Did you ever notice how when you\u2019re meeting somebody at a particular time and place that if you get there early you begin to question if you\u2019re at the right place, there at the right time, or whatever?<\/p>\n
Even worse, did you ever start to think you\u2019d gone crazy and you\u2019re getting ready to call whomever to figure out where they are and the arrive…well after the specified time…and they don\u2019t seem flustered at all.<\/p>\n
Or flip the coin, you arrive \u201calmost\u201d on time, and whomever you\u2019re 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?<\/p>\n
That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201c-ish\u201d being added to a time was plus or minus 13 minutes. So 2:00-ish was from 1:47 to 2:13. That\u2019s a pretty darned big window, when you think about it. Especially if you\u2019re in a small town, but if you\u2019re traveling halfway across the country, that\u2019s a drop in the bucket.<\/p>\n
The \u201c-ish\u201d 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 \u201cUnifying Theory\u201d moments that helped pull a bunch of concepts together and made sense of a number of things all at once.<\/p>\n
The TMU is a measure of time, so let\u2019s say that we have two folks with differing TMUs. Let\u2019s say that \u201cMom\u201d has a TMU of 5 minutes and \u201cJeff\u201d has a TMU of 15 minutes (of course, the names have been changed to protect the innocent, namely me).<\/p>\n
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\u2019s at the right location. Meanwhile, Jeff is running a bit late, but well within his 15 minute TMU, so he doesn\u2019t call to say he\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201conly\u201d 12:05 and he\u2019s still within his 15 minute TMU. By 12:15 (Mom +4 TMU) is beginning to ask those \u201care you in the ditch questions\u201d, but Jeff arrives blissfully unaware that he\u2019s actually \u201clate\u201d, since his arrival is \u201conly\u201d +1 TMU.<\/p>\n
The shorter a person\u2019s TMU, the more anxiety they will feel when other people don\u2019t arrive on time. The longer the TMU, the longer you\u2019ll wait for somebody else without feeling a great degrees of anxiety. In fact, with a sufficiently long TMU you\u2019ll never notice that anybody is late.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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 \u201cright on time\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
If you find yourself stressed, think about your TMU and their probably TMU and see if that might be the difference.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Did you ever notice how when you\u2019re meeting somebody at a particular time and place that if you get there early you begin to question if you\u2019re at the right place, there at the right time, or whatever? Even worse, did you ever start to think you\u2019d gone crazy and you\u2019re getting ready to call […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[38,129,75,82],"class_list":["post-338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-productivity","tag-gtd","tag-perfectionist","tag-success","tag-tmu"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n