PB436      Half Unit
The Science of Time at Work

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

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 seminars and 10 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

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

Students will be expected to produce one piece of formative work during WT

• 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.

Exam (100%), duration: 120 Minutes in the Spring exam period