All this happened, more or less.

Uncovering the mechanisms governing the timing of various human activities has significant scientific and commercial potential.

...the bursty nature of human dynamics is a consequence of a queuing process driven by human decision making: whenever an individual is presented with multiple tasks and chooses among them based on some perceived priority parameter, the waiting time of the various tasks will follow a Pareto distribution.

..the main finding is that the observed fat-tailed activity distributions can be explained by a simple hypothesis: humans execute their tasks based on some perceived priority, setting up queues that generate very uneven waiting time distributions for different tasks. In this respect the proposed priority list model represents only a minimal framework that allows us to demonstrate the potential origin of the heavy-tailed activity patterns, and offers room for further extensions to capture more complex human behaviour.

Albert-László Barabási. Nature 435, 207-211 (12 May 2005) | doi: 10.1038/nature03459

I have a feeling that this work is somehow connected to Kahneman and Tversky's Prospect Theory. Probably, it has to do with how people select their priorities ( e.g. risk-seeking vs risk-aversion ).