Time management: can a request be handled too early?
A file arrives while some necessary information still awaits confirmation: should work begin to get ahead? The managerial question is when an early start reduces the remaining workload, and when it mainly creates work that will have to be done again.
What the literature establishes
David Rosenbaum, Lanyun Gong and Cory Potts (2014, Psychological Science) investigated a tendency they call “pre-crastination”: hastening the completion of a subgoal, even at the cost of additional physical effort. In their experiments, participants would choose to pick up a bucket closer to the starting point, even if that meant carrying it farther. The authors suggest that completing a subgoal sooner may lighten the mental load; this does not demonstrate that starting a professional assignment quickly is generally inefficient.
Unloading memory without executing the task
Evan Risko and Sam Gilbert (2016, Trends in Cognitive Sciences) examine cognitive offloading in a literature review: the use of actions or external aids to reduce a task's cognitive demands. This framework helps distinguish two responses to a pending request: beginning to process it or externally recording the information needed to return to it. Recording a request, its owner and its starting condition could therefore reduce the need to keep it in mind without prematurely beginning execution.
The premature conclusion
It would be a mistake to conclude that action should wait until all information is available. Initial work can reveal a dependency, an ambiguity or a risk that would otherwise remain invisible. The useful distinction is therefore between exploration that generates information and execution whose results may be invalidated by a confirmation still outstanding. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot settle
A bucket-carrying experiment measures neither document rework nor the due diligence obligations of a Geneva-based team. The review of cognitive offloading likewise does not establish that a request log reduces total processing time in these professions. In practice, rework caused by starting prematurely must be distinguished from rework caused by a legitimate change in the request.
A practical check in Genève
Within SHR's “Time Management & Prioritisation” programme, one possible exercise is to track, over two weeks, requests started before an explicitly identified confirmation. In Geneva, the scope could cover a client file in private banking, a briefing note in an international organisation, an order in luxury watchmaking or a logistics instruction in commodity trading, without delaying mandatory checks or urgent action. For each request, record the outstanding confirmation, the reason for starting and the minutes of rework attributable to information received later; calculate the proportion of early-started requests requiring such rework and the corresponding total time. This record would not, by itself, prove that waiting is preferable, but it would make the potential cost of a supposedly time-saving early start verifiable. To go further: explore the Time Management & Prioritisation training in Geneva in the canton of Geneva, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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