Does the billable hour play tricks with your mind?

We've looked before at how the billable hour can affect your brain, and how the effect can be akin to self-induced obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Click to read that post. But are there other ways the billable hour unconsciously affects you? Does it make time go slower or faster? Or sometimes the former, sometimes the latter? If the billable hour does play tricks with your sense of the passage of time, you may find some clues as to why in this article.

From "Every second counts" (The Independent):

Time is of the essence. Time heals all wounds. Time flies when you're having fun...

The platitudes exist because they represent broad, if scientifically unproven, notions that time is elastic. Time does seem to fly by when we're having fun. Likewise, it stretches out ad infinitum when we're willing it to zip past and deliver us with birthdays, Christmas Day or that longed-for holiday.

But how often do we examine the many nuances of our relationship with time? It is a construct, after all. ... Yet we rely on (and obsess about) timekeeping, time-saving and the rate at which we gobble it up.

There have been endless studies into time perception, whether or not time ticks away faster at altitude or whether there is any physical basis for the universal conclusion that time moves more slowly when we are children and speeds up as we grow older. Nobody knows the amount of time they will live in their lives and yet we claim time as our own, demand more, and feel cheated when we lose it.

Claudia Hammond ... has a better understanding than most of the ways that our perspectives on time can be morphed, manipulated and played with.

Click to read the rest.

Note: Related post: "How do you really know what time it is?" (io9). Excerpt:

What they've discovered is that your brain is one of the least accurate time measurement devices you'll ever use. And it's also the most powerful.

...

[C]locks may well be humankind's oldest brain-enhancing technology. They allow our brains to experience something we never could without machines: Objective time.

 

Comments

[Anne Roberts]

A wonderful post! I think Einstein's relativity theory applies here as well.