Short answer: for a hard task you’re dreading, a few minutes of fun before you start may do more for you than the same fun saved for after. Fun’s main payoff is a good mood, and several studies have found that a good mood widens your thinking, helps with tricky problems and helps you keep going when the work is hard. Saved for after, that mood shows up once the hard part is already over. The research has real limits, and I’ll walk through them, but the practical takeaway holds up: fun can be the way in, not only the reward at the end.
I grew up where work came first and fun, if there was any, came after. Most of us did. It feels like the responsible order. It’s worth asking whether it’s also the effective one.
Where did “work first, play later” come from?
Psychologists call it delayed gratification: giving up something good now to get something better later. The most famous test of it is Walter Mischel’s marshmallow studies from the 1960s and ’70s, which offered preschoolers one marshmallow right away or two if they could wait. Later follow-ups linked waiting longer to better outcomes years down the road, and the idea that self-denial builds success took hold.
It’s held up less well than its reputation. In 2018, researchers repeated the study with a larger and more varied group of children and found the link to later achievement was about two-thirds smaller once they accounted for family background, early ability and home environment. Waiting still matters for some things. It just isn’t the master key it was sold as.
There’s also a mismatch hiding in the rule. A marshmallow is a reward you can bank: two later really is more than one now. A good mood doesn’t bank that way. It helps most while you’re doing the work, and saving it for after means it shows up too late to help.
Does a good mood actually help you think better?
The evidence here is the strongest part of the story.
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory holds that positive emotions widen what you notice and what you can think of doing, while negative ones narrow it. In a 2005 study, people who watched a short funny or contented film clip listed more things they felt like doing than people who watched a neutral, angry or anxious one.
An older line of research by Alice Isen points the same way. In a 1987 set of experiments, people who watched a few minutes of a comedy film, or got a small bag of candy, did better on creative problem-solving tasks, including a classic puzzle called the candle problem. People who watched a neutral film or a distressing one didn’t improve, and neither did people who did a short burst of exercise. That last detail matters. It wasn’t just being more awake or alert. It was the good mood.
Can a little fun help you keep going on hard work?
Probably, though this is where the evidence gets thinner.
In a 2007 set of four experiments, Dianne Tice and her colleagues first wore people out with a task that took self-control, like suppressing a thought or resisting cookies. Then some of them watched a short comedy clip or got a surprise gift. On the next hard task, those people kept at it about as long as people who hadn’t been worn out at all. In one experiment, the comedy group stuck with a frustrating puzzle for about 12.6 minutes, against 8.8 minutes for the group that watched a neutral video.
Here’s the caveat an honest reader deserves. That study belongs to a field called ego depletion, the idea that willpower runs down like a battery. In 2016, a large replication across 23 labs and more than 2,000 people found almost no depletion effect. So I wouldn’t lean hard on the battery story. The mood findings from Fredrickson and Isen stand on firmer ground.
A different approach has better real-world support. In a 2014 study, Katherine Milkman at Wharton gave 226 people audiobooks they wanted to hear, which they could only listen to at the gym. Their gym visits ran about 51% higher than a comparison group’s at first. The effect faded after a holiday break, which is useful to know too: the pairing works best when you keep it going. She called it temptation bundling, which means attaching something you enjoy to something you’ve been putting off, so the fun pulls you into the work instead of waiting at the end of it.
How do you use fun first without procrastinating?
The risk is obvious. “Five minutes of something I love” can turn into an hour of scrolling. A few guardrails keep it working:
- Pick something with a built-in end. One song, one short clip, one quick call. Avoid anything that runs on autoplay or an endless feed.
- Set a timer. The studies used a few minutes of mood boost, not an afternoon. Five minutes is plenty.
- Start while the mood is still with you. Have the hard task open and ready before the five minutes begin, so there’s no gap between the fun and the first step.
- Bundle where you can. Save a podcast, a playlist or an audiobook for the hard thing itself, whether that’s the paperwork, the workout or the long ride.
- Keep big rewards at the end. This isn’t an argument against ever waiting. The weekend away still belongs after the project ships. It’s the small, mood-sized fun that works better up front.
In the Built to Last framework, this sits under Mind: keep the edge that keeps you in charge. Part of keeping that edge is setting up the conditions that make the hard thing easier to start, instead of relying on willpower alone.
Where This Fits
Starting a hard task in a good mood is a small example of a bigger idea: doing the right things, and setting yourself up to actually do them. That’s what my next live class digs into. Built to Last: Foundation First — Why Your Routine Only Works If Your Body Can Use It is live on Zoom on Thursday, November 19, from 6:00 to 6:45 PM Central, and it’s free. The live Q&A and the Foundation Check walkthrough happen only in the room, and registrants also get the replay. Save my spot for November 19th.
Each week I send one short, evidence-checked tip like this one: what the research says, and one thing you can do about it. Get the Weekly Wellness Tips.
Sources
- Fredrickson BL, Branigan C. Positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought-action repertoires. Cognition and Emotion, 2005.
- Isen AM, Daubman KA, Nowicki GP. Positive affect facilitates creative problem solving. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1987.
- Tice DM, Baumeister RF, Shmueli D, Muraven M. Restoring the self: Positive affect helps improve self-regulation following ego depletion. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2007.
- Hagger MS, et al. A multilab preregistered replication of the ego-depletion effect. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2016.
- Watts TW, Duncan GJ, Quan H. Revisiting the marshmallow test: A conceptual replication investigating links between early delay of gratification and later outcomes. Psychological Science, 2018.
- Milkman KL, Minson JA, Volpp KGM. Holding the Hunger Games hostage at the gym: An evaluation of temptation bundling. Management Science, 2014.
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