Time is an experience, not a fact.

The clock on our phone or smartwatch has become a constant in our lives, a continuous measurement of time. It tells us how much time we can spend on a task or when we’re late. When our lives get busy, we live by the rhythm of time measurement. It becomes the metronome for everything we do … tik tok … get the groceries done … tik tok … arrive just in time to take the call … tik tok ... have to leave in a rush to get the kids from school … tik tok … tik tok.

You might think every half-hour lasts just as long as any other half-hour because that is what your clock tells you. But the half-hour you spend waiting in line feels different from the half-hour you spend reminiscing with an old friend you accidentally bumped into on the street.

Even Einstein’s theory about time dilation taught us that time is relative. The faster you move through three-dimensional space, the slower you move through time. And if your clock is closer to a source of gravitation, the slower time will pass.

Time depends on your frame of reference.

Even if we are traveling at a similar speed and we are at an equal distance from a source of gravitation, our experience of time can be completely different, though the moment lasted just as long. The way we experience time depends on what is happening in the moment and the state we are in. Our state even changes with the time of day, and so does our perception of time. In the morning, our state and time perception differs from the afternoon.

What does time mean to you?

I ask my participants in every facilitation course, “What does time mean to you?” The answers are always the same:

“A challenge, no matter how much buffer time I plan.”
“Something I consistently underestimate.”
“Pressure.”
“The hardest thing to manage as a facilitator.”

Usually, facilitators are too ambitious when planning activities. They leave little room to build a good “time experience”. Everything is time-boxed to the minute, even the buffer time. An overly ambitious agenda will generate too much pressure for a facilitator from the start, making it hard to create a great time experience for the participants. The risk is that the facilitator gets so hung up on the timing, obsessively checking how much time is left they won’t realize they are putting the burden of time pressure on their participants’ shoulders. A facilitator who is stressed because of timing will often indicate to the group they need to hurry up or that time is not on their side. Putting the burden of time on the participants’ shoulders creates a bad time experience for them. This has a detrimental effect on their creativity, level of connection and focus. It can even jeopardize the “safe space”.

All of the people I have in my facilitation courses have experienced the harmful effect of being stressed about timing and not being able to create a good time experience for their participants.

But a facilitator is the ARCHITECT of the moment, the GUARDIAN of purpose and the OWNER of time. These are the three roles a facilitator takes on to ensure effective co-creation. Being the OWNER of time specifically means that time is not a shared burden; it is not even a shared responsibility.

Building the right time experience for your participants can only be done if you are perfectly in tune with your timing during your facilitation. You have an intuitive connection with time. Instead of constantly watching the clock, you try to sense how much time a conversation or an activity should still take. It depends on whether the participants are close to a breakthrough or a conclusion. It depends on the required and desired level of progress.

I am sure not all facilitators agree with me on this one, but I would never work with a timekeeper. Working with a timekeeper takes away my intuitive connection with time during facilitation. My sense of time is not based on frequent time indications; I try to have a continuous accurate sense of timing. I only check when I am not sure anymore – when I feel I have lost my sense of timing.

To be that kind of owner of time, you have to start with imagining the possible time experience of your participants during your planning phase when you are building a moment of co-creation. You are the architect of that moment, like the architect of a building. So you have to imagine the time experience of your activities like an architect imagines the experience of walking around and living in the building during the design phase. Will it feel rushed, will they need more time to consolidate, will they need time to reflect, will they be overwhelmed, will they still have some brainpower for analysis, and so on. These are crucial questions to tune into your sense of timing during the design phase of the workshop or meeting.

When you have imagined the time experience while preparing a workshop, you are ready to manage the time experience during the workshop. Let’s dig into building the time experience in preparation and facilitation separately.

When you prepare

We are all in a different state in the morning, afternoon and evening. Although people can be early birds or night owls, or in-between, in general, we are able to do better analytical work in the morning and more social and creative work in the afternoon and evening. Daniel Pink refers to this as the “peak-trough-recovery” path. Generally speaking, you peak in the morning, dip in the early afternoon and recover again toward the evening.

The difference between morning and afternoon is explained by the changing levels of neurotransmitters and hormones. In the morning, we have higher levels of dopamine and norepinephrine, which help us to do focused work. In the afternoon, we have higher levels of serotonin. This means, as a facilitator, you should plan different types of activities depending on the time of day.

In the morning

Norepinephrine is also called the “wake-up” molecule: it sharpens attention. Dopamine is the motivational molecule. It fuels goal-directed behavior: it gets us to do things. Both function as neurotransmitters and hormones. Hormones are released in the bloodstream to interact with specific cells, while neurotransmitters work in the nervous system to transmit nerve impulses. Dopamine and norepinephrine create a different time experience compared to serotonin.

Andrew D. Huberman, Associate Professor of Neurobiology and, by courtesy, of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford School of Medicine, also famous for his podcast, the Huberman Lab, states that the more dopamine and norepinephrine are released in the brain, the more we overestimate how much time has passed. He describes it as “increasing the frame rate on your camera.” When a video increases its frame rate, enough slow motion is achieved, and dopamine and norepinephrine increase this frame rate. He explains that if you are doing work that involves adhering to rigid rules like math or something where there’s a right or wrong answer, it would be best to do it in the early part of the day because of how dopamine and norepinephrine impact our time perception. In other words, you will more easily get into a highly focused state to tackle the hardest tasks and problem-solve more effectively in the given timeframe.

Kent Berridge, PhD, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan, explains that dopamine imprints learning at that given moment. “It’s a kind of learning or teaching signal that creates a memory,” said Berridge. He also states that “research showed that you could enhance the memory of a moment, primarily by activating norepinephrine to the amygdala, like creating a flashbulb memory where the world is brighter, where you remember that moment very vividly.”

So, in the morning, you can plan for “concreteness”. This means you can plan activities that need more intense brainwork, consolidating details. Your time schedule can be a bit tighter, and you can add more activities in a short timeframe, knowing your participants might be able to get to conclusions a bit quicker. Your workshop design can contain more detailed work or harder analytical tasks done solo, in duos or smaller groups with less time to share in plenary, expecting the consolidation work in plenary to happen swiftly. The time perception of the participants will likely be fast during the work. After ending the session, they will look back, perceiving they moved a mountain. As they won’t need that much novelty, leveraging their already higher levels of dopamine and norepinephrine, it would be a good time to work on the “knowns”, for example, outlining an approach in more detail, prototyping, analyzing the status of current situations, digging into data, etc.

In the afternoon

Serotonin is also called the satisfaction molecule. It plays a role in regulating mood and is found in association with alpha brainwaves. Alpha brainwaves are also associated with creativity. Our serotonin levels are higher in the afternoon, making it the ideal time for brainstorming and creative work.

Also, our time perception is different with higher levels of serotonin. Dr. Huberman from Stanford University explains how the opposite time perception is true with serotonin compared to dopamine and norepinephrine, making the world seem faster than your internal clock. Thus, people underestimate how much time has passed.

So, in the afternoon, you can plan for “creativity”. This means you can plan activities that need more social connection and a lower analytical filter or less logical thinking. Your schedule needs to be less tight and the agenda less cramped with activity. Decision-making will take a bit longer, and detailed work will be a bit harder. The activities should have more plenary sharing and conversations or work in larger subgroups. The afternoon session is ideally built to capture new ideas, taking the time to let the “unknowns” surface.

Every facilitator has experienced that a busy agenda of activities for co-creation after lunch is hard to accomplish. It takes a lot of energy from the facilitator to keep the focus and pull things forward. To make sure the time experience is still pleasant, not tedious and slow, novelty plays a more important role. The participants are less vigilant than in the morning, but triggering some joy with surprising ways of working, great energizers and allowing for some explorative divergent thinking in a comfortable, cozy setting will still make them feel as if time passed by quickly, and they accomplished a great deal. On the other hand, time pressure and too much detailed focused work might result in the opposite feeling of the workshop being too long and, in hindsight, not having accomplished much.

Plan for a satisfying time experience

From the perspective of imagining what the time experience will be like in the morning and afternoon sessions, you can leverage the dopaminergic effects in the morning, making a lot of progress on tasks that might be perceived as tedious in the afternoon. In the afternoon, you can leverage the serotonic state to improve the social connections in the group and come up with new ideas or perspectives, making sure there is a lot less time pressure. People will not be as sensitive to time pressure in the morning as in the evening. Still, in both cases, they will want to experience progress. Their time investment in the morning and afternoon needs to feel worthwhile. When looking back, they always need to feel they have achieved a lot in little time.

To ensure that everyone remains excited and experiences time to be moving fast, it requires you as a facilitator to ensure there is enough novelty and especially no redundancy in the work you provide.

That novelty comes from understanding what value the co-creation will bring at the start. And at the same time, from breaking free from your own single-minded perspective on the topic and broadening your view with a multitude of perspectives also at the start of the session.

When you close the session, that novelty can also come from proper reflection on everything that has been achieved, all the new possibilities and all the new conclusions

In your preparation, then, it makes sense to plan a slow start and a slow end to allow for enough novelty. A slow start is when you create enough time for everyone to share their personal experiences or thoughts on the topic and clarify their intentions for this shared co-creation moment. It should generate some curiosity about what the session will bring and thereby some anticipation for new things to arrive, for novelties. This already sets the right baseline for a great time experience.

A slow end is when you foresee enough time to reflect upon all the work done and acknowledge its value. By evaluating together what the “new” things are, that can make the difference moving forward. You celebrate novelty. It is a great way to solidify the time experience. If you don’t take the time for this kind of closure, participants tend to feel the session was rushed in the end, and they didn’t arrive at a clear and satisfactory conclusion to move forward on.

A slow start for a good check-in and intention setting and a slow end to arrive at closure and see the work’s potential impact are two important ingredients in planning a great time experience.

When you facilitate

As mentioned above, when you facilitate, you have to be in tune with the timing. You have to be able to sense when an activity or a person is taking up too much time or when it (or they) need(s) more time, maybe even for a silent moment to prepare or reflect. The clock, and especially stress about timing, is only a distraction that can disconnect you from being in tune with timing.

Timing is always fluid during a co-creative session. It is very beneficial for participants’ experience of time to adapt the timing continuously to what is needed to arrive at higher interpretations and better conclusions together. It might mean adjusting the session’s objectives because some activities needed more time than expected. It is always better to arrive at the best qualitative result than to arrive at the planned objectives but in a less qualitative way. In other words, it is better to schedule a second session, if needed, than to push the participants to finish all planned activities for the sake of timing, ending up with less qualitative results.

These are five habits to consider when building a great experience of time during a workshop:

1 - Whenever there is a milestone moment during a session - when a decision or conclusion is made - you will need to ramp up the excitement by using your voice and your own authentic feelings of excitement about the outcome to boost dopamine and norepinephrine levels among the participants. Both dopamine and norepinephrine will enhance learning on the spot, engraining the outcome in their memories to build further on. These exciting milestone moments generate feelings of progress and are the foundation of their time experience.

2 - Always use language that exudes an abundance of time. Never talk about time in terms of lack or shortage. Use expressions like: “We still have a lot of time left …”; “I will add as much time as you need …”; “Take the next 5 minutes to slowly and comfortably finish your thoughts in preparation”.

3 - Allow anyone to express themselves fully, but when they repeat their thoughts, ask them to pitch their thought by sharing the essential takeaway for the group to consider and work with. Don’t cut off people when they are repeating themselves without giving them a chance to provide the essence to the group, but don’t allow people to keep filling up all the airtime with things that are not new or they’ve already expressed.

4 - Alternate between short solo preparation and longer group sharing. Don’t provide too much time to prepare for a group conversation; it will easily become tedious, and it doesn’t need much time to gather initial thoughts. But make sure there is enough time for sharing and conversation. On the other hand, when the sharing doesn’t bring any novelties, install a new moment of solo reflection (maybe adding a trigger question) followed again by a continuation of the group conversation. By alternating between short solo and longer group conversations, you allow everyone to gather their thoughts and share, and you allow for enough headspace for novelties to emerge. It won’t become tedious that easily; everyone will remain more engaged, resulting in a great time experience.

Time ratio: A solo preparation before engaging in a sharing conversation shouldn’t last longer than 5 minutes unless you give them an assignment beyond merely gathering initial thoughts on a question, such as filling in a form or creating a mood board. If you provide 10 minutes or more to gather their thoughts individually, you can risk slowing down the pace too much, and people might start to wander off and do other things. Sharing in a group can easily take 20 to 30 minutes. If you decide to do a couple of alternations between solo preparation and group sharing, the time for sharing can be decreased to 10 or 15 minutes, and at the end, you can install a final longer sharing of 30 minutes. There are no fixed rules for timing; it is not an exact science - you have to tune into your sense of timing while intuitively feeling whether the interaction needs an intervention or more time to continue.

5 - Install more unexpected breaks in the afternoon with a mission. In the afternoon, participants will need more breaks compared to the morning. But if they do the same old things each time during the breaks, for example, walking to the break room for another coffee or opening their inbox, it won’t bring more “novelty”. It may even stress them out about the time they are spending in the workshop. Therefore, give more breaks and add a mission each time. For example, announce a break and instruct them to:

Walk outside and have a sound safari. Become aware of all the specific sounds around you.
Ask a stranger or non-participant about a completely different topic, “Excuse me, would you know a great coffee bar in the neighborhood?”
Call a loved one or friend for 10 minutes just to check in with them.
Read an article on a good news website.
Email someone to thank them or praise them for something they did for you or accomplished.

In sum…

As a facilitator, you are the owner of time. That means that you make sure no one in your co-creative space has to worry even a millisecond about the timing in the workshop. Time is NOT a distraction you want them to have. Instead, you want them to feel time is abundant, and they can rely on you to make sure they can achieve the most together in the given time. They can let go of time and fully embark on the co-creative journey you have designed for them.

A great time experience will make the participants feel satisfied at the end of the co-creation. They will feel as if a lot has been achieved in little time -a highly productive session that made a lot of progress with the right amount of effort. A good time experience will engrain the most important outcomes in their memory and motivate them to continue collaborating.