Too many of us tend to procrastinate even when it comes to pleasure because we succumb to the planning fallacy when we estimate “resource slack,” as behavioral economists term it. We assume we’ll magically have more free time in the future than we do today. So we say yes to a work commitment three months from now that we’d never accept if it were next week—and then discover too late that we still don’t have any time for it. Researchers term this the “Yes . . . Damn!” effect.
