Vedant Das Swain
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States
Information workers often struggle to balance their time for a variety of activities like focused work, communication, and caring. This study analyzes the impact of a commercially available computer-assisted time protection intervention that automatically and preemptively schedules calendar time for self-determined activities. We analyzed the behaviors and self-reports of workers in two naturalistic studies. First, we studied 27 workers who were already using Computer-Assisted Protected Time (CAP Time) and found that they mainly used it for focused work. Second, we analyzed the effect of CAP Time as a randomized intervention on 89 workers who never had CAP Time and found that those with it self-reported an increase in performance, job resources, and immersion. In both studies, workers with CAP Time exhibited a rearrangement of activities leading to an overall reduction in work activity. This study highlights new opportunities for intelligent time-management interventions and the importance of protected time at work.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581326
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2023.acm.org/)