariely correctly, is to have a series of evenly-spaced sub-task deadlines. Paper: http://people.duke.edu/~dandan/Papers/PI/deadlines.pdf

anecdote: my life became better when I mentally converted all sunday night deadlines to friday afternoon deadlines.

Work expands to fill the available time.

sed -e "s/Work/Gas/" -e "s/time/volume"

Just give out fake deadlines

It's important to distinguish between procrastination and delaying working on something because it's not urgent yet. Sometimes the latter is just a reasonable thing to do. From that perspective, deadlines tell people how urgent it is to do something. It's not surprising that they won't do it if it's not urgent, and it's unclear whether this is actually a bad thing.

I believe that you are confusing anchoring with temporal motivation theory. It's not the suggested deadline that causes the procrastination itself, but rather the perceived utility of a given activity increases exponentially as the deadline nears.

If you want to avoid procrastination, this article, which is part of a larger series, can help.

Good luck!

I think deadlines are a sufficient condition for procrastination but not a necessary one. And even starting a project earlier is no guarantee of avoiding a last minute crunch. (When I was studying I'd start projects on time, get the "hard parts" done, but still end up finishing them off at the last minute. Whether that's a function of anchoring or just plain vanilla Planning Fallacy, I'm not sure).

Without a deadline, can you still procrastinate? Of course, but the consequences of not starting are less immediate, but still potentially severe. If you don't finish writing an essay by the deadline, you fail a course. If you don't submit an application, nothing happens now, but restrict your options later. If you never exercise, you're more likely to get sick as you age.

So having decided to start, how do you maintain momentum? From a comment above, breaking down a single project into sub tasks with their own deadlines is a great start. But there's still a trap here - the comforting thought that some sub tasks will take less time than others, and you've got heaps of time to the actual deadline to catch up. Quantifying what you'll achieve (e.g. I will write the introduction and conclusion by the end of the week) provides a concrete goal and also harder to lie to yourself about how much time you have.

Many people procrastinate signing up for the gym even when they haven't set themselves a deadline. The same goes for a lot of habits where people now they should be doing something but don't.

Any number you consider as an answer to a question will become an anchor and draw your answer towards it. Since you consider a deadline as a time to finish a project, your decision about when you should actually finish the project will be drawn towards it.

Can, but does not necessarily or often, lead to...

That'll make you start the project later, even though you know consciously that planning to finish a project near the deadline is a bad idea.

This is probably true- but consider the case where the deadline is set at "never." Having frequent, small, imminent deadlines seems to be good practice, and is behind things like Beeminder.