Have you ever started your day with a list of ten tasks but finished only seven?
Researchers from the University of London’s Interaction Center asked 20 academics (average age of 29) to track how they spent their day to gain insights on why knowledge workers experience such discrepancies.
They found that in general their plans were overly optimistic.
The participants ended their day with nearly a third of their planned work unfinished. Looking more closely, they found that the participants tended to overestimate certain tasks such as communication and coding and underestimated other tasks such as writing and planning research.
Now what does that mean for us?
- First, merely tracking your estimated time & spent time is really valuable. Many participants from the study noted that they “would not have noticed where their time went unless they kept the diary”.
- Second, regularly reflecting on your plans casts light on how to improve your time estimation skills for different tasks as one participant noted “I do not normally estimate the duration of my daily tasks. I make a to-do list and do not check the accuracy. I should do it because I am probably too optimistic”
- Finally, be specific and concrete with your plans. The researchers identified that vague and imprecise plans were the most common source of slow-downs to following through on the plan.
So the next time you’re going to work on replying to an email, writing a piece of code, reading a report or writing an article do the following:
- Make a concrete plan, e.g., in the next 15 minutes I will send out my status update email and make an appointment for a brainstorming session with my team; or in the next 20 minutes I will review 5 KPIs and have 1 insight on how to improve 1 KPI.
- Measure the difference between the estimated time and the actual time spent on the planned task
- Reflect on why you underestimated or overestimated the time to complete the task. If you correctly estimated the time, verify if it’s repeatable.
If you tried this out or have thoughts on this, leave me a comment or send me a message. I’m curious to know your perspective and experience.
If you want to learn more about concrete planning & reflection strategies I’ve outlined specific steps to plan your day, week and month and questions to ask yourself on a daily, weekly and monthly basis in my eBook “The 3 Pillars To Transformative Productivity & Well-Being“.
Reference: Yoana Ahmetoglu, Duncan P. Brumby, and Anna L. Cox. 2020. To Plan or Not to Plan? A Mixed-Methods Diary Study Examining When, How and Why Knowledge Work Planning is Inaccurate. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4, CSCW3, Article 222 (December 2020), 20 pages.
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