The urgency of requests from peers is determined by how it furthers one’s own goals, the conveyed urgency of the superior who may have flowed down the request and the private valuation of the individual. When competing requests come from peers, the decision may be made on the basis of who is liked more or who has previously helped that person, not the actual need.

Time structuring involves setting the time, duration and sequence of events in a day. There are several benefits to time structuring:

When we use time structuring, we set up time for different tasks. The priority of the task determines how much time it gets and whether or not we are willing to tolerate interruptions. Our place in a workplace hierarchy can dictate our time structuring and how we handle requests from managers, peers, contracted staff and employees.

When we look further into this question of time, we have all experienced the phenomenon of subjective time, with a clock usefully representing objective time. “The watched pot never boils”, says an old idiomatic expression. This is subjective time – an anticipated event seems to take much longer to happen,