Do you feel that time has been zooming (pun intended) past faster than usual since the work from home trend started?
As parts of the world begin to ease back on their lockdown measures, some people are looking back and finding that their time in isolation seems to have flown surprisingly quickly. That’s not what many of us expected when we were first told that our lives were about to become so much more restricted than usual, confined within our homes and having to learn and work from home.
It seems like the folks at the BBC felt the same. After some digging, the publication had a few ideas on why this could be:
- We create our own subjective experience of time in our minds and it doesn’t always match up with what we read on the clock or the calendar. A 20-minute lunch with a friend goes by in a flash, while a 20-minute wait for a delayed train can feel interminable, yet in reality the duration is identical.
- When we spend every day and every evening at home, the days begin to feel a little similar.
- This blurring of identical days leads us to create fewer new memories, which is crucial to our sense of time perception. Memories are one of the ways that we judge how much time has passed.
- Some people have found themselves busier than ever during the lockdown, juggling the technological challenges of working from home with the new job of home-schooling their children.
- With less to anticipate or arrange, our time horizon has shortened. Now we might only look ahead by a few days or into the far distant future when we imagine this might all be over.