Dr. Laura M Giurge

This course is available on the MSc in Behavioural Science, MSc in Organisational and Social Psychology, MSc in Psychology of Economic Life, MSc in Social and Cultural Psychology and MSc in Social and Public Communication. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

Time is the most pervasive aspect of our lives. Every day we make decisions (or decisions are made for us) about how or with whom to spend our finite time in our personal and professional life. But what is time and how do we calculate its value? Why do we fail to optimally allocate our time? How does time affect our motivation, productivity, and well-being? Why is it so difficult to eradicate inequality in time-use at work and at home? What can leaders and employees do to protect desired work-life boundaries? And if time is our most precious resource, why is time theft not a crime?

This course seeks to address these questions and more by drawing primarily from management research and featuring real-life examples across industries and cultures. Students taking this course will gain a multidisciplinary perspective on managing time at work and beyond; will learn to think critically about their own experience and use of time, and how this shapes their expectations and behaviours in their personal life, at work, and in society; they will be able to recognize the barriers that prevent them from pursuing activities that are beneficial for them; will gain knowledge about how innovations and the growing knowledge economy has changed the way we think about time; and will learn how to formulate solutions that enable positive behavioural change in the way they use and experience time across all aspects of their lives.

Given that how we spend our time is how we live our life, this course is set up to be highly interactive and experiential. Students taking this course will not only learn about the theoretical insights on time but will also get to apply the science on time by engaging in various evidence-based exercises. 

Below is an indicative schedule of the topics you can expect in this course. All changes to the content will be announced in class and/or on Moodle.

Time and the Person: Sessions 1-3 will focus on time at the individual level and will cover topics such as the difference between subjective and objective time, the psychological biases that lead people to misuse time, and potential strategies to overcome these biases.

Time and Work/Organisations: Sessions 4-6 will focus on time at work and at the collective level (e.g., teams, organisations) and will cover topics such as how teams manage time, the different ways in which organisations (un)intentionally misuse employees’ time, or promote gender inequality, and the role of temporal structures for collaboration.

Time and Society: Sessions 7-9 will focus on time at the societal level and will cover topics related to the drivers of time poverty in developed and underdeveloped countries, the interplay between time and environmental behaviour, and cross-cultural differences in norms around time and work.

Temporal Legacy: Session 10 will bring together the three different levels and address the development of our temporal footprints and why they matter.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars in the WT.

1) Individual review of one anonymous op-ed. You will play the role of the “examiner” and review one anonymous op-ed (submitted by students from a previous year) by implementing the marking criteria used in this course. You will submit your feedback via an online survey. This exercise will help you develop your op-ed.

2) Individual 1-page proposal on the topic of the summative assignment. Identify and evaluate a time-related challenge of your choice and propose an intervention to solve it. The time challenge can be psychological, behavioural, or structural; it can occur at the individual, collective, organizational, or societal level; and it can manifest in your personal or professional life, or at the intersection of the two. Like the summative assignment, in the proposal you will need to cover the following topics (you can decide the order in which you cover these topics): a) introduce the time challenge, b) explain what we know from prior research, c) identify what we don’t know about this challenge and why it’s important to address this gap in our knowledge, d) propose a (behavioural) intervention to address this challenge and argue why this intervention would be effective based on the knowledge gained through the class material and through your own literature review, e) discuss additional ways in which decision-makers (e.g., organizational leaders, policymakers) could address the identified time challenge. You will receive individual feedback, and this will help you develop your op-ed.

• Blagoev, B., & Schreyögg, G. (2019). Why do extreme work hours persist? Temporal uncoupling as a new way of seeing. Academy of Management Journal, 62(6), 1818-1847.
• Brodsky, A., & Amabile, T. M. (2018). The downside of downtime: The prevalence and work pacing consequences of idle time at work. Journal of Applied Psychology, 103(5), 496–512.
• Feldman, E., Reid, E. M., & Mazmanian, M. (2020). Signs of our time: Time-use as dedication, performance, identity, and power in contemporary workplaces. Academy of Management Annals, 14(2), 598-626.
• Giurge, L. M., Whillans, A. V., & West, C. (2020). Why time poverty matters for individuals, organisations and nations. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(10), 993-1003.
• Gonsalves, L. (2020). From face time to flex time: The role of physical space in worker temporal flexibility. Administrative Science Quarterly, 65(4), 1058-1091.
• Pai, J., DeVoe, S. E., & Pfeffer, J. (2020). How income and the economic evaluation of time affect who we socialize with outside of work. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 161, 158-175.
• Shipp, A. J. (2021). My fixation on time management almost broke me. Harvard Business Review.
• Templeton, E. M., Chang, L. J., Reynolds, E. A., LeBeaumont, M. D. C., & Wheatley, T. (2022). Fast response times signal social connection in conversation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(4).
• Young, C., & Melin, J. L. (2019). Time is a network good. Current Opinion in Psychology, 26, 23-27.

Essay (80%, 2000 words) in the ST.
Exercise (20%) in the WT.

1) Exercises (20%): To really understand the science of time, you need to apply it. For that reason, one part of the summative comprises several exercises that you are expected to undertake outside class. After each exercise, you will need to submit a brief reflection on how the exercise affected you. The exercises will be debriefed in-class.

2) Essay + Annotated bibliography (80%): You will write an essay (max 2.000 words, excluding the bibliography) that is grounded in academic literature but follows the structure of an op-ed article (e.g., Harvard Business Review style). In your op-ed, you will need to identify and evaluate a time-related challenge of your choice and propose an intervention to solve it. The time challenge can be psychological, behavioural, or structural; it can occur at the individual, collective, organizational, or societal level; and it can manifest in your personal or professional life, or at the intersection of the two. Like the summative assignment, in the proposal you will need to cover the following topics (you can decide the order in which you cover these topics): a) introduce the time challenge, b) explain what we know from prior research, c) identify what we don’t know about this challenge and why it’s important to address this gap in our knowledge, d) propose a (behavioural) intervention to address this challenge and argue why this intervention would be effective based on the knowledge gained through the class material and through your own literature review, e) discuss additional ways in which decision-makers (e.g., organizational leaders, policymakers) could address the identified time challenge. Like op-ed articles, you will use hyperlinked (not in-text) citations.

Along the op-ed, you will need to submit an annotated bibliography that contains a) a list of scientific references that you used for the op-ed, and b) a short text below each reference (1-2 sentences only) describing why exactly the reference is important in the context of your op-ed. You should follow the reference style. A successful annotated bibliography should show understanding of the sources included and not be a mere description of the sources.