A Study Encourages You to Have Fun First and Finish Your Work Later

New York Magazine:

It seems like the natural order of things: first work, then fun. If you finish your dinner, you can have dessert; if you finish your homework, you can play your video games. It’s what parents teach children, and it’s how adults typically run their own lives, too — you have to get your work done sometime, after all, and, anyway, you wouldn’t be able to enjoy your chosen leisure activity if some unfinished project was still hanging over your head.

And yet the results of a recent set of experiments suggest that although people expect that they will enjoy goofing off more if they’ve finished their work first, that’s not exactly true. Fun stuff is just as fun even if you haven’t “earned” it. Ed O’Brien, a professor at the Chicago Booth School of Business, co-authored this new study, published in Psychological Science, and he wrote about his work this week for Harvard Business Review.

Read the whole story: New York Magazine