A great deal of research has concerned choices of goods or services with different values receivable at various times. Temporal discounting – the magnification of values that can be obtained sooner rather than later – has proven to be immensely important in this regard. In the present article, we shift the focus from the receipt of goods or services to the performance of tasks. We show that temporal discounting also applies to task choices. Pre-crastination, the phenomenon we point to, was discovered by Rosenbaum, Gong, and Potts (2014) and is the tendency to hasten tasks even at the expense of extra energy. Pre-crastination was discovered in a study of psycho-motor performance, where the focus was on biomechanical factors affecting task choices. In the present article, we review that research, showing how the tendency found in the initial experiments are in fact illustrative of a more general motor-control tendency to inhibit easy forms of movement for the sake of later performance goals. Such inhibitory control may also be the basis for pre-crastination, provided one assumes that pre-crastination keeps working memory as clear as possible. A wide range of behavioral choices fit under the rubric of pre-crastination, such as answering emails too soon, submitting articles before they are ready, judging others before they should be judged, convicting others to get cases over with, and, in the worst case, going to war prematurely. Lack of temperance in these choices may seem to arise from impulsivity, but we argue against that view. The desire to “clear the decks” to be prepared for new challenges is, we suggest, a more apt account of pre-crastination.

大量研究关注在不同时间应收不同价值的商品或服务的选择。时间贴现——可以尽早获得价值的放大——已被证明在这方面非常重要。在本文中，我们将重点从接收商品或服务转移到执行任务。我们表明时间折扣也适用于任务选择。预拖延我们指出的现象是由 Rosenbaum、Gong 和 Potts（2014 年）发现的，它是一种加速任务的趋势，即使以牺牲额外的精力为代价。在一项关于心理运动表现的研究中发现了拖延症，该研究的重点是影响任务选择的生物力学因素。在本文中，我们回顾了这项研究，表明在最初的实验中发现的趋势实际上说明了一种更普遍的运动控制趋势，即为了以后的表现目标而抑制简单的运动形式。这种抑制性控制也可能是前拖延症的基础，前提是人们假设前拖延症使工作记忆尽可能清晰。广泛的行为选择适合预先拖延的标题，例如过早回复电子邮件，在准备好之前提交文章，在别人被审判之前先审判别人，给别人定罪以解决案件，在最坏的情况下，过早地开战。在这些选择中缺乏节制似乎源于冲动，但我们反对这种观点。我们建议，“清理甲板”以准备迎接新挑战的愿望是对预先拖延的更恰当的解释。