Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing * E-mail: anavinyoung@ucc.ie Affiliation School of Applied Psychology, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
Contributed equally to this work with: Aoife Bourke, Sarah Foley, Zelda Di Blasi Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – original draft Affiliation School of Applied Psychology, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland ⨯
Contributed equally to this work with: Aoife Bourke, Sarah Foley, Zelda Di Blasi Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – review & editing Affiliation School of Applied Psychology, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland ⨯
Contributed equally to this work with: Aoife Bourke, Sarah Foley, Zelda Di Blasi Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – review & editing Affiliation School of Applied Psychology, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland ⨯
Poor employee mental health and wellbeing are highly prevalent and costly. Time-related factors such as work intensification and perceptions of time poverty or pressure pose risks to employee health and wellbeing. While reviews suggest that there are positive associations between time management behavior and wellbeing, there is limited rigorous and systematic research examining the effectiveness of time management interventions on wellbeing in the workplace. A thorough review is needed to synthesize time management interventions and their effectiveness to promote employee mental health and wellbeing.
A systematic search will be conducted using the following databases: PsychINFO via OVID (1806-Present), Web of Science, Scopus via Elsevier (1976-Present), Academic Search Complete (EBSCO), Cochrane Library via Wiley (1992-Present), and MEDLINE via OVID (1946-Present). The review will include experimental and quasi-experimental studies that evaluate the effects of time management interventions on wellbeing outcomes on healthy adults in a workplace context. Only studies in English will be included. Two authors will independently perform the literature search, record screening, data extraction, and quality assessment of each study included in the systematic review and meta-analysis. Data will be critically appraised using the Cochrane risk-of-bias tools. Depending on the data, a meta-analysis or a narrative synthesis will be conducted. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines were followed in the development of this protocol. The protocol has been registered in PROSPERO (CRD4202125715).
This review will provide systematic evidence on the effects of time management interventions on wellbeing outcomes in the workplace. It will contribute to our understanding of how time management approaches may help to address growing concerns for employee mental health and wellbeing.
Citation: Young AN, Bourke A, Foley S, Di Blasi Z (2024) Effects of time management interventions on mental health and wellbeing factors: A protocol for a systematic review. PLoS ONE 19(3): e0288887. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288887
Editor: Collins Atta Poku, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, GHANA
Received: October 13, 2023; Accepted: February 23, 2024; Published: March 11, 2024
Copyright: © 2024 Young et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: No datasets were generated or analysed during the current study. All relevant data from this study will be made available upon study completion.
Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Each year, the consequences of poor employee mental health and wellbeing cost the global economy an estimated $1 trillion [1]. In 2022, the U.S. Surgeon General raised the issue of workplace wellbeing to national prominence [2]. Time is a critical factor to consider in understanding the current mental health and wellbeing challenges observed in the workplace. In the European Union’s 2022 Occupational Safety and Health survey, nearly half of respondents reported that severe time pressure and work overload contributed to increased work stress [3]. Research over the last few decades indicates that work intensification, referring to both the increased pace and increased amount of work, impairs employee wellbeing, health, and motivation [4–6].
Additionally, research on time poverty, or the perception of not having enough time, finds this temporal perception is detrimental to self-assessed mental health and health, emotional wellbeing, work-family conflict, physical activity, life satisfaction, perceived work performance, concentration at work, and turnover intentions [7–13]. Time poverty can also increase stress and stress-related symptoms including headaches, sleep disturbances, and musculoskeletal pains [9, 11, 14].
Time management interventions are the most common time-focused interventions implemented in the workplace and may support employee mental health and wellbeing by addressing experiences and impacts of time poverty and work intensification. Definitions of time management vary across the literature, often including components related to goal and priority setting, planning, structuring, organizing, and evaluation [15–19]. Time management interventions consequently vary depending on which definition of time management has been adopted [15, 16].
There is currently some evidence to suggest that time management interventions can improve wellbeing, however there are limitations with this research [15–17]. For example, a non-systematic review identified 35 time management studies using self-report questionnaires, diaries, and experiments published between 1954 and 2005 [15]. The authors reported that time management was positively related to perceived control of time, job satisfaction, and health, and negatively related to factors such as emotional exhaustion, role overload, and work-family conflict. This review identified several methodological limitations within the time management literature. First, the majority of study participants were university students, limiting the results’ relevance in a workplace context [15]. Second, a variety of time management definitions were used across studies, with some studies not providing any definition. Further, ten different self-report questionnaires were used to measure time management behaviors. The lack of transparent and consistent operationalization indicates strong heterogeneity, making it difficult to know whether ‘time management’ is being evaluated consistently across the literature [15]. Third, only eight of the 35 studies evaluated time management interventions, indicating a limited body of experimental research [15]. However, these experiments generally found that time management training increased self-reported time management skills and academic and job performance.
A recent comprehensive meta-analysis of 158 studies (n = 53,957) found time management (assessed based on studies using a quantitative measure of time management) to increase wellbeing, particularly life satisfaction, more than academic and job performance [16]. This meta-analysis further highlighted the limitations identified in the previous non-systematic literature review. First, a majority of studies used cross-sectional designs, thus limiting the relational conclusions that can be drawn between time management and wellbeing outcomes. Second, a majority of studies involved university students and time management was significantly less impactful for worker populations compared to student samples [16]. Third, there are limited experimental studies done to evaluate the effectiveness of time management interventions. And, finally, there is a lack of clarity, consistency, and generalizability across what is being conducted as a time management intervention [16].
The meta-analysis addressed the question of whether time management works, revealing that time management may primarily enhance wellbeing opposed to performance [16]. However, the question remains whether time management interventions (and which interventions) work to improve wellbeing. A review and synthesis of the time management intervention literature is needed to understand the current state of the field and further provide foundations for future research, development, and application of consistent, valid, and generalizable time management interventions. This is the focus and contribution of this systematic review.
The aim of this proposed review is to synthesize experimental and quasi-experimental studies that evaluated the effectiveness of a time management intervention on wellbeing outcomes among healthy adults in a workplace context. As the need for effective interventions grows alongside rising concern for workplace mental health and wellbeing, this review will contribute to our understanding of whether time management interventions may be integrated into impactful solutions. The proposed review aims to answer the following questions:
The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Protocols (PRISMA-P) guidelines were adhered to in the development of this protocol [20, 21]. The protocol was registered with the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (PROSPERO; CRD42021257157). The systematic review will be carried out following the PRISMA-P checklist (S1 Table) [22] and the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions guidelines [23].
The acronym PICO (Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcomes) guided the inclusion and exclusion criteria for the systematic review (Table 1) [24]. This review will include randomised controlled trials and quasi-experiments (controlled, non-randomised, and pre/post-intervention studies). Non-experimental studies, including literature reviews, case reports, qualitative, correlational, and cross-sectional studies, will be excluded from the review. Included articles will be written in the English language.