but also to a large extent in Europe, is very clock time, so we are unnecessarily weeding out people who have different talents." Make way for flexibility "The problem," Sellier says, "is that society, particularly in the U.S. The trick for organizations, social groups and people of all orientations is to know when to deploy clock-time skills and when to lean into the more intuitive skills of event time. And clock-timers, they note, have their advantages too - they tend to be highly organized "doers" who get things done when they say they will. Irma McClaurin, anthropologist and independent scholarįor the record, Sellier and Avnet are not lobbying against reliance on clock time, which they say helps improve efficiency and coordination between people. Studies suggest event-timers tend to see less chaos in the world at large. The event-timer, in contrast, sees that the commute will take longer but assumes that the planned meeting will eventually happen, even if later. The schedule is thrown off and the day is ruined. and the bus breaks down, the clock-timer feels stress that the meeting now won't start until 9:30 a.m. For instance, if two people are taking a bus to a meeting they've scheduled at 9 a.m. That runs counter to a commonly held belief that people who are punctual consider themselves masters of time.Įvent-timers, on the other hand, feel some control over the flow of their days, even if they can't control everything that happens to them, Avnet says. "If you're a clock, you're basically surrendering the control of your life to an external mechanism," says Avnet. Sellier and her collaborator, Tamar Avnet, chair of the marketing department at Yeshiva University in New York City, found in their research that clock-timers cede more than their schedules to the clock - they cede agency too. Shots - Health News I usually wake up just ahead of my alarm. Whichever of the two orientations you have, "it doesn't just shape your activities - it shapes the way you think about the world and the way you make decisions," Sellier says. But a clock-time person is more likely to look to external time cues - a schedule or a clock - to figure out when to go from one activity to the next, while an event-timer moves along when they "feel" it's time, based on social interactions they're engaged in and whatever else is going on around them. None of us is completely one way or the other in the way we organize our time, Sellier has learned, and most people can successfully function in both modes. What she's interested in across cultures is how people regulate themselves. "For my work, it doesn't matter what culture you're from," she says. In any given culture, there are clock-time and event-time people living in it - sometimes synchronously and sometimes not, says Anne-Laure Sellier, a business professor at HEC Paris who studies the time mindsets of individuals. Still, even by Spanish standards, she admits, she often runs "late." "For dinner, for sure, if someone invites you to dinner at 8 p.m., you can show up at 10 p.m. People go home for lunch they take afternoon siestas. to Valencia, Spain, which is generally considered a more laid-back, event-time-oriented society. My friend Danielle Hardoon, an American Montessori teacher and consultant, has been notoriously late since childhood, at least according to the clock. "The way that we measure time is really constructed." There are variations within cultures too "I think that's what we have to put in our head," McClaurin says. Goats and Soda Under 'Kenyan Time,' You're Expected To Arrive. But being less rigid with time, anthropologists, historians and other researchers tell me, continues to have its place and advantages too. Today, the focus on "synchronizing watches" is still valuable in cities and urban workplaces where a large group of people need to synchronize their activities to achieve a goal. That's when the increasing demands of factory work and the growth of railroads combined with the new boom in factory-made clocks and watches to create a new, more rigid expectation of punctuality. Strictly timing our day by the clock - the whole notion of being on time - took off with the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, McClaurin explains. "Clock time" versus "event time" - how did we get here? Equating punctuality with high value is a shortsighted view of history and a narrow view of world cultures, she and other scholars say. "We've created this schema that somehow 'being on time' is evidence of how much you value something," says Irma McClaurin, an anthropologist, independent scholar and founder of the Black Feminist Archive, which is based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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