Productivity Bit: Time Constraints Keep You Focused

There might be something to those arbitrary deadlines that we're sometimes held to. I'm not sure this should rate as news, but apparently a new study has found that if you want to be productive, it helps to be under a tight deadline (BritishPsychologySociety):

It helps to have the self-discipline to focus on one task at a time, but even that isn't always enough because thoughts about a previous task can linger and spoil our performance on our current task.

Now Sophie Leroy has made a counter-intuitive finding that could have implications for reducing interference between successive tasks. She's shown that completing a prior task (rather than leaving it unfinished) helps prevent its interference with a later task, but this benefit arises specifically when that initial task was completed under strict time constraints.

Read on for the details.