The Timing of Suboptimality: How Temporal Uncertainty Drives Procrastination Behavior

Procrastination, where people engage with an immediately rewarding task when they should work on a task with a delayed payoff, is typicallyframed as self-regulation failure or lack of motivation. We challenge this view by demonstrating that procrastination emerges naturallyfrom the computational intractability of sequential resource allocation under temporal uncertainty. When time horizons are certain, humansapproach mathematically optimal strategies for balancing competing tasks. However, when deadlines are uncertain – requiring integrationover exponentially growing outcome spaces – participants systematically over-invest in immediate rewards early, then attempt to compensatetoo late. Critically, individual differences in self-reported procrastination were predicted not only by overall task performance, but by thetemporal structure of these deviations, with early misallocation uniquely associated with items reflecting delayed initiation and inefficienttiming. These results identify procrastination as a timing-specific form of suboptimality under uncertainty, consistent with bounded rationalityrather than generalized self-regulation failure, and suggest that reducing temporal uncertainty may be a more effective intervention targetthan increasing motivation alone.