Why time at work is so slow today? 

By Dr. Peng Rocky CHEN

We all experienced the distress of looking at the clock only to realise that just 10 minutes have passed since we’ve last checked what felt like an hour ago. Indeed, the way we experience the passage of time at work (especially on Monday morning and Friday afternoon…) is a fundamental aspect of work experience. And if time flies when you are having fun, it becomes an ordeal when each second feels like a minute. What can employers possibly do to make our subjective experience of time better? A recent paper[1] by Dr. Rocky Chen, Associate Professor, Department of Management, Marketing and Information Systems, and his research team explores how time-related work design characteristics can actually make a day feels shorter and, if yes, is it worthwhile doing so?

When we “watch a pot until it boils,” time seems to pass slowly because we give our full attention to the passage of time. On the other hand, when we are immersed in non-temporal aspects of our environment, time seems to pass quickly because our focus is elsewhere. By shifting our attention away from time, both temporal predictability – such as minimising the unpredictable waiting period before a staff meeting scheduled for “sometimes” today for example – and task segmentation – when work is divided into small blocks of different tasks that are precisely scheduled – can speed up how we experience time at work. Using data collected across a series of experiments ranging from asking hundreds of participants recruited on Amazon’s Mturk to record their work satisfaction upon completing certain tasks to surveying how workers in a 2,000-people Chinese garment factory react to time-related changes, the research confirms that not only temporal predictability and task segmentation contribute to how workers perceive the passage of time, but that this perception actually translates into better job performance and satisfaction.

The practical implications of these findings are obvious since they establish that employers have the ability to arrange – and design – working hours in ways that keep employees focused, happier and more productive. Thus, making sure that employees are busy instead of having the time to fret while waiting between tasks can increase job satisfaction. Meanwhile, ensuring that meetings – the scourge of so many office workers – start and finish precisely on time can also go a long way in reducing time-induced anxiety. Breaks can also be an effective tool for making the passage of time seems faster, provided they are used to engage in non-routine activities. While it’s easier to enhance the feeling of time passing in industries that are creative, highly-skilled or amenable to workers’ autonomy, even strenuous and repetitive jobs can be improved using these insights (playing the right music on the factory floor maybe?).

In any event, next time you catch yourself looking at the clock while waiting for a meeting that “just about to start”, it may be a good use of your time to share this study with your boss! 

Reference:

[1] Zhao, Helen; Deng, Hong; Peng Chen; Rocky; Parker, Sharon & Zhang, Wei “FAST OR SLOW: HOW TEMPORAL WORK DESIGN SHAPES EXPERIENCED PASSAGE OF TIME AND JOB PERFORMANCE”, Academy of Management Journal 2022, Vol. 65, No. 6, 2014–2033 (https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2019.1110)