By: Jill Carton TIME MANAGEMENT

Time Management Problems and Discounted UtilityBy: 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 participateParticipants : 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

HypothesisThe 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 wellThose 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