POLYCHRONIC
This word isn’t especially new — examples occur from the early nineties at least — but it has only recently begun to appear more widely, usually in reference to the stress suffered by office workers trying to cope with too many things at once. That has led to buzz phrases such as time poor, acceleration disorder, hurry sickness, and compression tiredness. If you’re a polychronic personality, you work happily with many things happening at one time, in a non-linear and emotional way that lets you change your plans at a moment’s notice without distress and without worrying about deadlines. It’s the opposite of the personality type that human-resource experts say works best in the modern workplace, one that’s termed monochronic: time-driven, working in a linear and orderly way, intent on getting one job completed before starting the next. Both words contain the suffix chronic that comes from the Greek khronos, “time”; monochronic has another meaning dating from the 1840s that denotes events happening at one period of time.
Traditionally, cultures are divided into monochronic (where time is regarded as linear, people do one thing at a time and lateness and interruptions are not tolerated) and polychronic (where time is seen as cyclical, punctuality is unimportant and interruptions are acceptable).
[Daily Telegraph, Dec. 1999]
Our move into a nonstop culture is inevitable. But the question is whether we want it to be a monochronic-type one, or a polychronic-type one? For business the answer is easy, the former, because it means schedules can still be adhered to, but for the rest of us?
[Viewpoint, Issue Seven, 2000]
