Understanding Time and its Relationship to Individual Time Management

Time never has been an easy concept, since each of us has different time perceptions and experiences. Individual time management stories can vary dramatically because of a variety of reasons, such as different backgrounds, professions, social roles, cultures, gender and so on. The main focus of this book is on socially-constructed time, which demonstrates how humans interact with time in their social contexts. This perspective of time provides a good basis to understand how individuals experience time and furthermore manage their time. This chapter introduces the concept of time based on prior time research and its related concepts. First, it describes how difficult it is to interpret what time is and how scientists in different disciplines explain the nature of time. This chapter also explains what time dichotomies are by providing examples. The time dichotomies described include quantitative and qualitative time, clock-based and event-based time, and linear and cyclical time, which are different forms or representations of the main stream time dichotomy objective and socially-constructed time. A key contribution that social psychologists bring to time research is having a convergent understanding of time instead of separating the dual aspects of time. As primary time artifacts, clock and calendar are also introduced in this chapter. Clock is a common metaphor for measuring the objective time with seconds, minutes, and hours, while calendar is another popular tool for recording subjective or socially constructed time with meaningful schedules.