Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Procrastination, where people engage with an immediately rewarding task when they should work on a task with a delayed payoff, is typically framed as self-regulation failure or lack of motivation. We challenge this view by demonstrating that procrastination emerges naturally from the computational intractability of sequential resource allocation under temporal uncertainty. When time horizons are certain, humans approach mathematically optimal strategies for balancing competing tasks. However, when deadlines are uncertain - requiring integration over exponentially growing outcome spaces - participants systematically over-invest in immediate rewards early, then attempt to compensate too late. The findings reframe procrastination as bounded rationality under computational constraints rather than pure irrationality, suggesting that interventions targeting uncertainty reduction or temporal scaffolding may prove more effective than exhortations to increase motivation or willpower.