Time Orientation and Multi-Tasking

The concept of time orientation that classifies people as monochrons (M) or polychrons (P) is not new. Hall has extensively discussed time orientation differences among differing cultures. However, time orientation has not been explicit in the human-machine systems literature. Two experiments are presented in this paper. The first shows the effect of time orientation on human performance in a dual process control task. Polychrons switched more often between the two processes and had significantly better performance overall. The second experiment was a means to understand the underlying differences between monochrons and polychrons and it showed that there were no differences between M and P in the cognitive style analysis, perception, judgement and memory tests. However, there were differences between the two groups in the attention test. Overall, the concept of time orientation seems to be quite promising as an individual difference characteristic