Clock Time Versus Event Time: How Do They Affect a Person’s Scheduling Style?

Our society has always needed to devise ways to navigate time. How we manage time has affected our style of accomplishing tasks and getting involved in social engagements.

Timekeeping Across Cultures

Cultural differences exist in the value people place on leisure and work and on the balance between them. Similarly, time spent within the workplace also differs across cultures, each setting rules regarding the appropriate sequence of activities.

Throughout history, the most basic difference in timekeeping has been between individuals operating by the clocks and those who measure time by social events. This significant difference in thinking about time continues to divide cultures even today.

Most cultures use social activities to define their calendars, not vice versa. For example, the calendars of the Nuer people from Sudan are based on the seasonal changes in their surroundings. Some societies have some weeks that are not always seven days long, such as the three-day week of the Muysca of Colombia and the 10-day week of the Incas in Peru. Meanwhile, the Kachin people of North Burma have no single word equivalent of "time," making it more or less event-oriented.

READ ALSO: Adults, Children Do Not Experience Time in the Same Way; Here's Why

Clock-Timers Versus Event-Timers

Research suggests that individuals differ in terms of scheduling their tasks. For instance, when invited to have lunch, some may agree to eat at noon, while others would let you know when they are hungry.

The former live their lives predominantly in clock time, a scheduling style based on what time it is or how much time has already passed. Meanwhile, the latter live in event time, which is about an internal sense of what moves them forward, not dependent on the clock.

Clock timers depend on an external clue to tell them when to start and finish a task or a social engagement. For example, they may wake up every day at 6:00 a.m., start working at 8:00 a.m., have lunch at noon, go to the gym at 7 p.m., and sleep at 10:00 p.m.

On the other hand, event-timers might wake up when they are no longer sleepy, eat when they feel hungry, and work on a task until it is done. In short, they start and end their work with no predetermined time.

Inspired by differences in people's preferences, Tamar Avnet and Anne-Laure Sellier from HEC Paris Business School have studied clock and event times for over a decade. According to them, people are born with a tendency to be one more than the other. This relationship with the clock affects individuals more than just their to-do list. Instead, it may also be connected to how they experience their agency in the world and their emotional experiences in the moment.

Avnet and Sellier noted that a one-time management style is not necessarily better, although related differences exist. Since efficiency drives clock-timers, they are driven by their goal to complete tasks in a set amount of time, feeling valuable afterward when the work is done. If a clock-timer allocates three hours to finish work, when the three hours are over, the task is over.

An event-timer's effectiveness is more than the stated goal. This is because they finish working on a task when it feels accomplished. They value finishing the job well, even if they do not finish it at a certain point.

In the paper "So what if the clock strikes? Scheduling style, control, and well-being", researchers suggest that people might have a looser relationship with their sense of control when they depend heavily on the clock to determine what to do and when to stop. They look towards an external cue to assess their actions rather than something within them. More than clock-timers, event-timers appear to believe that their actions make a meaningful difference in deciding what happens to their lives.

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