jotsheet

Do you hate deadlines? I don’t, but I know many people do. This is interesting:

[A] study asked students to proofread three articles over three weeks and paid them for each error discovered. The participants were split into three different deadline groups: one due every 7 days; all three due at the end of 3 weeks; self-imposed deadlines within the three weeks. In addition there was no bonus for early completion and a penalty for late delivery.

Participants who were given only the final deadline performed the worst both from an accuracy perspective and a deadline-meeting perspective. Those who had the evenly-spaced deadlines performed best, and those with self-imposed deadlines came out in the middle. I note that the evenly-spaced group averaged more errors detected than were inserted into the sample text, while the self-imposed group averaged on par with the number of purposeful errors.

SSSB adds:

Which one would you select if you could? Maybe the end-deadline because it gives you the most flexibility in arranging the work (similar to a final exam or submitting your dissertation all at once)? Ariely and Wertenbroch found that the end-deadline does the worst both in terms of finding errors and submitting on time. Participants with evenly-spaced deadline did best. But that group also liked the task the least, maybe because they had several unpleasant episodes of reading silly texts, or because they spent more time than the other groups.

Bottom line is this:

1. Deadlines are effective
2. Deadlines work best when set by other people
3. Deadlines work best when they chunk tasks into manageable segments
4. People hate deadlines

(via Jack Vinson (via Cognitive Daily (via Social Science Statistics Blog)))

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