Meanings
plural precrastinations · alternative pre-crastination
- uncountableusuallyhuman sciencesThe completion of a task too quickly or too early for the optimal outcome; the compulsion to act in this way.
Lanyun Gong and Cory Potts, the two students with whom I did this work, and I conducted a number of experiments to check our precrastination interpretation.
2017, David A. Rosenbaum, Knowing Hands: The Cognitive Psychology of Manual Control, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 2343 more examples
My colleagues and I called this tendency “precrastination.” The term was meant to connote the opposite of procrastination, the tendency to put off until later what you can do right away. Pre-crastination is the tendency to do too soon what might be better done later.
2017, David A. Rosenbaum, Knowing Hands: The Cognitive Psychology of Manual Control, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 234It is foreseeable that if we do not enjoy the process involved in completing a task, we will choose procrastination or precrastination to minimize the time we need to spend to do a task.
2017, Wasif Haq, Interpreting Procrastination; Key to Success, Happiness and Wellness, Lulu Press, Inc, →ISBN, page 81The precrastination effect is the finding that individuals complete actions earlier to "get it out of the way" (Rosenbaum, Gong, & Potts, 2014). In the current study, we tested precrastination with a prospective memory (PM) paradigm to determine if this phenomenon generalizes to PM tasks that can be completed at a time chosen by the participant.
2018, Rachel VonderHaar, “Pre-Crastination Effects in a Prospective Memory Task”, in Illinois State University Research Symposium, volume 155
Origin
Blend of pre- + procrastination, q.v.
Full word history & related roots →Rhymes & wordplay
Rhymes with precrastination
Cite this entry
precrastination. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/precrastination
“precrastination.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/precrastination. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “precrastination,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/precrastination.
Source: precrastination on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.