In other words, a person who lives in P-time will suggest a general approximate meeting slot in the coming future without nailing down the exact moment that meeting will take place.
When I worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana (a P-time culture), I used to feel puzzled that a local teacher at my school would tell me ‘I am coming now,’ but twenty minutes later I would still be waiting with no sign of that person’s arrival. Later, I learned that if someone was actually coming right away, they would say ‘I am coming now, now.’ That second ‘now’ made all the difference.
In the wake of Hall’s work, psychologist Robert Levine began meticulously observing and analyzing various cultural approaches to clocks. He noted that some cultures measure time in five-minute intervals, while other cultures barely use clocks and instead schedule their day on what Levine calls ‘event time’: before lunch, after sunrise, or in the case of the locals in Burundi, ‘when the cows come home.’
Of course, a business manager in any country in the world is more likely to wear a wristwatch than to tell time by the sunset or by passing cows. But the way individuals experience the time shown by the hands on the watch still differs dramatically from one society to the next.