A suprising benefit of time pressure at work

Other research questions: Does hurrying through a sharply time-constrained task make you learn less from it? How about juggling multiple intellectually nontrivial tasks?

Hurrying through time-boxed tasks seems to be what grad school is all about. My own experience with taking classes is that I remember almost nothing from them. No doubt there are many reasons for that: relentless lecturing is an ineffective way to teach, homework problems are usually meaningless and don't provide context to make sense of the material, etc. It would be interesting to see if the rapid time-shuffling required by college also tends to shut down learning.

This was also my frequent experience with Extreme Programming. Once a task was done, I completely forgot what we did. Five minutes later, I couldn't tell you what we had worked on all morning. That was meaningful work, too.