I am reading through the first chapters of a book written by Professor Dezhi Wu entitled Temporal Structures in Individual Time management: Practices to Enhance Calendar Tool Design.
It’s a seminal work. But I am a bit biased as I have been lamenting the lack of proper research in this important area of professional life, so maybe I am a bit easy to please. She makes the same point, and explains that it comes, in part, from the time needed to do thorough research in this area. I remember from my days as a graduate student that “getting out” was a high priority, and I certainly was not interested in doing the kind of work that would prolong my stay. Kudos to her for not only doing the work, but for also turning it into a book that is… sorta kinda readable for the average graduate student! LOL
The purpose of the book is described here:
The focus of this work is to provide solid evidence that can be used to design better electronic calendar systems that support the creation and sharing of organizational temporal structures, both as a knowledge capture for the organization and as a handy tool for improving personal time management. This empirical evidence consists of two sets of intensive field interviews with busy professionals and a large survey with over 700 subjects. The study findings demonstrate a real need for improving current electronic calendar systems through incorporating temporal structure features.
I’ll be reading and updating the blog on my progress through its chapters and hopefully will report some interesting findings along the way. Stay tuned.