Dr. Ballard studies how our working lives shape our experience of time in multiple ways, both personally and professionally. As examples, she has studied the relationship between working time (including fast-paced work environments, multi-tasking, long-term planning, and time-management issues) and related outcomes (including job satisfaction, relational quality, communication in meetings, and information overload).

Her interests are reflected in two related lines of research: one focused on differences in time across varied occupational groups, the other centered on the role of technology in shaping the pace and timing of our work. Most recently, she has studied the way that members of different occupational groups manage multiple aspects of time in their day-to-day and long-term activities. Her latest project on this issue examines time in the athletic career. Additionally, she is interested in issues of time and space associated with new communication technologies and related work practices (such as virtual teams and bloggers) and recently completed a study on early adopters of Twitter.