Academic Productivity

I just found an excellent paper:

BIAS AND ACCURACY IN ESTIMATES OF TASK DURATION

Author(s): JOSEPHS RA, HAHN ED

Source: ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR AND HUMAN DECISION PROCESSES 61 (2): 202-213 FEB 1995

From the abstract:

When asked to estimate the duration of various academic-type tasks (e.g., the time needed to complete a writing assignment, solve a series of problems, or read a manuscript), subjects demonstrated a marked tendency to trade accuracy in favor of minimizing cognitive effort in their selection of planning strategies. This tendency resulted in a drastic underestimation of the time required to complete the task.

This might be well known for all academics (most people I know underestimate time needed to complete an assignment).

Reading estimates are particularly bad, and this could easily be solved by tracking (automatically) how long it takes you to read each article (extremely easy if you read them off the screen).

It seems that improving your estimation skills can take you a long way. Currently I’m trying to construct a todo list with all steps that a project needs till completion (using the granularity ideas previously mentioned, and the program toDoList with time estimation visible next to each task). Hopefully I won’t be late for my next deadline, which is in 15 days!

 

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About the author: Jose Quesada wanted to be a matador, an acrobatic pilot, or a painter, but found those activities not demanding enough, so he chose an academic career. He secretly hopes to orchestrate a system that produces papers without any human intervention (particularly, his).

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Reading, Time management, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.