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.

Auditing is not advised due to the participatory nature of lectures - please ask for permission from the course lead if you would like to audit.

Time is arguably the fabric of our lives, but its value often goes unnoticed. Every day we make decisions (or decisions are made for us) about how and with whom to spend our finite temporal resources. But what is time? How should we think about the value of an hour, or a decade? What does it mean 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 such questions by drawing primarily from the management literature and featuring real-life examples across industries and cultures. Students taking this course will gain a multidisciplinary perspective on managing time at work and in life; will learn to think critically about their own experiences and uses 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 and their community; will gain knowledge about how innovations and work has changed the way we think about time; and will learn how to integrate time across all aspects of their lives so they can enact positive change for themselves and their community.

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 Individual: Sessions 1-4 focus on time at the individual level and cover topics such as, subjective time, clock time, and the psychological and societal biases that perpetuate inequality and time poverty.
• Time and Work: Sessions 5-8 focus on time at work and cover topics such as, the various ways organizations (un)intentionally misuse temporal structures and push work-life boundaries, how to successfully lead temporally diverse teams, and the foundational role of time in work motivation.
• Time and Legacy – Sessions 9-10 focus on the legacy of time and cover topics such as, the impact of temporal footprints and the hidden potential of legacy.

Course Objectives

• To discover time research and why it matters for productivity and well-being.
• To get insights into one’s own perceptions and (mis)uses of time.
• To explore new team dynamins and leadership that centre around time.
• To gain a better understanding of the role of work and motivation in our lives.
• To identify solutions that turn innovations from threats to opportunities

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

Both lectures and seminars are highly interactive and involve class discussion.

1) Individual review of two anonymous op-ed essays. You will play the role of the “examiner” and review two anonymous essays (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. We will discuss your evaluations in class.

2) Individual 250-word pitch for your summative op-ed.  For your summative, you will write an op-ed essay on an academic article (you will get to choose one of three articles that will be provided to you). To prepare you for your summative, part of your formative work will be to write a pitch on the article you choose to write an op-ed on. In your pitch, you should describe which article you plan to focus on, why you chose that article, and how you plan to approach 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 period between WT and ST.
Research proposal (20%) in the WT.

1) Essay + Annotated bibliography (80%): You will write an essay (max 1.500 words, excluding the bibliography) that follows the structure of an op-ed article (e.g., Harvard Business Review style). You will be provided with three academic articles, and you will have to choose which article you want to write an op-ed on. Like op-ed articles, you will use hyperlinked citations. 

Along the op-ed, you will need to submit a 500-word annotated bibliography that contains a) a list of scientific references that you used for the op-ed (you can include references beyond those used in the academic article you chose to write the op-ed on), and b) a short text below your key references (1-2 sentences only) describing why the reference is important in the context of your op-ed. You should format your reference list using the APA reference style. A successful annotated bibliography should show understanding of the sources included and not be a mere description of the sources. The reference text itself does not count towards the word limit.

2) Research Proposal (20%): Along learning to translate academic knowledge to the public, it is also important to know how to identify a meaningful gap in the academic knowledge. To that end, one part of the summative requires you to write a brief (1000-word max) research proposal that identifies a meaningful gap in the academic research on time (specifically within the article you will write an op-ed on) and describes a viable way to address this gap. Unlike the op-ed, the research proposal should be written in academic language.