You know how it goes – some days seem to drag on forever, while others just fly by.
Of course, there’s often an easily identifiable catalyst; if you’re very busy, or fully engaged in a project you find interesting, the time will seem to pass more quickly than when sitting in some dull all-day meeting, or being left with nothing to do except twiddle your thumbs and watch the clock.
But in my world anyway, most days are neither extremely interesting nor extremely dull. A day is a day is a day, yet still, some days seem longer than others.
So here’s what I started noticing some while ago: Whenever somebody makes a comment such as “Man, this day is lasting forever!” or “Wow, it’s 5:00 already, where did the day go?”… Everybody else agrees, and I usually tend to as well. Rarely, if ever, have I heard somebody respond to “This sure has been a long day” with “Really? It seemed pretty quick to me.”
The easy reply is that people in the same office will be experiencing the same busy or boring day, thus the similar time perceptions, and that fits, but only to a point. I’ve noticed this even in offices consisting of people with entirely different jobs, whose workloads are not tied to each other’s in any way. I’ve seen it at sales offices and call centers, and at least one creative environment.
I’ve started wondering if it’s possible that there exists some as-yet unidentified external factor or factors that may have an influence on how one perceives the passage of time, and whether such factor(s) might affect people located near one another in the same way.
Sure, intellectually I know there’s probably nothing at all to this, and my “evidence” is less than razor-thin and purely anecdotal. Still, my mind likes to ponder stuff like this. So just for grins, I invite all people smarter than me – of which there are many on this board – to speculate on any plausible (or fanciful) explanations for the phenomenon I’ve described.