Blame it on deadlines for your poor productivity
Too many deadlines such as upcoming appointments-makes us less efficient with our time, research shows. People facing upcoming appointments, meetings, tasks, etc., perceive they have less time than they actually do, an eight-test study shows. In addition, these boundaries result in people performing fewer tasks, and make people less likely to attempt extended-time tasks that could actually get done.
When up against such an upcoming appointment, people tended to procrastinate on the long-time chore such as writing that report and reverted to working on shorter-time tasks, such as making a work call or typing up a quick synopsis. Or they’’d skip both entirely to focus on the simplest of work forms, like answering emails-or even scheduling more boundaries.
“It’s something we can all relate to,” says co-author Stephen Nowlis, professor of marketing at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, who started this project when coauthor Gabriela N. Tonietto of Rutgers University was a PhD candidate at Olin and co-author Selin A. Malkoc of Ohio State was an Olin colleague.
The team conducted more than eight tests over a twoyear period beginning in 2015 involving 2,300-plus participants to see how people in various situations arrived at budgeting scheduled and unscheduled windows of time.
Using the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) survey platform, 200 participants-split evenly between those with an upcoming appointment and those with a free schedule-had to pick between a 30-minute chore paying $2.50 and a 45-minute chore paying $5. They had an hour’s time. But the participants with an upcoming appointment felt they had 7.82 fewer minutes in their hour to commit to their chore than the people with an open schedule.
At Washington University, 158 undergraduates were told they had either a strict, five-minute window until their appointment or an implied boundary with “about five minutes to do whatever you want.” In the same fiveminute period, the latter group accomplished 2.38 tasks compared to 1.86 tasks by the hard-timeline group.
“If you have some big tasks, too many scheduled things will affect your productivity,” Nowlis says. “A lot of scheduling is fine for shorter tasks, so find the environment that works for you.”