Last Day Syndrome

The Public Issue Advertisement in the newspaper said : "Hurry !! Offer closes today." The MBA institute website calling for Applications for the Academic year yyyy says "Last Date for the Application to reach us : xx-mon-yyyy " and the shopping mall announces the last day of it's Annual Sale "Clearance Sale Closes Today. Last chance" . Ask the mall owner who doled out the ad about the Statistics with the respect to the Sales on the last day and the answer you get is that the LAST DAY sale exceeds the total sales in the whole clearance Sale period. The same story repeats with the number of applications received in the last week of the application deadline exceeding the total number of applications received prior to the last week of deadline.

So why this Last Day/week syndrome and why is it that we wait till the last day or moment for finishing up unfinished tasks? The syndrome implies that even though we have ample time to send the application before the deadline, we invariably tend to procastinate to the last day. This mass human pchyology is exploited by marketers alike and they dole out special "offers" for the last day shoppers. So Why do we procastinate ? Well, the majority of the hoi polloi tend to work under priority and deadlines . The sale is on till Sunday(deadline) and Sunday anyway is boring with no TV shows, why not get to home on the Weekday and watch my favorite TV show(priority). Since the application can wait till xx-mon-yyyy(deadline) , why not wait till then and in the meanwhile finish up the other chores(priority) which are more important ? ( Now it is a different matter that the important chore could be a must watch Saif-Rani flick) . And on xx-mon-yyyy or a couple of days before , you will do all you can so that the application reaches the destination on time since that is the priority for the day. ( Like for example sending the application using SpeedPost instead of ordinary mail)

So what's the bottomline ? Well manage your deadlines and priorities and you will not need to rush on the last day to the shopping mall only to realize that the best things on offer have already been taken by the early shoppers.