What a drag

The day just seemed to drag on yesterday.  I thought it was going to be a good day ahead of a nice long Bank Holiday weekend.  The morning was suitably busy in the office, several emails to respond to, some reports to start preparing data for, a framework to refine and send out for wider consultation, my 1-1 with my line manager a few phone calls.  All was going well until at some undetermined point in the early afternoon, time seemed to stand still.  The rest of the afternoon just seemed to drag on for ages. 

It may be down to the fact that I had blasted through a load of tasks earlier in the day and that what remained was less urgent and interesting and didn’t need to be responded to right away. It may be that subconsciously I’m thinking about the events of the evening and the bank holiday weekend ahead and daydreaming about being elsewhere, as I have much to do over the coming days.  Whatever the reason, the long afternoon at the office just seemed to take forever to tick round to 17:30.

The idea of “protracted duration”, time seemingly slowing down, and “temporal compression”, time going by quickly, is discussed by Vyv Evans his article on Psychology Today https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/language-in-the-mind/201503/feel-time-is-flying-or-dragging-thats-because-it-is He suggests that a 20 minute drive to work when you first start a new job may seem to take forever as we pay attention to the route, traffic and surroundings, but after a few months the same journey flies by and you hardly notice the route, traffic and surroundings. It depends on how the time is filled as to whether you consider it to be passing slowly or fast.  The same time period could be spent waiting for a train as could be having a sandwich and lunch with a friend.  One will seem to drag whilst the other whizzes by https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2c7nMpXf7ckY4tRlpfB4sdq/how-to-speed-up-or-slow-down-time

So from that I could deduce that the time in the morning whizzed by because I was engaged in faster paced activities and moving from one thing to another, whilst in the afternoon, the same number of hours seemed to go slower because I was doing slower paced activities and spending longer on one specific task.

Time flies when you’re having fun!