The Time Twist Paradox

One bleak monsoon morning in 2016, I journaled about a terrifying nightmare I’d just awoken from. It was one of those ugly, foreboding dreams that feel, uh...“asymptotic”, if you will. The ones where you need to be someplace but can’t reach because you keep getting late. And the world is waiting on you.

In my nightmare, I missed my calculus exam because of a faulty alarm clock. The device had malfunctioned in a mess of smoke and plastic on my desk, startling all of my senses early in the morning. When I’d unplugged it from the wall, instantly worried about the time it would take to clean up the debris and call the fire department, horror ensued. The clock began to bounce. It shrieked the time on repeat, a cruel revolt against my killing its power supply.

07:55!

07:56!

07:57!...

I didn’t care for the supernatural turn of events and the fact that this was clearly a very sinister clock. I cared that it was jibing me, mocking my love for punctuality by incessantly reminding me what time it was. And it was working because I entered a state of panic. If I had any doubts about reaching the exam hall that morning, the distress that the clock's timekeeping was putting me through left no room for confusion. I was obviously going to miss this exam.

As all shitty things finally do come to an end, so did my nightmare. I woke up to the rains in Mumbai, remembering that this was my summer vacation and that exam season had long ended. Still, the jitters had gripped me good. The dream had felt so real.

That’s what got me thinking about the emotional paradox of timekeeping. Why had being reminded of the time worsened my attempts to actually try being on time? Would I have made it to the exam (albeit late) if the faulty clock had been silent? Did my speed and performance deteriorate with the growing awareness of time passage? (These questions exclude the obviously damaging stimuli such as the loud beeps of the alarm clock, fire hazards, etc. and rather consider the direct effects of simply knowing how much time is remaining for a task.)

Interested in giving more meaning to these wispy thoughts, I came up with a hypothetical: it was the day of my exam and I woke up late. Only this time, I didn’t know it. Without eyeing the clock, it took me about thirty minutes to get ready. I was out the door and inside the exam hall in a jiffy. Sure I was late to my test, but not enough to miss it entirely.

Today, one hot coffee after rediscovering my 2016 diary, my curiosity has been piqued all over again by the thought experiment from eight years ago. The ideas I'd penned down were too abstract but too obvious. They also felt too interesting to leave aside. So...

...I decided to give this a little more shape. Welcome to the Time Twist Paradox!

Please note: this is a fun little piece not meant to be taken seriously (yes, even though it is written in a serious fashion).

I. Setting up the thought experiment

In equilibrium

• A woman takes approximately fifteen minutes to shower and get ready for work

• The time she takes passes organically—she doesn’t time herself but manages to get ready at the same speed every day as a result of routine habit

• Let’s assume she wakes up at 7am and is ready by 7.15am. She finishes breakfast and leaves the home at 8am to catch her bus to work

Introducing our stimulus

• The woman buys a new Smart Robot to help her improve her daily productivity

• Based on her wake-up time, breakfast routine, and bus schedule, the robot calculates that she has until 7.30am to finish getting ready (she normally finishes by 7.15am), and that she can still catch the bus after a good breakfast

• In simple words, the robot has informed her that she has more than fifteen minutes to get ready (7.00am – 7.30am)

The resulting phenomenon

• The woman is now acutely aware of the time she has, regardless of how long she naturally takes every day

• In an attempt to allocate time efficiently within the thirty-minute period, the woman’s natural routine is disturbed

• To elaborate, her conscious, continued time-keeping while selecting clothes, showering and putting on makeup, for example, makes her task of getting ready her secondary objective. Her primary focus, instead, is now making the thirty-minute timeframe

II. Introspection

Pondering over tea!

• If we were given an hour to make tea, would one hour be sufficient for the task? Would it be a little too sufficient?

I decided to try something along these lines and gave my sister one full hour to prepare a cup of tea for me (smirk).

Contrary to the amount of time she was given, she spent only the last seven minutes making the tea, because…well, she just had to boil some water and steep a few leaves after all!

Interestingly, after the time elapsed, she said she wasn’t satisfied with the tea at all and scoffed at the experiment. As I’d imagined.

But a couple of interesting things struck me. One hour wasn’t satisfactorily long enough for her to present a cup of tea she otherwise whips up in a few minutes. She might have completed the task more “perfectly” had she gotten more time after the end-moment rush or not been monitored on time at all.

So I decided to break down her points of focus during the sixty minutes of her task. She

• Checked the clock multiple times. Allocated the last several minutes to making tea because an hour was too much time

• Did several other things to pass time. Scrolled through reels, read a couple of pages of a book, and sat in the living room to soak up the sun

• Grumbled at the far too distant deadline (thus having to wait out the experiment and spend longer with me) and chose to begin the task only sufficiently close to the deadline

In essence, her focus was time and not the actual task. As such, the act of making tea didn’t conclude perfectly enough for her.

In spite of the sixty long minutes, my masala chai was ready at the last second, leaving me to think about the emotional paradox of timekeeping again...and perhaps the fact that no allocated time duration would actually ever allow the maker to feel their tea achieved “perfection”.

III. The Time Twist Paradox

In simple words, I conjecture that when we allocate time to complete a task that naturally takes a particular amount of time to do, we observe a

• Change in the way we complete the task, e.g. fussing when to start making the tea, feeling like there is simultaneously too much and too little time

• Constant need to improve or keep doing the task to fill up remaining time, i.e. not knowing when to stop

• Subsequent dissatisfaction after the task’s completion, feeling like it could have finished quicker or in better fashion as happens organically

Defining it

Here's where my favorite ever math professor would have chuckled at me for making unserious things serious, but *gulp* I'm going to go ahead and define things because doing so brings me immense satisfaction!

I start by defining Perfect in my conjecture

• A task is defined as being Perfect when it is completed with satisfaction. Additional time does not prolong the task or help perform the task better. It is already complete

• A Perfect task is identical to how the task lapses organically without time allocation

Next, defining the paradox itself

• The Time Twist Paradox is defined as the phenomenon of either a) taking longer than normal to achieve a Perfect task, or b) desiring more time to make an existing task Perfect when there is increased awareness of time allocated for the task, which remains different from the time it takes to naturally complete the task unmonitored

• The phenomenon prevails due to psychological factors that replace the primary objective of completing the task with being on time