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Hello.
Today, I'm going to talk to you about our paper, called
To Plan, or Not to Plan, A Mixed-Method Diary Study
Examining When, How and Why Knowledge Work Planning is
Inaccurate.
We conducted this study with Duncan Brumby and Anna Cox.
And my name is Yoana Ahmetoglu.
I'd like to start with a question for you.
How well do you think you can predict
the time you spend working on each of your tasks
on a typical day?
For example, how long will you spend answering your emails?
30 minutes?
60 minutes?
How about writing a research paper?
Our study shows that you'll most likely be too
optimistic in your estimates.
You think you would answer your emails faster than you actually
do, and you think you will spend more time on your research
paper than you actually do.
But why do these biases matter?
Well, because they make planning ahead very difficult.
The way we work is changing.
We have more autonomy, increasing number of workers.
Especially knowledge workers, such as scientists,
can decide when to do their tasks and the type of tasks
they do.
This means that we need to plan our time carefully.
And it is no secret that planning is difficult,
but also very important.
Planning allows people to collaborate
efficiently with multiple projects,
to spend time on priority tasks that matter to the most,
and to ensure they spend quality time away from work
to recuperate from work stress.
Even though there are benefits of planning,
knowledge workers who are in charge of their schedules still
experience a number of planning challenges.
For instance, they experience challenges
getting into the habit of planning,
making realistic plans, and sticking to those plans.
One particular challenge with planning
is that it requires time estimations.
People tend to be biased when estimating
the duration of their tasks.
For instance, we expect to finish future projects
and tasks in less time than they actually take.
There is scarce evidence in the CSCW and HCI literature
on the types and strength of these estimation
biases in the real world, especially in knowledge worker
occupations.
We conducted a one-day diary study,
followed by two sets of interviews.
In the diaries, we first asked academics
in the morning of a typical, for them,
workday to list the tasks they aim to achieve on that day
and to estimate how long they think they will
spend working on those tasks.
Then, they had to record the start and end
times of their main tasks during the day in a diary.
After that, we did interviews as a follow-up to the diaries
to understand why people changed their plans
and why they experienced delays.
And finally, we did a second interview
to investigate planning strategies in a more general
sense and to find out how different people experienced
planning inaccuracy in their everyday lives at work.
We found different level of time estimation bias
for different types of tasks.
What this means is that academics
were prompt with tasks which had clear time
constraints, such as meetings.
Also, they worked less time than planned on things
like their papers, while they spent more time than planned
on email and coding tasks.
Interviews showed that the reason for inaccurate planning
was related to vague and optimistic plans, as opposed
to many unexpected interruptions throughout the day.
This suggests that people were not
very skilled in making accurate daily plans.
Finally, interviews also showed that there
were four different types of planning strategies
participants use at work, each with corresponding benefits
and limitations.
In some of those strategies, time estimations
were crucial, whereas in others, people actually
avoided estimating time and preferred
to keep their plans open.
If you're curious to read more about the planning
adventures of your fellow academics
and the implications for support systems,
please visit our paper.