Sorting your existing entries by whether they carried explicit waiting information, comparing entries that are otherwise similar, and adding one entry from a wait where real information arrived partway through.
Your log’s “Available information” field has said “none” more often than not for three weeks running. This session is where you check what’s different about the entries where it doesn’t.
Before the session#
Read the Week 4 lecture first. It draws a specific line: expectation is what you bring into a wait, information is what you receive once it’s already underway, and this session only works if you keep those two questions apart.
Classifying what you already have#
Pick at least three existing entries. For each one, look only at what “Available information” actually contains and sort it into one of two buckets:
- Explicit waiting information — a countdown, a queue position, a progress update, an announcement, or a person telling you directly how long or how far through the wait you were.
- No explicit waiting information — nothing explicitly communicated remaining time, position, or progress, even if you happened to guess or assume something yourself.
Leave Week 3’s expectation classification exactly as it is on these entries. You’re adding a second, independent label, not replacing the first one.
Comparing across the classification#
Find a pair of entries where the clock duration is similar and the judged duration is similar, but one carries explicit waiting information and the other doesn’t. Look at their Outcome/notes. Write your comparison in three explicit parts:
- Pattern noticed — what actually differs between the two Outcome/notes entries.
- Plausible interpretation — whether the presence or absence of explicit waiting information is a reasonable candidate to explain that difference.
- Alternative explanation or limitation — at least one other thing that could account for the difference instead (different attention, different expectation, plain circumstance), or a note that the two entries differ in too many other ways to isolate information at all.
A worked comparison (a model of the reasoning, not a real pair of entries):
Entry A: waiting for a passport ticket to be called, clock duration eleven minutes, judged duration “about ten minutes,” a screen counting down numbers ahead of mine the whole time. Outcome/notes: “fine, watched my number get closer.” Entry B: waiting at a different counter, clock duration twelve minutes, judged duration “about ten minutes,” no screen, no update, nothing until my name was called. Outcome/notes: “started wondering if I’d been skipped, checked the desk twice, annoyed by the end.” Pattern noticed: near-identical clock and judged durations, very different Outcome/notes. Plausible interpretation: the screen in A is a reasonable candidate for the calmer outcome, since it’s the clearest difference between the two waits. Alternative explanation/limitation: the two waits were also at different counters on different days, so attention, mood beforehand, or something about the specific queue could be doing some of that work instead — one pair can’t rule that out.
Logging one more entry, with real information arriving mid-wait#
Add one new entry, in the exact log format from Week 1, from an ordinary wait where explicit waiting information genuinely arrived after the wait had already started — a countdown that appeared, a queue number update, a person telling you “about five more minutes” partway through. Don’t arrange for a system or a person to provide this for the sake of the exercise; log a wait where it happened on its own.
In the session#
Bring your classified entries, your three-part comparison, and the new entry. We compare across the room: whose logs show Outcome/notes tracking the information classification once clock and judged duration are held roughly similar, whose don’t, and whose comparisons land honestly in “too much else differs to tell.”
What this can and can’t show#
A matching pattern between explicit waiting information and a more favourable Outcome/notes entry is not proof that the information caused that outcome — your alternative-explanation step exists precisely because attention, expectation, and circumstance are still live candidates that a personal log checked against one more field can’t rule out. Treat the pattern as worth investigating further, not as something this session has demonstrated.
Afterwards#
Keep the log running, but this is the last week that rereads it through a single new field. Waiting Field Notes, due at the end of this week, asks for the log itself plus your own interpretation across attention, expectation, and information together — so before you submit, go back over all three classifications on your strongest entries at once, rather than relying on whichever lens each session made you apply in isolation.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- you have reread at least three existing log entries and classified each as carrying explicit waiting information (a countdown, queue position, progress update, or someone stating how long or how far through the wait you were) or no explicit waiting information (nothing explicitly communicated remaining time, position, or progress)
- for at least one pair of entries with a similar clock duration and a similar judged duration, you have compared their information classification against Outcome/notes, and written your comparison in three explicit parts — the pattern you noticed, your plausible interpretation of it, and at least one alternative explanation or limitation
- you have logged one new entry, in the existing log format, from an ordinary wait where explicit waiting information genuinely arrived after the wait had already started
- none of your notes present a difference in Available information as proof that it caused a particular outcome, and none conflate this week's information classification with Week 3's expectation classification of the same entry
Teaching team
- Idris Fenn — tutor