Things to Consider Western Value: “On Time”
If time is a line, and every event or task falls somewhere on that line, then only one of two things is possible: it is “on time” or it’s not. You can accommodate “early,” but “late” drives you crazy – after all, if one is “early,” there’s always room to be on time. Once you’re late, you’re late and you can never recover the time you “lost.” And if time is a line and every task falls on somewhere on it, it’s only obvious that you can “only do one thing at a time” or concentrate on “one thing at a time.” It’s a natural law in Western cultures that everybody accepts as real. And everybody knows that the most important thing to focus on is the job at hand. With such a linear focus on time, it’s important in your culture to “stick to the schedule.” Your work requires deadlines, plans and schedules. In your culture, you can rely on the predictability of buses, trains, and airplanes based on their schedules, and be reasonably certain that the 3:00 from Heathrow will not be leaving at 2:30 just because everybody is aboard. And if the captain announces an unspecified delay while the mechanics look over some problem in the cockpit, there’s a collective groan among the passengers. After all, they’ve got appointments to keep at the other end, and being late is not only rude, it will throw everybody else off schedule.
This linear outlook about time also means that you require focus and concentration to get each task done in its proper order. And for you to focus and concentrate, you establish a fence around your privacy and expect other people to respect your boundaries. At the same time, your culture probably presents you with unwritten rules that everybody knows about respecting the privacy and concentration of other people. You are hesitant to interrupt, apologize if you do, and feel terrible at disturbing the other person at their work. Not only do you think of time like a line, you think of it as a real “thing” – as if it’s a resource like money or water. True, you can measure time (like you can measure those other things), but I hate to tell you this: time is not concrete or physical – no matter what your watch says! Therefore you can’t spend it, save it, invest it, kill it or waste it – but you speak and act like you can. Not only that, you get extremely anxious or experience stress when you think you’ve somehow “lost” time. Your Western linear approach to time is all geared toward the future. You think “if I spend or invest this time now, I’ll get some reward or payoff in the future.” And because everything happens for you along the line, your relationships come and go – in time. You say hello, focus your time and energy on this relationship right here, and when it’s time, you say goodbye and move on to the next one. In other words, in most Western cultures, relationships with other people are short-term or short-lived. And everybody’s OK with that. Because relationships in Western culture tend to be shorter term, it’s important that nobody “owe” anybody anything. There’s a great respect for private property, and most Westerners are uncomfortable borrowing or lending except in very formal transactions (like buying a house or car). Think about advice you may have got from your parents or grandparents – or even popular proverbs in your culture: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” or “quick to borrow is slow to pay,” or “before borrowing from a friend, consider which you need more” all point to a sense of shame or dishonor in lending and borrowing. Even in your formal borrowing and lending relationships (like with banks or credit card companies) the idea that you are encouraged to pay “on time” and penalized for paying “late” originates with the Western idea that time is a concrete, fixed thing that cannot be violated.
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