THE BUFFET PROBLEM: the pursuit of curating time (original) (raw)
Related papers
A R T I C L E S IT'S ABOUT TIME: NEW PERSPECTIVES AND INSIGHTS ON TIME MANAGEMENT
Time management has helped people organize their professional lives for centuries. The existing literature, however, reveals mixed findings and lack of clarity as to whether, when, how, and why time management leads to critical outcomes such as well-being and job performance. Furthermore, insights relevant to time management are scattered across various disciplines, including sociology, psychology, and behavioral economics. We address both issues by synthesizing and integrating insightful elements from various fields and domains into three novel perspectives on time management. First, we draw on the sociology of time to describe two key concepts: time structures and time norms. We illustrate how time structures and time norms operate at the team, organizational, and national levels of analysis in influencing time management outcomes. Second, we draw on the psychology of time to show how individual differences including time-related beliefs, attitudes, and preferences affect the way people manage time and, consequently, time management outcomes. Third, we rely on the behavioral economics literature to describe how cognitive biases influence individual time management decisions. Integrating insights from a diverse set of fields results in a better understanding of past research and allows us to reinterpret conflicting results prevalent in the time management literature. Finally, we offer directions for future research and discuss implications for how organizations and individuals can implement interventions resulting in a stronger and positive relationship between time management and desirable outcomes.
Time Management - a Paradigm of Contemporary Society
2013
INTRODUCTIONTime management has increasingly become an issue of crucial relevance.Time needs to be viewed as a complex mathematical value and not as a simple linear graphic, hence the current debate of whether it is better to follow classical methods to speed up the pace as the fast hare or the alternative view of actually slowing down the rhythm like the wise tortoise. The current paper aims at developing, besides the classical and the alternative views regarding time management, a third category of methods that focus on the individual, personal perception of time."Do you begin each day with a planner brimming with goals and to-dos that are important to you, or are you handcuffed by poorly planned days that result in nothing done by day's end? Plan and achieve." This is a constant slogan that we hear daily in all personal development and time management seminaries. But is it all that easy as they say?In today's hectic life style, it is becoming increasingly diffic...
Choreographing time and management: Traditions, developments, and opportunities
2002
Time is an essential feature of social and organizational life. It is our prime organizing tool. People use time in order to create, shape, and order their worlds. And yet, despite its importance, we take our time values and uses of time largely for granted. This not only applies to one's daily life but is also true for academic theory and business practice alike. Making Time is concerned to bring time to the forefront of management theory and practice.
Beyond time management: Time use, performance and well-being
In this review questions such as " What is a good use of time? " , " How can one achieve satisfaction with their time? " and " How can one's relationship with time contribute to their well-being? " are raised and discussed with regard to empirical research on various aspects of positive psychology of time. This paper differs from traditional approach to thinking about time in organisations in three substantial ways. Firstly, it reviews the existing empirical research on time use, focusing on the implications of this research for organizations and individuals. Secondly, it highlights the limitations of believing that time is infinitely stretchable and defined good time use as one that results in increased well-being, rather than productivity at the expense of well-being. Thirdly, although the workplace is in the centre of the paper, we view time use from a broader perspective of life and work-leisure balance. A range of evidence is considered, based on both objective and subjective time use studies, suggesting specific measures to increase well-being through time use, first of all, at workplace, but also touching on other domains, such as media, leisure, etc. Based on Self-Determination Theory, we argue that good time use results from choosing activities that help people to satisfy their basic needs and are directed at intrinsic goals (helping other people, establishing relationships, developing and growing as a person, maintaining health and balance in one's life). A pathway to increase basic need satisfaction and, as a result, happiness associated with good time use, is by supporting autonomy: giving people more opportunities for choosing and working towards goals that are self-congruent and intrinsic, benefitting both themselves and societies. Keywords: time management, time use, satisfaction with time use, time use and well-being, positive psychology of time, time affluence, balanced time perspective
57 Administrative Science Quarterly The Time Famine: Toward a Sociology of Work Time
Weick, and three anonymous reviewers offered invaluable advice and suggestions. This paper describes a qualitative study of how people use their time at work, why they use it this way, and whether their way of using time is optimal for them or their work groups. Results of a nine-month field study of the work practices of a software engineering team revealed that the group's collective use of time perpetuated its members' "time famine," a feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. Engineers had difficulty getting their individual work done because they were constantly interrupted by others. A crisis mentality and a reward system based on individual heroics perpetuated this disruptive way of interacting. Altering the way software engineers used their time at work, however, enhanced their collective productivity. This research points toward a "sociology of work time," a framework integrating individuals' interdependent work patterns and the larger social and temporal contexts. The theoretical and practical implications of a sociology of work time are explored.' Corporate lawyers, investment bankers, computer programmers, and many other types of workers routinely work seventy-or eighty-hour weeks, putting in extra effort during particularly hectic times (Kidder, 1981; Schor, 1991). These men and women, married and single, are stressed, exhausted, and even dying as a result of frantic schedules (Harris, 1987). They have insufficient time to meet all of the demands on them from work and their lives outside of work. The purpose of this paper is to explore what I refer to as their time famine-their feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it-and to question whether this famine must exist. I chose to study a group of software engineers in a hightech corporation. Over the past three decades, a number of studies have described the nature of engineers' work (e.g., Perrucci and Gerstl, 1969; Ritti, 1971; Brooks, 1982; Zussman, 1985; Whalley, 1986); however, I chose this group not because of the type of work they do but, rather, because of the immense pressure they are under to get their product to market and the time famine they experience as a result. Several recent books have described with awe the fastpaced, high-pressure, crisis-filled environment in which software engineers work (Kidder, 1981; Moody, 1990; Zachary, 1994). These authors portray the engineers as heroes for their willingness to work extremely long hours and celebrate the engineers' intensity and total devotion to work. 1, in contrast, explore the engineers' actual use of time at work and the impact their use of time has on other individuals and the groups to which the individuals belong, which reveals the problematic nature of the current way of using time. Ultimately, I therefore challenge the assumption that the current way of using time, which is so destructive to individuals' lives outside of work, is in the corporation's best interest (Perlow, 1995(Perlow, , 1997.
Time management: Paradoxes and patterns
2001
Abstract The topic of time management inevitably emerges when researching concepts of time in organizations. And, as we live in a society where we deal with organizations all the time and in a variety of forms, we are continually confronted with the way in which time is managed in an'organizational'way. This article departs from a critical overview of time-management literature and confronts the assumptions therein with the experiences of a (female) chief executive, managing her time.
Time Work: Customizing Temporal Experience
The literature on agency neglects temporality; the literature on temporality neglects agency. This paper integrates these largely separate lines of research with the concept "time work," which is defined as individual or interpersonal efforts to create or suppress particular kinds of temporal experience. Semistructured, open-ended interviews were conducted with 398 subjects, who were asked to describe ways in which they engage in time work. Analytic induction yielded five themes: in descending order of prevalence, the subjects reported efforts to control or manipulate duration, frequency, sequence, timing, and allocation. The variety and prevalence of time work suggests the sovereignty of self-determination; for the most part, however, time work contributes to cultural reproduction.
Communications of the ACM, 2011
Masterful time management means not just tracking of messages in your personal environment, but managing your coordination network with others.
Purpose -The purpose of this article is to provide an overview for those interested in the current state-of-the-art in time management research. Design/methodology/approach -This review includes 32 empirical studies on time management conducted between 1982 and 2004. Findings -The review demonstrates that time management behaviours relate positively to perceived control of time, job satisfaction, and health, and negatively to stress. The relationship with work and academic performance is not clear. Time management training seems to enhance time management skills, but this does not automatically transfer to better performance.