Time Perception

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All my life I’d heard people talk about how, as they get older, time seems to go faster. I don’t disagree, as this has been my experience as well. As a child, waiting 1/2 an hour for a TV show to come on seemed to take a lifetime¹. Later, 1/2 an hour was easy to cope with. These days, I feel like if I go get a glass of water I might not return for more than 1/2 an hour.

I’ve always heard that how we perceive time changes because it’s relative to our life experience, though it would seems there might be some “better” physiological explanations². Regardless, this post isn’t really about how or why our perception of time changes, but rather the effect that this change has on our lives.

You probably have heard of “flow states” – that state we get in when we are cruising along doing a thing that time seems to evaporate. Coders coding, writers writing, builders building, artists artisting, you get the idea. And anyone who’s ever experienced this state (or, more importantly, anyone who wanted to experience this state but was unable to achieve it) knows that there is a certain threshold of effort needed to enter the state. You can’t just sit down at a blank window and start pounding out whatever it is you pound out in windows (code, thoughts, project plans, etc). There are a number of ways to build up that effort to achieve that threshold³, but it usually takes . . . (wait for it) . . . time.

And it’s this time that we perceive over the years as we age that changes how effective we are, because it can either make entering the productive flow state easy, hard, or even impossible.

We all have time constraints. Everyone has a bed time⁴, if nothing else. But obviously we have more pedestrian limits: The end of the work day, the end of the school period, whatever. So the key is: Can you get into the flow state within the time constraint you have for this activity?

This is why self-employed writers and artists and the like have it so good⁵.

There! Did you feel that? That was two months going by since I wrote that last sentence. I have a limited amount of time to spend thinking these thoughts and putting them down on. . . RAM⁶? So the reality is that it’s been about two months since I’ve been in the same state as when I started this…entry⁷? And worse still is that this particular time slot I’ve chosen is both the first time I’ve had available to revisit this, and also not long enough to finish, only to do a quick re-read/cleanup, and start this paragraph. I have about 15 more minutes, and if this were the end of my flow-state time, I could pound out oodles of text. But I’m literally just starting to type, and I know I will not get there⁸.

Anyway, what is the point of all this discussion? The point is that productivity is a Gaussian function of our age. I don’t mean to imply that there is a hard-and-fast rule to people’s productivity (either that there is some “peak age” or how high one’s peak will be). Just that, in generally, we start out not-so-productive, get more productive as we age, and then at some point we peak, and our productivity goes down. Maybe it tanks, maybe it ramps down at the same rate it ramped up. Maybe it ramped up slowly. Maybe you woke up one day and went from zero productivity to genius-level output. Whatever. The point is, is starts at 0, ends at 0, and somewhere in between it’s non-zero.

And I believe there are two primary reasons for this. The first is, somewhat obviously, your ability. Infants aren’t known for their ability to solve complex problems (sociological, economical, or otherwise). And if you’re lucky enough to get old enough to forget how to do anything, you aren’t solving complex problem then, either. But all this is somewhat intuitive.

But what’s less intuitive is the paradox of available time. As a child, you seem to have oodles of it, it crawls by, you can’t wait for it to go by. As you age, your life gets busier and busier, and you have so much to do. You have so many demands on your time, and yet. . . somehow you are just getting shit done. You’re like some sort of John Henry pounding it out. But then you get older, and. . . you start to have more time. Maybe the kids are older and don’t need 24-hour supervision. Maybe you retire. Whatever. But while you now have days on end to do whatever you want. . . what do we do? How do we find the time?

This last part is what I’ve been pondering. Why don’t we get tons of stuff done when we’re older and have tons of time? I believe it’s because, as we age, we perceive time taking less and less time to pass. And if you feel you need 20 “objective observer” minutes to enter a flow state, well, that means if you’re older and it take 1 “objective observer” hour for 20 “subjective observer” minutes to pass, it gets harder and harder to find that time to enter flow state. I submit that at a certain age, we will all get to a time where it takes more than a day to enter flow state, and then, with the interruption of sleep, we will not enter it again⁹.

Aaaaaannd bam. There, it happened again. Looks like it’s been about three months since I last added to this missive. By the time I’ve been able to re-read it, make a couple of minor fixes to typos, it’s now about time to go to bed (because everyone has a bed time, right?). I don’t know what to add at this point, so off it goes.