Did you ever notice how when you’re meeting somebody at a particular time and place that if you get there early you begin to question if you’re at the right place, there at the right time, or whatever?
Even worse, did you ever start to think you’d gone crazy and you’re getting ready to call whomever to figure out where they are and the arrive…well after the specified time…and they don’t seem flustered at all.
Or flip the coin, you arrive “almost” on time, and whomever you’re meeting is freaking out that you might have been killed, you might have been lying in a ditch somewhere, or you had decided to totally blow them off?
That’s what I call the variable TMU at work. This is gonna get nerdy, but stick with me, I think it will help you understand other people, and maybe a little bit about yourself.
People approach time differently. To one person, being on time is a specific time on the clock, while to another person the agreed upon time is a general range. We used to joke about “-ish” being added to a time was plus or minus 13 minutes. So 2:00-ish was from 1:47 to 2:13. That’s a pretty darned big window, when you think about it. Especially if you’re in a small town, but if you’re traveling halfway across the country, that’s a drop in the bucket.
The “-ish” part has been formally dubbed by me as the TMU: the Temporal Metronomic Unit. The concept really jelled during a series of trips I took one summer. I obviously spend way too much time alone, especially driving…and I have a tendency to think about weird topics. Some time ago a theory hit me that explains a lot about why different people deal with time differently. It was kind of one of those “Unifying Theory” moments that helped pull a bunch of concepts together and made sense of a number of things all at once.
The TMU is a measure of time, so let’s say that we have two folks with differing TMUs. Let’s say that “Mom” has a TMU of 5 minutes and “Jeff” has a TMU of 15 minutes (of course, the names have been changed to protect the innocent, namely me).
So Mom and Jeff are going to meet for lunch at 12:00pm. So that she is ontime, Mom always strives to arrive one TMU early, so she arrives at the restaurant at 11:55 on the dot. Her TMU clock starts running at the point. One TMU later (12:00) Mom begins to wonder if she’s at the right location. Meanwhile, Jeff is running a bit late, but well within his 15 minute TMU, so he doesn’t call to say he’s running late. At 12:05 (Mom +2 TMU) is now wondering if she had the right time and/or location and becoming a bit agitated. Jeff is still fine, it’s “only” 12:05 and he’s still within his 15 minute TMU. By 12:15 (Mom +4 TMU) is beginning to ask those “are you in the ditch questions”, but Jeff arrives blissfully unaware that he’s actually “late”, since his arrival is “only” +1 TMU.
The shorter a person’s TMU, the more anxiety they will feel when other people don’t arrive on time. The longer the TMU, the longer you’ll wait for somebody else without feeling a great degrees of anxiety. In fact, with a sufficiently long TMU you’ll never notice that anybody is late.
But, if the TMU is vastly different (say TMU-5 and TMU-30) there can be a ton of anxiety for one person while the other one is “right on time” in their mind. The greater the difference in the TMU the higher the degree of disconnect and anxiety that can exist when the two people try to make plans together.
Think about your family, your co-workers, your boss. Do you notice that people operate with different clocks? How does it impact your interactions with them?
If you find yourself stressed, think about your TMU and their probably TMU and see if that might be the difference.
