By: Jill Carton TIME MANAGEMENT

Time Management Problems and Discounted Utility By: Cornelius J. Koing & Martin Kleinmann

 Between subjects design  The manipulation occurrence of interruption occurred either:  (1) Close to the beginning of time reserved for the task OR  (2) Close to the end of the task  DV : Duration for which the participant answered the survey on the phone  Lab setting  Used a typical time management issue : An interruption  Latter case : Utility of the task should be higher because it’s less discounted  The likelihood that attention & time spent on the task rises and the likelihood that participants spend time on interruptions should decrease  Hypothesis : Participants will spend more time on an interruption if it occurs earlier in the task STUDY

 Setting  In day assessment centers advertised as university training courses for job applicants.  This offered applicants the opportunity to become familiar with assessment and receive feedback on their performance  To increase their motivation to participate : They paid a small amount of money to participate  Participants : 43 total (22 women, 21 men) METHOD

 Material & Procedure  Told the participants to assume they were managers of a car hire company  After coming home from a 4 day business trip, they have many messages & mail  They’re required to prioritize items & determine how to respond  There is a time restriction to 40 minutes, making it hard to finish the task  The interruption is a call from an electronic survey  They are asked a variety of questions  The call is either placed :  (1) 9 minute from the task start (near the beginning of the task) OR  (2) 31 minutes from the start (near the end of the task) METHOD

 All participants cut the electronic survey by hanging up the phone  Interruption at 9 minutes : 50.2 seconds on the phone  Interruption at 31 minutes : 19.9 seconds on the phone  These results showed that the participants spent more time on an interruption if it occurred earlier in the task RESULTS

 When the deadline for a task gets closer, less discounting of the outcome of the task occurs  If there is less discounting, there is a less likelihood of working on the task increases  The resulting consequence is that people spend less time on other tasks (interruption by phone)  People don’t pay a lot of attention to tasks with deadlines in the far future or no set deadline DISCUSSION

Time Crawls When You’re Not Having Fun : Feeling Entitled Makes Dull Tasks Drag On By: Edward H. O’Brien, Phyllis A. Anastasio, and Brad J. Bushman

 People who view themselves as important value their time as “more precious”  Focuses on entitlement : being more deserving than another person  Entitled people view activities as dull, showing perception of time and a higher percentage of these activities as wasting their “precious” time BACKGROUND

 They first assessed time perception while performing dull versus fun tasks among individuals with varying trait entitlement levels  There were no predictor of time estimates for fun tasks  They focused on time perception of dull tasks  Participants who did a Psychological Entitlement Scale 1 month earlier rated how much time passed while doing a dull or fun lab task  Controlled several factors : Subjective rating of task, time urgency, mood, sensation seeking, status, power ; which were all measured on a rating scale  Hypothesis  Time would drag during a dull lab task  No relationship between entitlement & time perception for fun tasks : People shouldn’t see time spent doing “fun” tasks as wasted / dragging on STUDY

 Participants : 50 college students  Method  1 month before, they did a reliable / valid 9 item Psychological Entitlement Scale  “If I were on the Titanic, I would deserve to be on the first lifeboat”  7 point scale (1= strong disagreement, 7= strong agreement)  Randomly assigned to complete a fun or dull task : had a 10 minute time limit  Dull : reproducing a matrix  Fun: using the same group letters to form people’s first names in English  Then they were asked to rate how much time they thought had elapsed  They rated their current mood (1=extremely negative, 7= extremely positive) METHOD

 Hypothesis  The fun task would be rated more fun and interesting than the dull task  Participants who completed the fun task to be in a better mood than participants who completed the dull task METHOD

 There were no gender differences : They combined the data  Fun task were rated more fun than dull task & rated more interesting as well  Those completing the fun task were in a better mood afterward than those who completed the dull task  There was a significant positive relationship between scores on the Psychological Entitlement Scale and estimates of how much time had passed while completing the dull task (more entitlement = more time had passed)  There was no relationship between Psychological Entitlement Scale & rating of how much time had passed while completing the fun task RESULTS

 The time spent doing dull tasks seemed to crawl for more individuals : Results stayed the same when controlled for variety of variables, including time perception  The only signification predictor of time spent completing the dull task was the level of entitlement  There was no relationship between entitlement & the time spent completing the fun task  There’s a time entitlement link and is specific to dull tasks : When entitled people aren’t having fun, time seems to crawl DISCUSSION