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One thing I find difficult to get used to here in the Philippines is
the “timing thing,” and I don’t mean in this case particularly
not being prompt for appointments, I have actually noticed
significant improvements in that over the last few years; no longer
do people turn up a day late for appointments, there is a much
higher consciousness in business dealings of the need to be prompt.
What I’m addressing here is the 24-hour time pattern.
I tend to work to a pattern, albeit a bit
flexible, get up, kids to school, go to work, come home, dinner,
kids to bed and then either work, have an appointment, or rarely, go
out for some form of entertainment. I remember once arriving in
Caracas, Venezuela (another ex-Spanish colony) from Europe at about
four in the morning and being amazed at the number of people
wandering around in the street, as I would have expected that most
people would have been in bed asleep. Western patterns of life
didn’t seem to apply, and to a degree, the same thing happens
here. In Australia children and encouraged nationally to go to bed
at about 7:30 a.m.
It’s not unusual here for people to set of to
travel fairly long distances at midnight, arriving at their
destination at five or six in the morning and then go about their
business. I don’t know how they have the energy; in fact, I
suspect that they don’t really have the energy at all, at some
point in the day a nap would be necessary in order to catch up on
lost sleep. People can’t be at their mental and physical best
operating like this can they?
Activity patterns do not appear to have the same
universal application in Asia and the Philippines as they do in
Western societies. By my observation Asian children seem to be
around for longer in the evenings than Western children, frequently
going to sleep at the same time as their parents—perhaps this is
the way things should be, rather than “packing them off” as in
Australia at 7:30 at night so that the parents can have time to
themselves. It does though tend to encourage less consciousness of
the potential for life patterns later on.
I cannot function too well on the basis of
snatched ad hoc sleep, and because of this I think that others are
the same, perhaps this is not the case. Patterns though do tend to
exert a degree of discipline on life and make planning much easier
and “happenings” in general more predictable. I would not
support the Australian approach of forcing kids to bed at 7:30 p.m.;
however, regular patterns are useful—calls to meet people in the
middle of the night, or for that matter, in the middle of the normal
working day as if this is the most usual thing in the world, are not
generally appreciated.
Perhaps I’m being too boringly Northern
European here and chaos is either more efficient or more fun, but I
feel that predictability certainly in business and in life is a more
secure planning basis, jumping from one thing to another at “the
drop of a hat” and at any time of the day or night cannot be
efficient.
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mawootton@gmail.com
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