Time – it’s complicated!
If you are reading this, you probably work in an organisation, and if you work in an organisation you almost certainly are very aware of the passing of time as measured by a clock. On my computer screen I see the clock on the bottom right-hand corner. It’s telling me I have an hour until I need to stop writing this article so I can be somewhere else.
We arrive at meetings at agreed clock times, we catch planes, trains, buses and meet with our friends in restaurants all at agreed clock times. So it can seem that a clock and time are the same thing.
But different cultures have different ideas about time. Some cultures are more clock-time oriented, and others more activity or event-time oriented. The first looks to the clock to measure how long a task should take – it’s a more mechanical approach. The second is more focused on the group sense of how long an event takes – it's focused on how the community feels about the event and the changing environment in which the event takes place (for example, the changes as the sun rises and sets).
And then there are other time senses that we have. We all experience biological rhythms – like sleeping and waking, appetite changes, fluctuations in our body temperature, and the menstrual cycle.
Then there’s our subjective experience of time. When we are bored, time can feel like it’s dragging, and a task will never end. And then, when we are racing to complete a task it can feel like time has sped up. And when we are emersed in something we love doing, it can feel like time stops, and when we finish what we’re doing we realise hours have past.
There is much more to time than the clock. Living solely by clock time may lead to us to trying to override our biological rhythms, for example, our sleep/wake cycles. It may mean ignoring our preference for different sorts of work at different times of the day - perhaps the time you most easily think about planning is mid-afternoon. Focusing solely on clock time and our schedule may mean we don’t notice what those around us want to do at particular times, and thinking that clock-time is the only way of organising time may lead to cultural clashes and misunderstandings.
So as you move through 2023, you might want to see if you can refine your sense of time to include your own biological rhythms and preferences, the way our subjective experience of time can change depending on the task, and how a group’s sense of how long a task takes might differ from a pre-prepared schedule.
Take the time…
Would you like additional support to handle your time either at work or at home? Contact Newport & Wildman for a confidential chat. We have qualified experts that can help you thrive. Call us on 1800 650 204.
Stephen Malloch, Manager Clinical Consulting
Image by Freepik
