I’m John Lund, a PhD student at the University of Utah, and I’ll be presenting about our paper,
“Less is More: Exploring Support for Time Management Planning” which Dr. Jason Wiese and I
worked on together.
Think back to the last time you felt overwhelmed by the things you had to get done and sat
down to make a plan. What did you reach for? There are thousands of time management
applications available on the web and app stores, but prior literature tells us that probably you
reached for pen and paper, a notes app or word processor, or maybe just made mental notes,
even if you had a dedicated time management app on hand.
Why is this? And what can we do to improve the way we design to support planning?
For this work, we set out to design software which could adequately support the practice of time
management planning or TMP. This form of planning is defined as “determining tasks to be
performed on a particular day, prioritizing and scheduling the order of such tasks, and sketching
out the approximate amount of time to be spent on each task”
In other words, Time Management Planning is determining what will be done and when during the upcoming day.
Time management literature discusses planning as a critical practice, but largely provides only
descriptions of what planning involves and its benefits and not how people actually do it.
From related literature, we derived principles of effective planning (further discussed in the full
paper), and attempted this initial design.
Our approach with this initial design came from thinking that the ideal form of planning incorporates
each of its components into a unified process, and that the best way to support it was to make
these practices inherent in the structure of the plan.
For example, by only allowing one item per time, users must explicitly determine the tasks that
will be completed at a particular time and how this impacts their other plans.
Additionally, determining tasks to do on a particular day and prioritizing have to be done as the user faces all of
their upcoming responsibilities when seeing unspoken-for time.
In other words, our thinking was that planning tools had not been useful to people in the past
because they did not structure data in the right way to support the important components of the
process of planning.
While we felt this approach would be successful based on our review of planning theory, we
needed to understand more about what people actually do when planning to confirm or refute our thinking.
We conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 graduate students about their current planning
practices - examining what tools they use and what common mechanics and methods they
employ. We then conducted a 5-day diary study where these same participants were asked to
plan according to guidelines we specified to see how they would respond to planning according
to a predefined process like our initial design follows.
Our goal was to understand how people currently engage in planning and how they might respond to our initial design approach.
So, what did we learn from this study?
The experiences of our participants showed us that our initial design and framing were flawed for a few reasons:
Different people approach planning with different methods
The same person plans differently on different days, depending on factors like their workload, stress level, or unexpected circumstances
and the ways participants used tools to plan sometimes actually depended on their
imprecision and flexibility, in contrast to the highly structured and precision-oriented design we presented earlier
Let’s discuss these points in a little more detail.
The 3 main methods of planning we observed were creating a schedule, creating a to-do list,
and pausing and resuming. These are described in more detail in the full paper, but I’ll briefly
discuss the second, Creating a to-do list.
For each method, we paid particular attention to the end format of the plan and what steps
participants took to create it. In the case of creating a to-do list, we observed participants review
their current tasks in sources such as existing to-do lists, email, or their memory, review
scheduled events to remember related tasks they needed to complete, and then create a new
to-do list of task items to complete for the given day.
The end format is something like what you see on the right there.
You can already begin to see a disconnect between this common method of planning we observed and our original design.
If someone only wanted to review and then list out tasks to complete for the day, they would
quickly be frustrated by this initial design where tasks must be assigned a specific time block in order
to appear on the plan. While our initial design supports one method of planning (and thus one
group of people), there are others it does not support at all.
We also found that our participants’ methods of planning changed depending on contextual
factors such as workload or stress level. For example, one participant would move from a pause
and resume method to making to-do lists for their time in the lab if they had "a lot going on."
Another said they regularly switched back and forth between to-do lists and scheduled times for tasks depending on their general stress level.
In other words, there are not just between-individual differences in approaches, but also
within-individual differences that occur regularly in this population. As a result, even for those
our initial design supported, their methods were likely to change, meaning its usefulness would be even further limited.
Finally, our study revealed that planning happens in unstructured tools and the ways participants
used tools to plan sometimes actually depended on their imprecision and flexibility, rather than it being a hindrance to the process.
As I said, planning happens in unstructured tools - tools like pen and paper, notes applications,
email drafts, or word processors. Only rarely did our participants use specialized time management tools
such as to-do list managers or even digital calendars to actually capture their plans.
This was, in part, due to the ways our participants interacted with their personal data and tools when planning.
In this example, we see how the flexible format of a notes application was leveraged to allow for
imprecise time assignments for tasks. While there are some scheduled items like the 9:30 Run
and 12:00 appointment, the tasks between these items have no associated time.
Because of the unstructured nature of the application, this interaction is obvious and easy to
perform, yet it’s actually difficult to reproduce in something like a digital calendar or even our
initial design because tasks must have an assigned time to appear in a relative position with
other items in those tools. This participant didn’t need to know exactly what time they would
wash the dishes and countertops, just that it needed to happen between 9:30 and 12:00.
These interactions showed us a different way of approaching planning than we originally imagined would be best to support.
When engaging in planning, they jotted down notes, scribbled things out, and rearranged
sections of their plans as they created them. They used unstructured tools, not just because
they were on hand, but because these tools allowed them to adapt to their needs even within a single day.
The whole experience was more draft-like and imprecise than specialized tools often allow, with a
mix of scheduled events, notes, and tasks with vague start and end times such as “by 5 pm” or “on the way back from campus”.
In our initial design, precision and structure are not just suggested, they are required. If you’re
not sure how long studying for an exam or even lunch will take, there’s no flexibility. You have to
decide when things will start and stop, as well as their precise position in the day, even for tasks or entire days where this really isn’t necessary or even appropriate.
With this perspective, it became clear our initial framing and approach to design based on
theory were misaligned with the role of planning and how it happens in practice.
Rather than focusing on structuring our design in the right way to support one particular
planning process, our findings showed us we needed to leverage flexible formats to support the planning process the user needs.
We decided to take a new approach, asking, “can we support the current practices we observed
happening in general purpose tools better?” rather than requiring that best practices occur in a structured way.
Our design based on this framing takes the form of a domain-specific notes application. At its
core, it behaves just like a text editor. Writing text, copying, pasting, etc. all occur as expected, but
some of the common interactions we observed in our participants’ planning earlier are
specifically designed for. More details about the design can be found in the full paper.
Overall, this design seeks to accommodate planning in a variety of forms better than the general
purpose tools currently used to accomplish it. This flexibility is important not only because of the
differences between people, but also between how an individual plans on different days.
We can leverage these types of designs to accommodate the adaptations users need to make
in a domain like time management. Other domains with similar characteristics may also benefit
from this approach to design, and our (and we hope others’) future work will focus on how to
continue to guide users toward improving important practices such as planning without requiring best practices or relying on heavily structured approaches.
Thank you for watching this presentation. Please see our full paper for more details on our study
and findings, and feel free to contact us with any questions or comments about our work.
Thanks again.