The Effects of Previous Misestimation of Task Duration on Estimating Future Task Duration

It is a common time management problem that people underestimate the duration of tasks, which has been termed the "planning fallacy." To overcome this, it has been suggested that people should be informed about how long they previously worked on the same task. This study, however, tests whether previous misestimation also affects the duration estimation of a novel task, even if the feedback is only self-generated. To test this, two groups of participants performed two unrelated, laboratory-based tasks in succession. Learning was manipulated by permitting only the experimental group to retrospectively estimate the duration of the first task before predicting the duration of the second task. Results showed that the experimental group underestimated the duration of the second task less than the control group, which indicates a general kind of learning from previous misestimation. The findings imply that people could be trained to carefully observe how much they misestimate task duration in order to stimulate learning. The findings are discussed in relation to the anchoring account of task duration misestimation and the memory-bias account of the planning fallacy. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York

Pacing styles, personality and performance

Whereas many struggle to meet deadlines, 'the time by which some task is supposed to be completed' (Locke & Latham 1990: 7), some seem to have developed ways to pace effectively before reaching a deadline. Although there has been considerable attention among researchers regarding time-related individual chamcteristics (for an overview, see Francis-Smythe & Robertson 1999), only a few studies have addressed how individuals pace themselves before a deadline. Waller Conte, Gibson and Carpenter (2001) suggested that a combination of time urgency and time perspective may be used to classify persons into four categories to distinguish the way in which they handle deadlines. To our knowledge, empirical analysis of these categories has yet to be conducted. In our research, we have adopted a different approach by developing a graphic scale to assess people's pacing styles (Gevers, Rutte & Van Eerde 2006). This scale inquires into the preferred distribution of effort over the time interval towards a deadline. Building on earlier work from Lim and Mumighan (1994) and Blount and Janicik (2002), we developed several graphs showing pacing styles with steady, increasing, or decreasing activity over time, or combinations of these styles. In this chapter, we aim to explore the value of the pacing style and the use of gmphic scales to predict individual and team-based performance. [n particular, we examine how the pacing styles we identified are distributed in three samples, and whether they explain variance in performance outcomes over and above the personality mit 'conscientiousness'. We describe three projects, involving students and professionals operating individually and in teams in a training context and a real organizational environment, in which we test two gmphic scales for measuring pacing styles