

A suprising benefit of time pressure at work - embeddedradical
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2009/07/surprising-benefits-of-time-pressure-at.html

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bkovitz
Interesting, but I wouldn't call the result surprising.

Other research questions: Does hurrying through a sharply time-constrained
task make you learn less from it? How about juggling multiple intellectually
nontrivial tasks?

Hurrying through time-boxed tasks seems to be what grad school is all about.
My own experience with taking classes is that I remember almost nothing from
them. No doubt there are many reasons for that: relentless lecturing is an
ineffective way to teach, homework problems are usually meaningless and don't
provide context to make sense of the material, etc. It would be interesting to
see if the rapid time-shuffling required by college also tends to shut down
learning.

This was also my frequent experience with Extreme Programming. Once a task was
done, I completely forgot what we did. Five minutes later, I couldn't tell you
what we had worked on all morning. That was meaningful work, too.

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carterschonwald
this isn't quite relevant because the tasks performed in the study aren't on
the intellectually nontrivial side, I would think

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embeddedradical
i saw its application...i wanted to take a team of windows developers to git,
and i just couldn't get reliability out of the current gui software out there
(tortoisegit and git extensions). i kept going back, trying to make everything
work out. i'd think that things are smooth, but then when i try to branch,
something would go wrong. eventually i concluded that i was wasting too much
time and i'll come back to it in six months (due to the time when the team
would start was coming up soon), and then again in a year if need be. if there
was no time constraint i might have downloaded the tortoisegit code and seen
if i could fix the issues myself...(contribute to the project), although that
is totally not the problem i was ultimately trying to solve.

also, in the code itself, i sometimes get caught up on trying to make
everything perfect and try to take care of every edge case....often for things
any user doing such a thing should know - this isn't going to work....but in
case they try :) i want something friendly to happen.... and so on, and so on.

