Fear not the deadlines, new research finds!

Our project investigated the effects of temporal stressors and distractions on knowledge workers. First, we conducted controlled experiments in the lab to gain some fundamental understanding of the phenomena and perfect our measurement methods. Armed with this understanding and our newly developed technical capabilities, we concluded our research by carrying out naturalistic studies to observe these phenomena in the actual world. In the said naturalistic studies, per an institutionally approved protocol, we monitored the conditions and behaviors of academic researchers as they were working their way towards and out of proposal and paper deadlines.

We chose to study deadlines because they are part and parcel of modern knowledge work. Journalists must serve their weekly columns, managers must turn in their monthly reports, and researchers must submit their papers and proposals on time. Despite their ubiquity, deadlines conjure up negative feelings and are perceived as challenging events. Accordingly, there has been a trend to do away with deadlines, where possible.  Critics, however, have been arguing that although deadlines may be painful, they are necessary, because they motivate people to act.

The key question we set out to address was the following: "Does knowledge work near deadlines incurs higher sympathetic load than knowledge work away from deadlines?" Sympathetic activation is the state of physiological arousal that indicates how much people are "on the tips of their toes". Sympathetic activation often leads to stress, and this is why its intensity and duration should be kept in check. 

Our naturalistic study was the first of its kind. Miniature cameras were placed at the researchers' university office to unobtrusively record their facial physiology and expressions, as well as their movements throughout the working day. The participants' sympathetic activation was measured every second through quantification of their imaged perinasal perspiration levels. Applying advanced data modeling on hundreds of hours of multimodal recordings, our team found that researchers experience high sympathetic activation while working, which speaks to the challenging nature of the research profession. Surprisingly, this high sympathetic activation remains about the same with or without deadlines. "Research is tough every day! If I were to use a metaphor, if you are under heavy rain all the time, if one day the rain is a little heavier, it would not make much difference to you, because you are already wet to the bone. This is what our models show with respect to the effect of deadlines on researchers", Pavlidis, one of the principal investigators, commented.

The only factors found to exacerbate sympathetic activation were extensive smartphone use and prolific reading/writing. The first factor is manifestation of the gadget-based addiction trends that have altered human behaviors across the board. The second factor is integral to research work, and thus unavoidable. Thankfully, however, researchers appear to auto-regulate increases in their sympathetic activation by instinctively adjusting the frequency of physical breaks. It was observed that on average researchers take one physical break every two hours. From this baseline, data analysis showed that for every 50% increase in sympathetic activation, the break frequency nearly doubles, revealing the limits of cognitive work under increasing stress. 

"Our naturalistic study not only brings fresh insights into researchers' behaviors but also challenges some prevailing views about deadlines", Pavlidis said. "With the recent advances in affective computing, I expect such naturalistic studies to proliferate across domains, challenging misconceptions we hold about a lot of things", Pavlidis remarked.

Last Modified: 07/11/2023
Modified by: Ioannis Pavlidis