Eric Crayton, a Los Angeles school bus driver honored for his on-time performance, is a man of the clock. The 39-year-old says he’s always been “a time person,” having learned from his mother the value of planning, an early bedtime and punctuality. The students he drives to and from school could set their clocks by him.
Ten years ago, Crayton spent his first couple of paychecks from his bus-driving job on a Swiss watch — equipped with a second hand, as required for all Los Angeles Unified School District bus drivers. He wears his timepiece constantly, but he considers himself a good judge of time’s passage even without it. He can feel when he’s a few seconds ahead — or behind — on his daily rounds, he says.
To demonstrate, Crayton recently took a guess — just over seven minutes — at the length of his shower (it’s the only place he doesn’t wear his watch), then timed himself. He turned off the water at seven minutes, 25 seconds.
The internal clocks that govern our behavior at the most basic level have been honed over millions of years of survival in primitive conditions. Humans share with virtually all animals the ability to recognize the imminence of nightfall, to mark the passage of a day or to attend to cues that signal the passage of a month or season.
These processes are governed by circadian rhythms buried deep inside the brain’s hypothalamic region, where basic bodily functions such as metabolism, appetite, sexual arousal and readiness for sleep and waking are cued.
Evolution also prepared us to make split-second judgments about how quickly an oncoming car — or a hungry lion — would reach us if we continued at our current pace. As language became important to our survival, we probably evolved an ability to detect tiny pauses in speech that give communications meaning and nuance. These are operations conducted beneath the level of conscious thought. But pulling a steak off the grill at the four-minute mark, getting through a to-do list in the two hours before your next appointment, keeping track of time during engrossing activities such as shopping or surfing the Web — these feats take conscious effort, practice and attention to one’s overall cognitive health. There’s nothing automatic about our ability to track and manage time effectively.
Although bus driver Crayton may have been born with a few strengths that make his distinction as “a time person” more likely, his ability to estimate accurately the passage of minutes and hours is a learned skill. A few tricks and strategies can help most people internalize an appreciation for time’s flight, researchers say.
The more you routinize the things you do every day, the more realistic are your estimates of the time it takes to do those things. Whether it’s emptying the dishwasher or checking your e-mail, set a time for the task, follow the same patterns and strategies as much as possible, and take note of the time required. This not only makes time an explicit part of your daily routine; it also hones your conscious time-tracking skills. An added benefit: With practice and attention to time, you might pick up speed and develop better strategies for getting tasks done.
Routine helps keep Crayton on schedule. Sometimes, traffic snarls require him to depart from his well-honed route. But when the route between points A and B changes, it helps to know exactly when he’s due at points C and D so that he can get back on track. When our tasks are ordered in predictable succession, they’re more likely to get done at the expected hour.
Such predictable days aren’t possible for everyone. But taking advantage of the routine parts of our days can help us use our time more efficiently and keep track of time spent doing novel things. Catalin Buhusi, a neuroscientist at the Medical University of South Carolina, calls this practice “behavioral timing,” and it’s a mechanism some researchers think is at work throughout the animal kingdom. Much timing in the natural world can be attributed to circadian rhythms. But the 24-hour cycle of day and night fails to explain why, for instance, bees often are observed returning to a given flower at precise intervals only a couple hours apart. Some time-perception researchers believe bees and other animals might have foraging routines that make their comings and goings as predictable as a clock. In this case, Buhusi says, “your timer is yourself — your whole body,” engaged in a routine task.
The cognitive skill of holding several bits of information briefly in memory is key to many everyday challenges: Following instructions, making choices among many options, completing tasks, shifting smoothly to new demands and returning to an interrupted task with a minimum of downtime and delay. Of course, faced with many choices and even more demands on our time, the ability to shift among tasks, sometimes known as multitasking, is a stern requirement.
Working memory is a capacity that varies greatly. It is measurably weaker in many, including those with schizophrenia or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), who have problems estimating the passage of time at the level of minutes and hours. The close association suggests that working memory and reliable time estimation are closely related. “Time awareness has to be connected with being able to retain in one’s mind the things that are in progress and upcoming — and right there is the connection to working memory,” says Dr. Eric Saslow, a pediatric neurologist at the University of California at Los Angeles who works with patients with cognitive deficits and learning disabilities. “Until recently, people never thought of working memory as something that could be modified; they saw it as something more akin to hair color or eye color,” he said.
In recent years, neuroscientists have come to believe that working memory can be taught and sharpened — with potentially broad benefits for everyday function.
On average, studies find, people misestimate the passage of time by 15 percent to 20 percent, according to Buhusi. That means you might spend 48 minutes to 72 minutes completing a task you estimated would take an hour. Breaking that task into six 10-minute segments should not, mathematically, cut your misestimate. But experts agree that, even for people without attention disorders, it is easier to sustain focus for the duration of a shorter task than it is for a longer one. And that greater focus is likely to lead to more efficiency.
Those who work with patients who have ADHD call this “chunking” tasks, and they say it is a crucial strategy for time management, as well as for overcoming inertia and overload. Dr. Martin L. Kutscher, author of several books about living with ADHD and co-author of a forthcoming book titled “Organizing the Disorganized Child,” says that for many who struggle with time-management problems, it’s necessary to break down “to-do” lists into small, manageable increments and to map out a day — or at least a designated “work” portion of the day — in half-hour increments. It’s equally important to look back over one’s estimates for the completion of task chunks and gauge accuracy, Kutscher says. Our internal rhythms can be powerful cues to keep us on track — if we listen to them, experts say. But sleep — one of the circadian rhythms’ most insistent demands — may play the most important role in keeping us in charge of our time.
Researchers have found that getting sufficient rest — generally about eight hours nightly — makes sensory perception sharper, attention more focused, reaction time swifter and time estimates more consistent.
Humans’ circadian rhythms tick entirely separately from the internal clocks that influence our unconscious sense of “timing” or allow us to estimate the passage of minutes or hours. Patients with damage to their suprachiasmic nucleus — the region of the brain in which the circadian clock resides — can still count passing seconds and minutes and hear, see and respond to tiny time gaps that help us make sense of the world. But trying to cheat our internal clock — most notably out of adequate nighttime sleep — can wreak havoc on our ability to focus attention and engage in higher-order reasoning. Good timing, as well as accurate estimation of time’s passage, rely on both to work optimally.
