Procrastination

I've noticed something interesting today as part of my role in a service task for our national organization. I've had to assign reviewers to proposals, and reviewers needed to complete their reviews by the end of the day today. They've had them for about 3 weeks, and last night we sent out a reminder email that their reviews are due. We asked them to have them done by "the end of the day tomorrow".

So now it's 5 p.m. today, and as I look at the statistics I see that out of our 134 submissions, 2/3 of them have not been fully reviewed yet, and 1/3 of them have been. So 2/3 of the submission still need to be reviewed -- at 5 p.m. on the deadline day! I knew people liked to wait until the last minute, but this is more extreme than I would have guessed. I find it kind of funny to note that pretty serious procrastination, down to the wire, appears to be the rule rather than the exception.

(Although just to be clear, I'm not innocent of this myself. Just last week I completed an article review only about an hour before the deadline, and I'd had it for 6 weeks.)