A suprising benefit of time pressure at work(bps-research-digest.blogspot.com)
bps-research-digest.blogspot.com
A suprising benefit of time pressure at work
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2009/07/surprising-benefits-of-time-pressure-at.html
3 comments
this isn't quite relevant because the tasks performed in the study aren't on the intellectually nontrivial side, I would think
i saw its application...i wanted to take a team of windows developers to git, and i just couldn't get reliability out of the current gui software out there (tortoisegit and git extensions). i kept going back, trying to make everything work out. i'd think that things are smooth, but then when i try to branch, something would go wrong. eventually i concluded that i was wasting too much time and i'll come back to it in six months (due to the time when the team would start was coming up soon), and then again in a year if need be. if there was no time constraint i might have downloaded the tortoisegit code and seen if i could fix the issues myself...(contribute to the project), although that is totally not the problem i was ultimately trying to solve.
also, in the code itself, i sometimes get caught up on trying to make everything perfect and try to take care of every edge case....often for things any user doing such a thing should know - this isn't going to work....but in case they try :) i want something friendly to happen.... and so on, and so on.
also, in the code itself, i sometimes get caught up on trying to make everything perfect and try to take care of every edge case....often for things any user doing such a thing should know - this isn't going to work....but in case they try :) i want something friendly to happen.... and so on, and so on.
Other research questions: Does hurrying through a sharply time-constrained task make you learn less from it? How about juggling multiple intellectually nontrivial tasks?
Hurrying through time-boxed tasks seems to be what grad school is all about. My own experience with taking classes is that I remember almost nothing from them. No doubt there are many reasons for that: relentless lecturing is an ineffective way to teach, homework problems are usually meaningless and don't provide context to make sense of the material, etc. It would be interesting to see if the rapid time-shuffling required by college also tends to shut down learning.
This was also my frequent experience with Extreme Programming. Once a task was done, I completely forgot what we did. Five minutes later, I couldn't tell you what we had worked on all morning. That was meaningful work, too.