To understand these two different time cultures and how they contrast, consider the following example at an airport.
A traveler becomes frustrated when the customs official takes too long to stamp their passport and help them pass through the body scanner. The official moves at a slow pace because other team members keep interrupting him, and his phone keeps ringing. The traveler wants the official to finish one task - stamping his passport - before moving on to the next. Instead, the official is trying to complete multiple tasks at once.
The traveler is a classic example of a monochronic person, and the official is polychronic.
The monochronic individual believes in finishing one task at a time. In their time culture, time is a valuable commodity that shouldn't be wasted and sticking to one task at a time ensures that it’s well-managed. The monochronic culture schedules one event at a time in an orderly fashion.
In the polychronic culture, employees can work on several tasks simultaneously. Polychronic individuals thrive on carrying out more than one task at the same time as long as they can be executed together with a natural rhythm. For example, it’s perfectly natural for the official to stamp the passport and take a phone call at the same time because these tasks require different parts of the body and different levels of concentration.
The critical difference between the two time cultures is that monochronic cultures value schedules, while polychronic cultures value interpersonal relationships. That is why a monochronic individual will have an alarm to wake up and other gadgets to help keep time.
A polychronic person, on the other hand, will often rely on other people as time cues.