When the to-do list keeps growing but the hours in the day do not, new research from the University of Virginia suggests the problem may start with how people set their goals.
Sarah Memmi, an assistant professor of commerce and marketing at UVA’s McIntire School of Commerce, studied what happens when people are juggling multiple goals with limited time. For Memmi, the idea of launching a study in the first place crossed over into her everyday life.
She was a new parent while earning her doctorate, a period when competing demands in her own time as a parent and student were part of a daily grind.
“As any new parent knows, the baby arrives, and there’s so much more on your plate that you have to do,” Memmi said.
The research, conducted with co-author Jordan Etkin, an associate professor at Duke University, and published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, found that people usually set goals that are too ambitious because they do not first map out how much time they have available.
Through 12 experiments, the researchers found budgeting time before setting performance goals helped people set targets that were better matched to the amount of time available. Overall, participants made more progress and, in some cases, felt better about what they accomplished.
“The to-do list tends to be one thing, and then the time lives in the calendar,” Memmi said. “And so, marrying those two up and bringing them together can be really beneficial.”
The problem, according to the research, is that people can unintentionally overestimate how much time is available for each task. Someone may have several things they want to get done in a two-hour period, for example, without first deciding how much of those two hours can realistically be devoted to each one.
Budgeting the available time first changes that calculation. Instead of starting with everything that needs to get done, a person might first decide to spend an hour on one project, 30 minutes on <a href="https://bitcomme.com/u-s-mortgage-rates-climb-above-7-in-another-blow-to-housing-market/” title=”U.S. mortgage rates climb above 7% in another blow to housing market”>another and the remaining 30 minutes on email. Only then would they decide what could realistically be accomplished during each block.
“The busier you are, the more important this is,” Memmi said.
According to Memmi, the strategy does not require tracking every minute once the work begins.
“We didn’t necessarily spend that exact amount of time,” Memmi said of the people in the study. “But they still made better progress.”
She said researchers found the act of budgeting time beforehand mattered more than rigidly sticking to a timer while completing the work.
“The tracking of your time while you’re actually working on something was not as important,” Memmi said.
The UVA findings also overlap with several commonly used time-management strategies.
One is time blocking or reserving specific portions of the day for special tasks instead of relying only on a traditional to-do list. But simply dividing the day into smaller blocks is not necessarily a guarantee of better work.
A 2026 experimental study of time blocking found that workers attempted more tasks when their work periods were broken into shorter intervals, but they also made more mistakes. Researchers found only a modest overall improvement in completed output because working faster came with a tradeoff in accuracy.
Other research suggests that the benefits of managing time may extend beyond productivity. According to the 2021 PLOS ONE review, Does time management work?, people who managed their time well did better at work and school, and experienced less stress. The review analyzed 158 studies with more than 53,000 participants.
Technology can also help put some of those strategies into practice. Digital calendars can be used to block out time for individual assignments, while task-management apps can help organize deadlines and priorities. Timers and focus settings built into many phones and computers can also help people protect periods of uninterrupted work.
But Memmi’s research suggests people may not need another complicated productivity system. The first move can be much simpler: look at how much time is actually available before deciding how much you expect yourself to accomplish.
Get breaking news and daily headlines delivered to your email inbox by signing up here.
