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Category: Project

Description: Standard approaches for identifying task completion strategies, such as precrastination and procrastination, reduce behavior to single markers that oversimplify the process of task completion. To illustrate this point, we consider three task completion strategies and introduce a new method to identify their use. This approach was tested using a historical dataset (N = 8,655) of the available electronic records of research participation at our institution. The approach out-performed standard diagnostic approaches and yielded an interesting finding: several strategies were associated with negative outcomes. Specifically, procrastinators and precrastinators both struggled to finish tasks on time. Together, these findings underscore the importance of using holistic approaches to determine the relationship between task characteristics, individual differences, and task completion.