User studies and intuition both suggest that the activities that a knowledge worker engages in change—sometimes dramatically—over time. Projects and milestones come and go, and the tools and information resources used within an activity often change over time as well. Furthermore, activities completed in the past and their outcomes often impact activities in the present, and ongoing activities will, in turn, affect activities that will be undertaken in the future. Capturing activity over the course of time has long been a problem for desktop computing.

he two patterns—monochronic and polychronic—form a continuum, because polychronicity is the extent to which people prefer to engage in two or more tasks simultaneously, and the complete absence of any simultaneous involvements, engaging tasks one at a time, is the least polychronic position on the continuum.

The retention of “many problems in their minds simultaneously” speaks direcdy to the definition of polychronicity, men­tal activity being a component of polychronicity as well as overt behavior (Per­sing 1999)

Demographic Characteristics.

Such questions not only point the direction for expanding our knowledge of polychronicity but also suggest the likelihood of various social and psycholog­ical determinants of it. One such determinant seems especially intriguing, and it is the individual’s breadth of attention. Breadth of attention is “the number and range of stimuli attended to at any one time” (Kasof 1997, p. 303). This concept is used to describe screeners, people who focus on a small range of stimuli and filter or “screen out” other stimuli. Conversely, nonscreeners attend to a large range of stimuli and are aware of a much larger range of potentially unrelated stimuli (Kasof 1997)

So does polychronicity scale? Or is it a nested phenomenon whereby someone might be monochronic within hour- long intervals but polychronic when the frame enlarges to a month? And if so, what might be the consequences of different nesting combinations?

figure 3.4. Forms of polychronic and monochronic patterns of behavior

June Cotte and S. Ratneshwar (1999) have certainly documented the ability of some people to vary their behavior radically along the polychronicity continuum as they moved between work and leisure activi­ties. Hall suggested the facility to make such shifts may be related to what he called a “high adaptive factor” (Bluedorn 1998, p. 114), such people being more flexible along the polychronicity continuum than others. In a life context of varying polychronicity demands, perhaps an individual whose own polychro­nicity lies near the average of the varying environmental demands might be able to cope most readily with them because the largest adjustment required would be smaller, hence less potentially uncomfortable or stressing than from any other position on the polychronicity continuum

Brown and Eisenhardt studied change and project management in com­puter firms and found that firms with less successful project portfolios demon­strated very low amounts of communication across projects. This was part of the context in which projects were planned, divided into small tasks, and then executed in a “structured sequence of steps” (1997, p. 14). A structured sequence is, of course, a monochronic strategy, and the low amount of communication is consistent with the proposition that monochronic strategies generate less awareness of other activities and tasks. One of the managers in their study re­marked, “Most people only look at their part” (p. 14); another, “The work of everyone else doesn’t really affect my work” (p. 14). These responses contrasted with the pattern of work in the companies that managed their portfolios of projects more successfully, which Brown and Eisenhardt characterized as “it­erative” (p. 14). Iterative (repetitive) patterns are suggestive of the back and forth flow of polychronic strategies

Group Effectiveness

So individual polychronicity is related to several individual variables. Rela­tive to less polychronic people, more polychronic people appear to have more of the following:• Extraversión (extroversion)• Favorable inclination toward change• Tolerance of ambiguity• Formal education• Striving for achievement• Impatience and irritability• Frequency of lateness and absenteeismThose same people appear to have less of the following:• Conscientiousness• Stress (only in some jobs)But, as will be revealed in the following section, these are not the only in­dividual variables to which individual polychronicity is related

Both studies reveal a positive correlation between polychronicity and speed values: The more polychronic the organization, the more doing things rapidly is valued in its culture. Although these consistent findings about the speed-polychronicity relationship support the explanation of the size- polychronicity relationship developed in this discussion, they are not a direct test of this explanation, which is, admittedly, speculative. More direct tests must await studies deliberately designed to investigate this explanation

in a more polychronic culture, people would stand closer to each other while talking. So time and space are related in the social as well as the physical world.

At the level of individual beliefs and behavior, the nature of polychronicity as either a trait or a state becomes an important issue. Ifit is a trait, individu­als will be much more consistent, even habitual, in the polychronicity process strategies they follow, more consistent than if polychronicity preferences are a state. But if polychronicity is a state, it will be affected much more by the con­textual factors in an individual’s environment, leading to much greater vari­ability in patterns of polychronicity behavior. So the degree of stability or its converse, the amount of variability, would provide important clues about poly­chronicity’s statelike or traitlike identity.

At the group level—group referring to all potential culture-carrying aggre­gations larger than a single individual (e.g., departments, organizations, soci­eties, etc.)—polychronicity is a value and belief complex that manifests itself in overt process strategies. Although the strength with which it is held may vary, as a fundamental process strategy—it is fair to say the fundamental process strategy—whichever position along the polychronicity continuum is normative in a culture is apt to be held strongly. This is because such process strategies are mainly learned unintentionally, usually unconsciously. Such learned knowledge is retained at the level of culture Edgar Schein (1992) labeled basic underlying assumptions. This deepest of cultural levels normally contains beliefs and val­ues prescribing behaviors that are so taken for granted and institutionalized that they seldom rise to the conscious level for extensive examination and dis­cussion (Schein 1992, p. 22). Consequently, they are difficult to change, and in this sense they are strongly held.

From the beginning (Hall 1981b), polychronicity has been analyzed at both the group and individual levels. As such, it has been seen as both a cultural and an individual phenomenon. And values about the same phenomenon can and do occur in both cultures and personalities, but this does not mean that rela­tionships involving them are the same across levels of analysis (e.g., Dansereau, Alutto, and Yammarino 1984; Robinson 1950). Relationships found at one level of analysis, individual or group, are suggestive of those relationships at another and are reasonable justifications for hypothesizing their existence as a prelude to their empirical investigation, such investigation clearly being necessary to establish the existence of relationships across multiple levels of analysis

Although it is easier to see this distinction in terms of a dichot­omy—polychronic or monochronic—polychronicity is a variable that reflects an underlying continuum of engagement preferences and practices, and a po­tentially infinite set of gradations distinguish one individual’s preferences from another’s, as well as one culture’s from another’s

Moreover, the correlations between the preference-for-engaging-two- or-more-events-simultaneously dimension and the other dimensions in the best-fitting model were very low, so Palmer and Schoorman concluded, “The three dimensions of time use preference [ preference-for-engaging-two-or- more-events-simultaneously], time tangibility, and context do not represent . highly correlated measures and should be considered separately” (1999, p. 336).

Following Blue­dorn et al. (1999, p. 207) and Hall (Bluedorn 1998, p. no), polychronicity is the extent to which people (1) prefer to be engaged in two or more tasks or events simultaneously and are actually so engaged (the preference strongly implying the behavior and vice versa), and (2) believe their preference is the best way to do things.

The “going back” is indicative of the back-and-forth pattern of polychronic behavior, because it is another way of engaging several activities during the same tim

And although an infinite number of patterns are possible, all strategies for engaging life’s activities fall along a con­tinuum known as polychronicity, a continuum describing the extent to which people engage themselves in two or more activities simultaneously. That this choice is fundamental is revealed by the fact that most people most of the time are unaware that they are even making it. This is because the choice of strategy results from a combination of culture and personality, both of which store these choices and preferences at deep levels, very deep levels. Nevertheless, a choice or a decision made unconsciously is still a choice or a decision

By mosaic, we mean that time is often simultaneouslyinhabited by multiple types of interaction that are forced to form a coherent whole. Unlikeconcepts like multi-tasking(doing multiple tasks ‘at once’) or polychronicity(a reported preference for doing multiple tasks at once) [44], mosaic timerefers to the negotiated merging of multiple social spheres into a layered or fitted set of simultaneous interactions