Business Insight Zone

That’s my non-scientific summary of this interesting academic paper:

Resource Slack and Propensity to Discount Delayed Investments of Time versus Money

This 2005 article from the Journal of Experimental Psychology was written by Gal Zauberman of Penn‘s Wharton School and John Lynch of Duke‘s Fuqua School. Here’s part of the abstract:

We demonstrate that people discount delayed task outcomes due to perceived changes over time in supplies of slack. Slack is the perceived surplus of a given resource available to complete a focal task. [...] If people foresee less resource competition in the future, they will appear to discount that resource steeply. We use this framework to explain differential propensity to delay investments of time and money.

This provides a basic explanation for why we put off things until later, and why we take on obligations that in fact we shouldn’t. In the opening paragraph of the article, the authors provide an academic example that translates easily to the business world:

Many of us have accepted invitations weeks or months in advance to do a review for a journal article outside of our field, to serve on some departmental or university committee, or to travel to another university to give a talk, only to regret our decision when the time arrived to make the time investments promised. Viewed from a distance, the benefits seemed clearly to outweigh the costs. But when the time arrived, the costs seemed much more painful than we had anticipated. “Yes” was often followed eventually by “Damn!” …

Not that any of us have ever experienced that, right? (And you’ve got to respect an academic paper that includes mild cussin’.)

I downloaded this article thinking that I would have time to read it later. What do you know? — it turns out that I didn’t! Still, the piece was worth a good skim, and it got my wheels turning about how we so often commit to projects in the workplace that we hope we’ll be able to carry through later, but that in fact we’ll never have time for. In my humble opinion, this is a key underlying source for overcommitment and underdelivery in today’s go-go, information-overloaded workplace.

What do you think?