My personal experience in the Middle East: expect everyone to be at least half an hour late (you're stuck in a huge traffic jam anyway), don't be surprised if someone is 2 hours late, and don't view 11pm as an unusual time for a meeting (joking: there exists a time zone in which the meeting starts in time). I would classify it as "multi-active".

Personally, I like it that people are not angry with you when you're really late (again, traffic jam). I experience this as relieving.

Oh dear... I was looking through the comments of the top trending thread in HN now (6 hour workday) and this comment reminded me of your post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7839210

I like the choice of emotion: "relieving". It signifies some form of acceptance that "things spill over and nothing could be done about it".

Middle east cultures : Multi-active and relationship oriented perception of time. They are more relationship oriented, both Israeli and Palestine people. Also Afganistan or Beduin types consider relationships to be the most important thing in the world. Middle easterns like to live in the moment.

Indian cultures: As far as my understanding goes, it's a mixture of compartmentalized time and cyclic time. The ritual or traditions or religions kind of show a cyclic view of time, specially with the karma viewpoint, but the offices and businesses are laid by british, hence more compartmentalized way of thinking is done there. Basically with Indians you can expect sudden no communication, or the office things might take huge amount of time too.

I'm Bangladeshi and both are my view point, and I've indian and Middle eastern friends, but I've not exactly visited the countries.

''The important thing here isn't that any one country is 'wrong'''

...yet the article concludes with a remark that "we are confident (in North America and Northern Europe) that we have approached the optimum management of time". This amounts to a good deal of circular reasoning - this is can only be considered "efficient" if, as explained at the beginning, your goal is to fulfill as many tasks as possible.

But that view dismisses the cost that such detailed planning brings with it: it doesn't consider the increased wear from stress, and doesn't account for those achievements gained by following opportunities at happenstances that couldn't be planned for. It also misses the inherent efficiency of going with the flow by following tradition and customs, where you know what will happen without the need to build a detailed analysis for each step.

You can think of those costs as "externalities", goods that were lost because no one had them in mind when building the plan.

To be more precise: if your goal is to fulfill as many planned tasks as possible.

Maybe in the south they fulfil more tasks, but they were not planned in advance.

I hazard a guess, that colonisation and western homogenisation has largely overwritten the local notion of time with the western model, amidst the vast majority of the population.