I've been enjoying reading Heidi Grant Halvorson's blog, The Science of Success. It interests me, because we both have our focus on successful goal pursuit. In her latest entry, she discussed the planning fallacy as one of our biases that can affect our task engagement. She noted that ". . . while we all tend to be prone to the planning fallacy to some extent, some of us fall into its trap more often than others." Our own research on this indicates that procrastinators aren't really at risk here. Procrastinators know that they tend to work later.

Heidi did her usual excellent job of summarizing research. So I won't review the recently published study that shows how power influences the extent to which we focus on singular events rather than distributed information about task completion.

Instead, I just wanted to reply to her posting by noting how in a study we conducted over a decade ago, we didn't find trait procrastination to be an individual difference that was related to the planning fallacy. In other words, procrastinators aren't necessarily more prone to the planning fallacy, even though I think we commonly think that chronic procrastinators are "broken" like this.