Setting up the personal log you'll keep and reinterpret all semester, and making your first entries against it.
This session sets up the one instrument the whole course runs on: a wait-observation log you keep yourself, add to every week, and reread with a different question each time. Week 1’s job is just to get it started correctly, because a log with a sloppy first week is harder to use in Week 4 than an empty one.
Before the session#
Read the Week 1 lecture first — the log only makes sense once you’ve separated clock duration from judged duration, and prospective judgement from retrospective judgement. Nothing to prepare beyond that; the lecture is the full prerequisite.
The log format#
Log one row per wait. Every entry needs these fields — leave nothing out, even when the honest answer is “none” or “didn’t notice”:
| Field | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Context | What kind of wait this was, in enough detail to remember it later (e.g. “waiting for a bus,” “on hold with a phone provider”) — no need for exact location or time |
| Expected wait | What you thought the wait would be before it started, if you had any expectation at all |
| Clock duration | How long the wait actually took, as close as you can measure it |
| Judged duration | Your own estimate of the wait’s length — a duration, not how it felt about it — in your own words or units (e.g. “maybe six minutes,” “about twice as long as it should have been”) |
| Prospective or retrospective | Whether you were forewarned, before the wait began, that you’d be asked to judge its duration (prospective), or received no such warning and only decided to produce a judgement once the wait was over (retrospective) — this depends only on the forewarning, not on what you did during the wait |
| Attending to | What you were actually doing or looking at for most of the wait |
| Available information | Anything you were told or shown about the wait’s likely length (a countdown, a queue position, nothing at all) |
| Outcome / notes | Anything else worth remembering about how the wait ended or how it felt — this is where an emotional reaction belongs, not in judged duration |
A worked example (a model entry to show the format, not a real observation):
Context: waiting for a kettle to boil, one evening before I’d thought to start today’s entries. Expected wait: “a few minutes.” Clock duration: 4 minutes (worked out afterwards, from when I remembered switching the kettle on). Judged duration: “felt like at least six or seven.” Prospective/retrospective: retrospective — nothing about the wait told me in advance that I’d be asked how long it took; I only produced an estimate once it was over, when I sat down to write up the log. Attending to: the kettle, my phone, back and forth. That describes what occupied the wait; it does not determine whether the judgement is prospective or retrospective. Available information: none — no indicator light, no timer. Outcome/notes: annoyed by the end, even though four minutes is short by any other measure.
Getting a genuine prospective entry, and a genuine retrospective one#
Your log needs at least one honest entry of each kind, and they come from setting the wait up differently, not from labelling the same kind of wait two different ways after the fact:
- For a retrospective entry, pick an ordinary wait you didn’t think about recording until after it was already over — you weren’t forewarned, because nothing, including you, decided in advance that this wait would be judged. Only once it ended did you think back and produce an estimate.
- For a prospective-style entry, choose a wait you are already going to experience (a kettle, a bus, a queue you’re about to join) and decide before it begins that you will judge its duration. This gives you the same kind of forewarning that defines the prospective paradigm in experimental research, although your personal log is not a laboratory replication.
Note the forewarning itself in the entry, not just the prospective or retrospective label — a short phrase like “decided beforehand” or “only thought to log this afterwards” is enough. And don’t pick which waits to log in order to produce a particular result: if the one genuinely prospective wait you get to this week happens to feel short, and the one genuinely retrospective wait happens to feel long, log that. The point of the pair is an honest comparison, not a demonstration of the lecture’s finding — a personal log of two entries can’t establish that finding either way.
In the session#
We go through the format together, each write a first entry from a recent wait (even one from earlier today), then compare: who logged a prospective judgement, who logged a retrospective one, and whether that changed what their “how long did it feel” answer actually meant. This is a working session, not a lecture recap — bring something to log, not questions to ask.
What the log is and isn’t#
This is a personal record for a method you’ll use all semester, not a scientific study. One person’s log, kept for twelve weeks, cannot establish that any mechanism causes a wait to feel longer or shorter — it can only give you concrete cases to test an explanation against, which is exactly what Weeks 2 to 4 do. Treat every entry as something you noticed, not something you proved.
Two rules, both non-negotiable: don’t record anything that would identify a stranger involved in your wait (no names, no descriptions specific enough to identify someone), and don’t log a wait you didn’t actually experience.
Afterwards#
Keep the log going — you’ll add to it without a formal check-in until the Waiting Field Notes assessment in Week 4, which asks you to submit the log itself alongside a short written interpretation of what it shows.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- you have logged at least three ordinary waits since the session, each with a clock duration and a judged duration
- at least one entry is marked prospective and at least one is marked retrospective, honestly (not assigned to make the set look balanced)
- each entry names what you were attending to during or after the wait, and what information, if any, was available to you about how long it would be
- none of your entries record anything identifying about another person
Teaching team
- Idris Fenn — tutor