Prioritisation: why do we accept distant commitments too readily?
Priorities are not set only at the start of the working day: they also take shape when we accept a request today for work later on. The managerial question is specific: how can we assess a future commitment without treating time that is not yet scheduled as genuinely available capacity?
What the literature establishes
Gal Zauberman and John G. Lynch Jr. (2005, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General) show that people expect to have more spare time in the future than in the present, and that this expectation is stronger for time than for money. Their experiments link this anticipated availability to placing less weight on distant investments of time. A future slot may therefore appear inexpensive not because the workload will be light, but because the available capacity is overestimated.
Distance makes desirability more salient than practical conditions
Nira Liberman and Yaacov Trope (1998, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show that desirability weighs more heavily in distant decisions, whereas feasibility carries greater weight in near-term decisions. Applied cautiously to management, this mechanism helps explain why an initiative's appeal can dominate the discussion while the conditions for delivering it remain secondary. As the deadline approaches, questions of preparation, availability and access to resources become more concrete.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that managers should turn down more distant requests or postpone committing. These studies do not justify making this a general rule: some early commitments are precisely what secures the necessary resources. The distinction is between an initiative's value and the capacity to accommodate it, rather than treating temporal distance as an automatic reason to accept or decline. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot determine
These experiments establish neither an optimal calendar occupancy rate nor a universal amount of time to keep in reserve. Applying them to a team requires attention to actual constraints, fluctuations in activity and the authority to decline a request. An empty calendar does not establish available capacity, but the existence of a bias does not establish that every future commitment is excessive either.
A practical check in Lugano
Within SHR's time management and prioritisation programme, one possible exercise is to track, for one month, new commitments accepted for the following month in a bank, a fashion or trading company, or an Italian-speaking family SME in Lugano. For each commitment, a form in Italian records the deliverable, the preparatory tasks and the existing work that will be retained, rescheduled or dropped. The measure is the proportion of these commitments that subsequently required previously planned work to be rescheduled, distinguishing those for which capacity had been explicitly reviewed from the others. This comparison does not demonstrate a causal effect, but it provides a check on whether presumed availability corresponds to capacity that can actually be deployed. To go further: explore the Time Management & Prioritisation training in Lugano, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Time Management & Prioritisation in Lugano
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