The purpose of this book is to provide useful user requirements for capturing and designing more extensive temporal structures within the current electronic calendar systems through a series of in-depth user studies. Chapter 5 presents the study results of two in-depth interviews with twenty professionals for identifying what types of temporal structures are being used in personal time management practices and possible design implications to further design the current electronic calendar tools. In order to deepen our understanding of how individual time management quality is related to the various temporal structures, it is necessary to conduct a much larger scale user study to further support the findings reported in Chapter 5. If we could possibly obtain solid support from a larger user study, we would be more confident to state that we need to enhance the design of the current electronic calendar systems through incorporating more extensive temporal structure features.
This chapter describes a theoretical base for conducting a large user survey on whether the quality of individual time management is being impacted by individual temporal structure usage. In other words, this study aims to find out whether temporal structure is an important component of individual time management practices. In this chapter, we attempt to answer four questions: (1) what constitutes the quality of individual time management? (2) how do individuals process and utilize their external and internal temporal structures? (3) what types of temporal structures have been created and used in the researched site? (4) what exact temporal structures constrain the three main groups of people consisting of faculty, staff, and student at the researched university? A large survey study is therefore proposed to investigate: (1) how effective vs. ineffective individual time managers could be distinguished based upon their perceptions of time management quality components and temporal structure usage, and (2) what are the overall construct relationships between the quality of individual time management and different levels of temporal structure knowledge and its usage? This chapter serves as a theoretical basis and pre-cursor for the next three chapters (8, 9 and 10), which primarily report the results of the proposed large survey study on different perspectives.