"I need to be in the right mood"

The form done tired is a form with a mistake in it. Better to wait until you're fresh, and capable, and in the mood for it.

Sirois and Pychyl's point from chapter 5 is that the mood is the mechanism. You put the form off because it makes you feel slightly bad, and putting it off makes you feel slightly better, and that trade is the whole of the habit. "I need to be in the right mood" is the same trade, said as a principle. The mood you're waiting for is a mood in which the form doesn't feel slightly bad, and that mood doesn't come, because the form always feels slightly bad, and the waiting is producing the heap.

Dianne Tice and Roy Baumeister, in 1997, followed students through a term and compared those who put work off with those who didn't. Early in the term, the ones who put things off were less stressed and less ill. They were, in a sense, in a better mood, and that's the trade working. By the end of the term they were more stressed, more ill, and sicker overall than the others, and they'd done worse on every assignment. The good mood at the start was borrowed from the end, at interest.

That's the mood to look at. Not the mood before the form, which is slightly bad either way, but the mood after. The form done, tired, at nine on a Tuesday, produces a mood at half past nine that's a little lighter, because the item's gone and the carry has one less thing in it. The form not done produces a mood that's the same as before, plus a small guilt, plus the item still there in the morning. If you're choosing by mood, and you are, choose by the mood you'll have at half past nine.

And about the mistake. Forms done tired don't have more mistakes in them than forms done fresh, in my observation, because forms are mostly copying information from one place to another, and the tiredness that would ruin a piece of writing has no effect on a postcode. The mistake you're worried about is a story the mood is telling to justify itself. The one mistake that tired people do make with forms is not doing them, and that one's already happened.

You don't need to be in the right mood to do a form. You need four minutes and the policy number. The mood comes afterwards, and it's the good one.