By Daniel, ESL Educator & Everyday Curiosities Writer
Think about three small waits from an ordinary day. You press the elevator button and watch the numbers. You stand at the baggage carousel after a flight while the same three suitcases go around. You stare at a little spinning circle on your phone while a page loads. None of these takes very long. So why do they feel so much longer than five minutes of cooking, talking or working?
Quick answer: When you’re waiting, your attention has nothing to do except notice time, and time you watch closely feels longer. When you’re busy, your attention goes to the task, and the minutes slip by without being counted. Not knowing how long a wait will last makes it feel even longer.
At the elevator: when the clock gets all your attention
Psychologists who study time often explain it like this. Imagine your brain has an inner clock that produces small “ticks.” Between the clock and your sense of time there is a gate. The psychologists Dan Zakay and Richard Block called this an attentional gate. The more attention you give to time, the wider the gate opens and the more ticks get counted. More ticks means the interval feels longer.
At the elevator, there is nothing else to think about. You’re waiting for one thing to happen, so your attention goes almost entirely to time. The gate opens wide. When you’re cooking dinner, your attention is on the onions and the pan, so fewer ticks get through. In a large review of studies, Block, Zakay and Peter Hancock found that when people knew they would have to judge a period of time, a heavier mental workload made that period feel shorter.
The idea is older than the lab research. In a well-known 1985 essay on waiting lines, the service expert David Maister quoted the philosopher William James: “Boredom results from being attentive to the passage of time itself.” Maister added that a more everyday version is the saying “A watched pot never boils.”
Maister also told a story that has become a classic. A hotel group got complaints that guests waited too long for elevators. Someone suggested putting mirrors near them. According to Maister, people’s natural habit of checking their appearance greatly reduced the complaints. The wait didn’t get shorter. It just got less empty.
At the baggage carousel: why a longer walk ended the complaints
A 2012 opinion piece in The New York Times, “Why Waiting Is Torture,” opened with a similar story from an unnamed Houston airport “some years ago.” Passengers complained about slow baggage claim. The airport added more baggage handlers, and the average wait dropped to eight minutes, which was within industry standards. The complaints continued.
A closer look showed the problem. Passengers walked about one minute to baggage claim and then stood for about seven minutes waiting for their bags. Most of their time was spent doing nothing. So the airport moved arrival gates farther away and sent bags to the most distant carousel. The walk became about six times longer, and complaints, the article says, fell to almost zero.
It’s a great story, but it comes without the airport’s name or data, so treat it as an illustration, not proof. The idea behind it, that occupied time feels shorter than empty time, is the first principle on Maister’s list.
On the loading screen: the trouble with not knowing
A spinning circle tells you nothing. Will it take two seconds or two minutes? Maister argued that uncertain waits feel longer than known, finite waits, and that unexplained waits feel longer than explained ones. His examples are familiar: a patient told the doctor will be thirty minutes late can relax, but a patient told the doctor will be free “soon” sits in nervous anticipation. A pilot who keeps announcing “only a few more minutes” makes things worse.
Computer scientists have tested a related question. In a 2007 study, Chris Harrison and colleagues showed 22 people progress bars that lasted the same amount of time but moved in different ways. Bars that sped up near the end were seen as faster. Bars with pauses were seen as taking longer, even when the total time was the same.
A twist: the wait that feels short later
Here is something surprising. How time feels while it’s happening and how it feels when you remember it are not the same. Researchers call these prospective and retrospective judgments. In the same review, when people were asked about a period only afterward, without warning, a heavier workload made them say more time had passed, not less.
So a busy afternoon flies by but seems full and long when you look back. Twenty minutes in a waiting room drags while you’re in it, but leaves little in your memory. If you’d like to know more about how memory stretches time, see Why Does Time Seem to Move Faster as We Get Older?
Next time you’re stuck waiting
- Give your attention a job. A short article, a word game, or planning tomorrow’s to-do list all pull attention away from the clock.
- Find out how long. Ask, check the app, or read the sign. A known wait is easier than an open-ended one.
- Stop checking the time. Every look at the clock opens the gate a little wider.
- If you make others wait, give them a realistic time and something to do.
Useful words from this story
- drag (on): to seem to pass very slowly. “The last hour of the flight really dragged.”
- fly by: to pass very quickly. “The weekend flew by.”
- occupied: busy; having something to do. “Keep the kids occupied during the drive.”
- open-ended: without a fixed end or limit. “An open-ended wait is stressful.”
- a watched pot never boils: a saying meaning that if you wait and watch for something, it seems to take longer.
A Note from Daniel
I wrote this for anyone who has ever stared at a clock and felt let down by it. Waiting might seem simple, but it reveals a lot about how our attention works and how our brains create a sense of time from what we experience. I hope this article helps make that familiar frustration easier to understand and possibly even a bit less annoying.
Sources
- Maister, D. H. “The Psychology of Waiting Lines.” In The Service Encounter (Czepiel, Solomon & Surprenant, eds.), Lexington Books, 1985. davidmaister.com
- Zakay, D., & Block, R. A. “An Attentional-Gate Model of Prospective Time Estimation.” montana.edu (PDF)
- Zakay, D. “Psychological time as information: the case of boredom.” Frontiers in Psychology, 2014. frontiersin.org
- Block, R. A., Hancock, P. A., & Zakay, D. “Cognitive workload affects duration judgments: Meta-analytic evidence.” Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2007. peterhancock.ucf.edu
- “Why Waiting Is Torture.” The New York Times, August 2012 (excerpt). Association for Psychological Science. psychologicalscience.org
- Harrison, C., Amento, B., Kuznetsov, S., & Bell, R. “Rethinking the Progress Bar.” UIST ’07, ACM, 2007. chrisharrison.net
Stay curious, and the ordinary will start to speak. — Daniel