You have a meeting on Wednesday and your boss rings to tell you it has been moved forward by two days. Do you now think the meeting is on Monday or on Friday?
But how you interpret it tells us a lot about how you view time. Using the conceptual metaphor theory, if you thought the meeting was moved to Monday you fall in to the time-moving metaphor category. Time-moving people think time is coming towards them. If you thought Friday, you fall in to the ego-moving metaphor, you are moving toward the future. Your answer could also reveal more about your inner thinking – ego-moving people tend to be more optimistic while those who are in the time-moving metaphor tend to be more pessimistic.
On Thursday 17 March we organised our first Career Skills Series meeting which focussed on the perception of time management. Claudia Hammond, an award winning BBC broadcaster and author spoke to us about the psychology and neuroscience of time. Incidentally she is a time-moving person.
Claudia started her talk with some BBC footage of the release of the journalist Alan Johnston, who was a Gaza correspondent held captive for four and a half months. While he was captive he had no way to track time other than through natural day/night light and he came up with a variety of ways to try to manipulate time to trick himself in to thinking time was going quickly. He found that when he was in a life threatening situation time would slow down considerably and he was acutely aware of everything around him.
Your psychological well-being plays a significant role in how you feel about time. 10 years ago an experiment in America looked at how an individual’s well-being affected their perception of time. The experiment started with a group of strangers in a room, mingling and discussing what music they liked, where they liked to go on holiday, what they liked to do in their free time etc… After everyone had met during the information discussion, they were all asked to write down who they would like to work with following these introductions. The group was then split in two – each person in the first group was told that no-one had picked them to work with and therefore that they had to do the next task alone. The people in the second group were told that everyone had picked them (and that this had never happened before – they must be so lovely!) and that as a result they couldn't decide who to put them with so they would have to do the next task alone. For the people who were told they were popular, time went extremely quickly and they were surprised when the time for the second task was up. For the first group, time went more slowly – their perception of the time taken to complete the second task was much slower.
Claudia put up a series of images to see the audience’s perception of them. There were two short films. One had a series of images of a giraffe, with one image of a mango within the film. When asked about the length of time the images were on the screen, a significant number within the audience thought the mango image was up for longer. In fact all the images were on the screen for the same amount of time. The mango image seemed to be up for longer as people pay more attention when something is unusual or new. This is known as the oddball effect. It is equally true for moving images – if an image is new your brain thinks it has more to remember and therefore thinks the image lasts for longer. How many memories we make steers our perception of time as the more we have to remember the longer it feels it takes.
Claudia discussed numerous theories on time perception, and we all took part in a number of experiments to show how even a small group of treasurers can think very differently.
There were a few take-home ideas for helping us manage our time.
How many of us look at our email first thing in the morning? And often what we see steers how we feel for the next few hours – we can feel annoyed if someone has emailed something negative or we can change our plans for the day in order to work on something as a result of the emails. We might even regret responding to something with a quick email back when a more thoughtful and balanced email, a little later in the day, would be more appropriate.
In fact, during the panel discussion that followed there was a lot of discussion about how to manage emails and work flow. One of the panel said they did not check their email in the morning – "if anything is that urgent someone should ring me” - and this meant that they were free to concentrate on the piece of work they needed to get through instead of being interrupted by the often constant flow of emails, invariably generating yet more work.
Claudia mentioned the Pomodoro technique as a way to manage how you use time. This idea is to set a timer (originally it was the red tomato timer that we all had many years ago, hence the name Pomodoro technique!) to allow you to work intensively for 18 minutes. Once the timer goes off you can then take a 5 minute break, and then go back in to 18 minutes of intensive work. This focuses your mind on the task at hand and makes you more productive.
We finished the evening with a lively panel discussion on work/life balance.
The key ideas were that we have to be disciplined and prioritise tasks. Treasurers often work in a peak and trough environment, and you need to be flexible and adapt to what is needed at the time.
We discussed whether there is an optimum part-time working week and the panel agree that it all depended on the role, the department and company and what support is given. Flexibility is key – whether this is in the form of being able to work from home, working 9 days out of 10 or even allowing people to take a few years off and then come back. Another key message is that if you don’t ask, you don’t get. If you want to work from home one day a week there is no stigma in asking – you never know what might be available until you ask!
[su_box title="Ideas welcome" box_color="#51284F" radius="1"]The Career Skills Series is designed to help you to find inspiration and ideas about life and work. It looks at the behavioural aspects needed to manage your work/home life better. If you have any suggestions for topics for future events , please let me know at ltatham@treasurers.org.[/su_box]
References:
Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception by Claudia Hammond
Conceptual metaphor theory.http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2006/06/20/on-time-space-and-metaphor-1/
