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mere urgency
You prioritize trivial tasks because they offer immediate completion.
The mere urgency effect shows people choose tasks with shorter deadlines over tasks with higher rewards.
Participants were offered a high-value task with a long deadline and a low-value task with an immediate one. Despite the rational choice being the high-value task, subjects repeatedly chose the shorter deadline task. The feeling of finishing a task acts as a psychological reward that overrides the long-term utility.
You are often working toward closure rather than true progress.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Zhu et al., 2018, Journal of Consumer Research
- What the check found
- The study in the Journal of Consumer Research (2018) by Zhu, Yang, and Hsee confirms this effect as described.
- Confidence
- Well replicated
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.