I work in a field where we have a lot of long-term projects. And many folks find it hard to keep up their enthusiasm over the life of a project. I was hired for a project that would take five years to complete. Somewhere around the two-year mark, there had been enough compromises and politics to change my attitude from “this is an adventure” to “this is a job.”
Smaller projects that can be completed in 18 to 24 months don’t seem to suffer from this. And projects that run for a bit, are put on hold whyile you do something else, then you return to seem to take 18 months of “project time” rather than “calendar time” before they become tiresome. (Of course, if a project is resurrected too often, it becomes The Job That Wouldn’t Die.)
Are there any studies about attention span that might confirm/refute this purely personal observation?
I can confirm your personal observation with my own. I’m currently spending about 90% of my billable time on a 5 year project. We are also about 3 years into it. It is becoming very dull and I’m having a hard time motivating myself anymore.
The only interesting thing that has happened in the recent past was the formation of a new company. I’d post more about that but the old company is currently suing us and we have been advised by our attorney not to discuss the specifics.
I kind of makes you wonder about large projects in the recent past. Many of them took 20 or more years to complete. I’m not going to get into the ancient past when things took considerably longer than that even,
Easy one-step assembly instructions.
Pour Beer A in Uncle B.
We do some long-term projects but we have a six-month to one-year “put together a demonstration that shows how far along you are right now” mindset that overrides it. In some ways this is a blessing but in others it’s an annoyance. It’s frustrating to have to divert resources for a dog-and-pony show, but the worst thing is that those only vaguely familiar with the project (i.e., management) frequently confuse your hastily constructed demonstration with the anticipated end product. “Now that that’s out of the way, let’s move on to …”
And of course it’s not applicable to many long-term projects: “We know it takes five years to build the bridge but we’d like you to build five little bridges, one a year, instead.”
Let’s see. I lathered and I rinsed. But did I repeat?
Related to this, I’m interested to know what the attention span is of a person doing a complex repetitive task. I know this is going to sound stupid, but when I graduated college and worked at a pharmaceutical company, I did drug screening all day everyday, and I LOVED my job, even after doing it for five years. Now that I’ve gone to graduate school, have my own office, and do complex analyses of companies and their products in the pharmaceutical field, about the only thing I look forward to at work is adding things to this message board
Heh. Everyone who’s done a thesis is familiar with this issue. The problem is that instead of short term day-to-day activities with reasonably frequent rewards, you’re engaged in a long-term activity with a distant, possibly ever-receding pay-off of uncertain value. At the very least, the payoff is usually pretty abstract. Furthermore, there is usually little sign of progress for long periods of time.
Evolution probably didn’t equip us for this kind of activity. Absent the kind of infrastructure provided by society, a mammal
who engaged in a five year project to develop better ways to dig grubs isn’t too likely to pass on genes to the next generation. Boredom is probably a survival value – if you don’t see any benefit from what you’re doing, you move on before you starve to death.
Best way to cope is to set some milestones, hopefully with some tangible rewards. If this isn’t possible, take up some outside activity that’s less abstract – woodworking or gardening, for example.
My situation may be different than the type of project you are working on (I’m a computer programmer) - currently I’ve got several rather long-term projects in the works. I find if I alternate between them in fifteen minute intervals I can eventually find one inspiring enough to crank away on it for hours (note that sometimes it takes days of ‘mucking about’ before I get to this point).
I think if I had to spend even two years working on a single software project I would probably lose my mind (I can’t conceive of a five year software project - by the time it was done it would look…five years old).
I think if you want hard, scientific data the place to look would be the applied sociological journals. If you spent an afternoon at your local university’s library going through abstracts you could copy enough material to keep you engaged for weeks!
My situation may be different than the type of project you are working on (I’m a computer programmer) - currently I’ve got several rather long-term projects in the works. I find if I alternate between them in fifteen minute intervals I can eventually find one inspiring enough to crank away on it for hours (note that sometimes it takes days of ‘mucking about’ before I get to this point).
I think if I had to spend even two years working on a single software project I would probably lose my mind (I can’t conceive of a five year software project - by the time it was done it would look…five years old).
I think if you want more scientific data the place to look would be the applied sociological journals. If you spent an afternoon at your local university’s library going through abstracts you could copy enough material to keep you engaged for weeks!
isn’t too likely to pass on genes to the next generation. Boredom is probably a survival value – if you don’t see any benefit from what you’re doing, you move on before you starve to death.