A Brief History of Time

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned the concept of time or efficiency before, but it’s certainly come up in most discussions I’ve had with fellow Westerners who have been here for a while or are only passing through. The most common response I hear when expressing frustrations over the pervasive and almost pre-meditated inefficiency I witness everyday is a reference to culture.

Much of our pre-departure training revolved around finding ways to let slide ones dependence on Western concepts of time. Being aware of the fact that culture has a profound influence on time management certainly helped me to prepare for confronting it for the first time, but no amount of preparation can prepare you for prolonged exposure to it. I’m not saying that I get visibly perturbed every time a half-hour goes by without anything getting done. In fact, I usually laugh it off. But when hour delays turn into three hours and entire days go by without any structure or visible productivity, I begin to wonder how any progress can be made at all.

A delegation from RCT Copenhagen, our partner organization responsible for 80% of our current funding, visited the office on a project appraisal mission this week. I might call my experiences with them this week a cold shower, as they served to wake me up out of this slumber of inefficiency I had so gradually fallen into over the past month. Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but in the very least it highlighted how different our Western approach to work and productivity is from that which is dominant in this part of the world. Even the three from RCT (two Danes and one Norwegian) who had been through this many times before and each of whom was more than twice my age became visibly frustrated by the lack of progress we were making during their five day visit. Initiatives that were supposed to take one hour ended up always taking four; hour-long lunched turned into an hour and a half; nobody even showed up to the conference room until 11am despite the fact that we had been waiting there since 10…the list goes on.

Anyways, I’m not going to get into the pros and cons of each system right now, or even whether this approach is pervasive in every industry and the government (actually, it’s worse in government), and not simply in NGOs (I hear our organization is actually a model of efficiency, relatively speaking) – that’s a debate for the sociologists – but I will say that it’s proving to be rather difficult to adapt to a system other than that which one has grown up with and taken to be the norm. This makes me realize that trying to impose what I see as ‘efficient working practices’ within this cultural context is in fact as difficult to impose this working structure on our own system in Canada.

I can see it now: legislation forcing Canadians to start their work day at “around 10am”; to never be on time for appointments – in fact, to be at least an hour late for each of them; mandating workshops and conferences not to print up actual schedules or even think about sticking to one, and during these vaguely structured conferences which don’t even begin until 11am each day, the host organization must have its in-house coffee boys interrupt proceedings every twenty minutes with clattering trays of cups and saucers, crunchy cookies and rattling tea pots. Cell phones must be fitted with the loudest and most obnoxious ring tones; instead of extending the common courteousy of turning them off when in a meeting, leave them on and let them ring. Or better yet, answer your calls and stay at the conference table while talking to the person on the other line. Much time must also be spent trying to make dysfunctional electronic equipment work when it’s not even necessary in the first place.

Looking back at this last paragraph, I realize not only that my rational analysis of efficiency and time has turned into more of a rant about a frustrating and minimally productive five day session, but also that many of these things exist in my own country (wasting time trying to figure out how to setup the DVD player or overhead mic in the lecture hall and the legions of disrespectful cell-phone users are among them). But I maintain that each of these little annoyances are magnified ten-fold in the developing world, and therefore that coming to the understanding that it’s “the way things are” and there’s very little I can do about it is much more difficult in practice than it is in theory.