Let's do a quick thought experiment:

The CRASH-B will be held on February 28.

Woah, that is this month!  That is like, three weeks!  I better get training.

Nah, don't worry, it's actually March 1.

Whew, that is a relief.  

But that sense of relief might be a problem that will hurt your score.

If the idea of a February erg test is a little rattling - maybe a fair bit more rattling than "The CRASH-B will be held on March 1" - there is a reason for it; your brain perceives the February date as being a lot closer than just one day before March 1.  According to research by Yanping Tu and Dilip Soman published in the Journal of Consumer Research, setting a goal or deadline in the same month or year (or day or week, etc., as it may be) in which you find yourself at present can have a measurable effect on your ability to meet the goal or deadline.

The researchers performed four studies, the first of which asked two groups of farmers in India to set up bank accounts and fill them with a certain amount of money in six months' time, with a reward of Rs 5000 for anyone who met the goal. One group was contacted with the offer in June, with a deadline of December the same calendar year; another was contacted in July, with a deadline of January the next next year.

The study found that 36.86% of the farmers with a December deadline opened the account immediately, compared to only 8.09% with a January deadline.

The researchers found same effect doing studies of college students who were given five days to complete a task, some starting on May 24 with a May 29 deadline, and others starting on May 29 with a June 4 deadline.  The subjects in the former group were far more likely to start working immediately.

They researchers also did another study that more or less introduced some confusion between the day of the week (Monday, Tuesday, etc.) and the numerical date, and still found that if the deadline date fell in another month, subjects were less likely to start on task sooner.

The research turns on the notion of "like-the-present" descriptors vs. "like-the-future" descriptors.  If a deadline seems more like the present (this month, this year), people are more likely to get started on the task than if the deadline seems more "like-the-future" – even if the timelines are identical.

The study would seem to indicate, then, that the sense of urgency you may have about training for a March 1 CRASH-B may be significantly lower than that of a, say, February 29 CRASH-B.

Finally, the researchers did another study using colored-in calendars that showed that by blocking out dates in "like colors," you could override the day and date inclinations of the previous studies.  So for example if you have a big wall calendar with the whole year on it, and you color in all of February and then color in March 1 as well, you can trick yourself into perceiving March 1 as "part of" February, at least with respect to your goal-setting and deadlines (read more about this in the study).

If you don't have a big wall calendar, and your smartphone doesn't even show March 1 on the same dang screen as today, maybe this will work, for this year at least:

The CRASH-B will be held on February 29, 2015.