No Two People Perceive Time In The Same Way
Has this ever happened
to you? You are traveling 2 hours to visit friends. It’s two hours to get there
and 2 hours to get back, but the trip there feels much longer.
It’s about the mental
processing — In his interesting book, The Time Paradox, Philip
Zimbardo discusses how our experience of time is relative, not absolute. There
are time illusions, just like there are visual illusions. The more mental
processing you do, the more time you think has elapsed. If people have to stop
and think at each step of a task, they will feel that the task is taking too
long. The mental processing makes the amount of time seem longer.
It’s about expectations
— The
perception of time and your reaction to it, is also greatly influenced by
predictability and expectations. Let’s say you are editing video on your
computer. You’ve just clicked the button to produce the video file from your
edits. Will you be frustrated by how long it takes to produce the video? If you
do this task often, and it normally takes 3 minutes, then 3 minutes will not
seem like a long time. If there is an in-progress indicator, for example a bar
that is moving, or a message that says “2 minutes 48 seconds left to
completion”, then you know what to expect. You’ll go pour yourself a cup of
coffee and come back. But if it sometimes takes 30 seconds and sometimes takes
5 minutes, and you don’t which one it is going to be this time, then you will
be very frustrated if it takes 3 minutes. Three minutes will seem much longer
than it usually does.
Time expectations change
– Ten years ago if
it took 20 seconds for a website to load you didn’t think much of it. But these
days if it takes more than 3 seconds you get impatient. There’s one website I
go to regularly that takes 12 seconds to load. It seems like an eternity.
Take-aways
·
Always provide in progress indicators so people know how much time
something is going to take.
·
If possible, make the amount of time it takes to do a task or
bring up information regular, so people can adjust their expectations
accordingly.
·
If you want to make a process seem shorter, then break it up into
steps and have people think less. It’s mental processing that makes something
seem to take a long time.
Your, Insight On This Please..
Interesting, Insightful & Informative all at the same time.
ReplyDeleteKeep up the good work bro :)