Weighting waiting: A decision-theoretic taxonomy of delay, pacing and procrastination

Why do today, what you can fail to do tomorrow? Pacing styles involving postponing, and ultimately procrastinating tasks are widespread pathologies to which many succumb. Previous research has recognised multiple types of delayed working, influenced by a myriad of psychological and situational factors. However, the main mechanistic explanation for delays, which concerns temporal discounting of distant rewards, only encompasses a subset. Further, investigations of pacing have been rather independent from those of procrastination. Here, we introduce a systematic taxonomy of pacing and procrastination within a common framework that is based on the type of temporal decisions involved in choosing to delay. We suggest that these decisions are driven by characteristics of the task and the (sub-)optimality of the decision-making. We illustrate aspects of the taxonomy by simulating diverse sources of behavioral delay using reinforcement learning models. We also analyse whether students pacing their work through a semester in a real-world task (Zhang & Ma, Scientific Reports, 2024) showany evidence of behaving according to the types detailed in our taxonomy. Our approach provides a theoretical foundation for understanding pacing and procrastination, enabling the integration of both established and novel mechanisms within a unified conceptual framework.