Instinctively, there are any number of things one assumes would happen. One might decide to do the job that’s the most overdue, or the one that has the closest deadline.
With Christmas Day looming, why do so many people wait until the last moment to do Christmas shopping? Research has modelled procrastination as a scheduling problem and has found, as the deadline gets closer, procrastinators speed up and work more efficiently. In the procrastinators? schedule a number of jobs arrive in succession and there is a deadline by which each has to be done, but when should people do which job. Researchers at the University of Bristol, State University of New York and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki devised a 'scheduling algorithm' for procrastinators that will help order the jobs they need to do, while making sure that no job is unreasonably late. Assuming, as a procrastinator, everything is going to be late, you firstly have to have a measure of lateness, which is defined as a function of how long the job was meant to take in the first place. Therefore a job that takes a year plus a day is not nearly as late as one that takes a day plus a year. Dr Raphaël Clifford , Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Head of the Algorithms Group at Bristol University and one of the authors on the paper, said: 'Instinctively, there are any number of things one assumes would happen. One might decide to do the job that's the most overdue, or the one that has the closest deadline.
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