While the Medical Intern Matching Program offers a very elegant (in the sense of economic theory) solution to the assignment problem, we should recognize that the model is a one-shot deal. Once the algorithm runs and interns are assigned to hospitals, that's it. But most of us are solving some assignment problem quite regularly, perhaps on a daily basis, maybe even more frequently than that. New work regularly flows in. How does it get prioritized? Each of you have been dealing with that question as college students. In this post I'd like to discuss task allocation some, both from the perspective of the individual decision maker, and from the perspective of a manager. The world is much different now than it was 30 years ago, as a consequence of electronic communication. It is possible to do work anytime and any place. The old 9-5 paradigm is dead. The new way of doing things is both a blessing and a curse and we should explore both sides of that, which is what I intend to do below.
We have previously discussed in class how much time students spend out of class doing coursework and the discrepancy in expectations between professors and students about how much out of class time should be devoted to a course. The reality about knowledge work, as distinct from manual labor like mowing the lawn or washing the dishes, is that there is no a priori way to know how long it will take. Sometimes you can zip right through it. Then other times, you are engaged in an inquiry that is quite absorbing but of unknown duration, though it surely is not immediate. Still other times you might get stuck. Getting unstuck takes time, an unpredictable amount of time. Learning to get yourself unstuck is one of the more important life lessons a college student can have. It would be a terrible thing if students give up too frequently when they are stuck because they haven't allocated enough time to the situation. In addition to the lack of confidence that would create, it means students haven't mastered a critical problem solving skill. But to manage the time it might take to get unstuck, students need time buffers that they can run down on an as needed basis. From some of the discussion in class about how many credit hours students are taking, or how many hours students are working at a paying job, it seems the need for time buffers is either not well understood or it is not prioritized as very important. It is.
The assignment problem that we all address is manifest in many forms. Which emails do we ignore and which do we respond to? For the latter, what sort of lag between the time of receipt and the time of response do we conclude is acceptable. How much time do we spend monitoring the InBox versus being engaged in the current task. Likewise, ahead of time do we think we can respond with little or no thought? Or are we likely to spend substantial time in composing a response? Here I don't want to be prescriptive. All I want to make clear now is that some decision making has to be done so these situations can be dealt with. They are rather frequent. Now you shouldn't give a detailed investigation of how you've addressed the issue. Yet you should acknowledge that how you solve your own time allocation problem is a kind of budgeting. The issue is whether you've come up with something sensible or not. Tests of this are whether you manage to get your obligations done on time and that you don't feel overwhelmed from doing so. When either of those tests fail, not just once but with some frequency, it suggests a different approach is needed.
There may be time inconsistency between your planned allocation and your actual performance. One of those demons that is inside all of us is an in-the-moment felt need to procrastinate. I am certainly not immune to it. As I am composing this post on Saturday morning, I want to note that I have yet to do the weekly upload of grades into Moodle, which I normally do on Friday. My "excuse" is that yesterday I chose to update my NetID password as I wanted to make sure I did that before the deadline. I was able to then update the stored passwords in my browser on my desktop computer where I access campus apps, such as Banner and Moodle. That was no problem. But I couldn't get email on my phone to work. So I went through a troubleshooting process, which was kind of frustrating. uninstalling the email account and then reinstalling it. I ended up doing that twice and testing each time to see if mail would go through, by sending myself email from other accounts I use. Eventually it did work, though I'm still not sure why. Afterwards, I simply didn't feel like doing the grade uploads. This morning, I'm writing this post first. I enjoy the writing more than doing the administrative task. And it's still early in the day. So I rationalize that students won't see it yet, though I really don't know that.
Student procrastination does leave something of a trail in our class, because in addition to knowing when you turn in work, I get information about when people download the Excel homework. There are a lot of downloads Wednesday evening, after I've gone to sleep. Since you can't initiate the homework before you download the file, evidently those who do download Wednesday evening think they can work it through then and there with little fanfare, or are willing to suffer the consequences of being unable to complete it on time. Yet some students have gotten stuck on the Excel and have asked for help as a consequence. If you want to allow for a time buffer in case you need help, then initiating earlier makes sense.
I don't see how you make these sort of decisions in your other classes. But I have a general sense that there are some students who get all their work done well before the deadlines, other students who are always scrambling right up till the deadlines, and then a group in the middle who do some of each of these. The overall pattern hardens as habit. If you do some self-reflection about how you "solve" the assignment problem, you might ask whether you are happy with your own habits. If you are, congratulations. If you are not because with regularity you don't live up to your own good intentions, you might try some behavioral economics cures. For example, ask what you usually do when you procrastinate. Is there a way for you to raise the cost of doing that or to make it impossible to do? Alternatively, can you find some productive work that you actually enjoy, so can readily spend time on it. (For me, it is writing a post like this.) You might still procrastinate on tasks where your sense of avoidance is strong, but at least you can make some headway with other activities that are more rewarding in the doing.
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I now want to talk about the assignment problem in the workplace. Many of your blog posts, written about internship experiences, described a situation where permanent staff were incredibly busy, and often seemed to be overworked. Let's peel the onion on this some to see what lies below the surface of this observation.
First, hourly work and salaried work are different, regarding the time put into the job. With hourly work, the time is part of the contract and/or the pay varies directly with the hours put in. With salaried work, in contrast, performance is measured by some work-related output. The time put in to achieve that output is typically not monitored well, if at all. Both the inquiry part of knowledge work and the communications part - being on the phone, writing or reading email messages - can be done away from the workplace. So the expectations are that work related output gets done at a certain pace, and the time needed to produce that pace is treated as something the employee manages.
Next, to the extent that there are fixed costs per employee, in class we mentioned the costs of training, here let me note that an experienced employee who has reliably produced good work in the past may be scarce at that organization, and then there are costs like health insurance premiums that don't depend on worker output, all suggest that it is rational for the employer to try to get more work out of current employees rather than to expand the workforce and hire additional people. It is important to keep that in the back of your mind.
This suggests that the the pace of work related output which each employee produces is determined by the local ethos at the place of work and that might vary from one employer to the next.
Then there is the question whether the work itself is interesting and absorbing for the employee, a source of learning new skills and being exposed to new ideas, or if it becomes drudge work and is somewhat alienating. For the former, employees might willingly sacrifice their own leisure time to do this sort of work. For the latter, such employee effort is much harder for the employer to elicit.
A related issue is dealing with the stress from being expected to produce a tolerably good deliverable in a short time frame. Younger employees may initially appreciate taking on added responsibility that a manager assigns to them. That the manager would do this seems to indicate that the manager is confident in their performance. But continued piling on of the work can become unbearable, especially if that seems a permanent thing, not a temporary escalation of work because there is some emergency that must be dealt with.
Managing this issue, one must be aware that staff can burn out, which lowers individual productivity and lessens group morale. This means managers need to find a way to keep workloads within bounds. The issue was particularly acute on campus during the last couple of years of the previous decade, after the Great Recession began. In information technology, on campus a moratorium was put on new hires. So if some employee quit or retired, there was no replacement brought in. Yet, the set of IT services remained constant and indeed the demand for these services rose, as travel budgets on campus had also shrunk and many were trying to use video conferencing as a substitute for making trips. Around then I was writing a quarterly column for Educause, the national IT organization for higher education. This column on Sunsetting IT Services was written with these concerns in mind. You might find it interesting.
Put a different way, getting increased output by having salaried employees work more hours does not constitute an increase in productivity. Rather, it is an internal tax placed on the employees by the company. Doing this near term may seem like it is efficiency enhancing. But it will almost surely backfire long term.
All of us need some balance in our lives. This includes regular physical activity and leisure pursuits that both engage and are unrelated to work. Where to strike that balance may be more art than science, but we should all agree that such balance is necessary. If you are ever to become managers at your place of work, keep that in mind for your employees. It will make the environment much healthier and the work more enjoyable.
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