Get Out Of My personal space-time!

It’s really frustrating when people intrude into your personal space. Your personal space is immediate space that surrounds you, and it’s called yours because YOU get to decide what happens in it and who get’s to join the party.

The size of my personal space really depends on my energy levels. If my energy is low, you better keep your distance, as my personal space will be measured in meters. Even though I might be able to bear somebody stepping into my personal space, it really drains my energy. Which sucks as I probably was already low on energy to begin with.

The fact that you right now aren’t welcome in my personal space doesn’t mean I hate you, I just means I need time to recharge until I’m ready to face your pretty face again. As an introvert this means sitting by myself and chilling out. If you happen to be an extrovert, you might need to hang with all your bffs at the same time.

The concept of personal space goes way back to 1963 when it was introduced by Edward T. Hall, yeah I googled it. With the rise of mobile and being online 24/7, people are not only intruding on your physical space they also start to lay claim on your time.

Today on November 24th 2015, I officially like to add an extra dimension to your personal space, your time.

I would love to introduce you to the concept of personal space-time.

For all the rookies, space-time is actually a pretty simple concept. You add an extra variable (time) to your ordinary space variables (length, width, height), which creates an extra dimension. So while home is one ‘location’ in space, home at 10pm and home at 3am are two different ‘locations’ in space-time. Think back of your mum when you were a teenager, she would totally agree that those are very different. Personal space-time actually might not be a perfect analogy with the space-time from physics, but don’t you agree it just sounds really cool.

Personal space-time, is simply adding YOUR time to YOUR personal space. Everybody has the same amount of time in a day, but it’s YOUR time because you get to decide how you are going to allocate it. If you want to sleep all day and night, then you can actually do that.

These days, even though we are miles apart, we manage to intrude on peoples personal space-time by claiming somebodies time. Which might be even worse than intruding in their personal space.

Before this whole mobile revolution, it was pretty straight forward. Somebody planned on claiming your time by knocking on the door or calling you and you didn’t feel like it or had other plans with YOUR time? Easy. You didn’t answer, made up a simple excuse that you just missed them, and get back to them when you felt ready for it.

Unfortunately this isn’t true anymore today. Part of the blame goes to the fact that our hands are glued to our mobile devices, so everyone knows you have seen any message within 7 seconds. WhatsApp and Facebook took it even a step further, where you not only get confirmation that they received it but also if they actually looked at it.

This leads to people expecting you to answer right away, or at least within the next 3 minutes. What they might not realise is that they are actually claiming YOUR time. They are saying in the next 3 minutes you need to spend at least 20 seconds on answering me. Regardless of what else you had planned to do with YOUR time. Which is an invasion of your personal space-time. This also happens in a professional setting, when you get a call wondering if you saw that email they sent 5 minutes ago.

Exactly as with your personal space, there are days you have high energy and you have time to answer everybody within seconds, with an added bonus of happy emojis including some unicorns. On other days however, your energy might be low or allocated somewhere else; you are watching a movie, reading something or who knows doing some actual work.

If case of the latter, forcing yourself to answer will drain your energy the same as it would be with somebody stepping into your personal space. Unlike in the pre-mobile era there is no easy way out, by just not answering until you feel up for it.

It’s not uncommon for people to keep sending messages trying to guilt trip you into replying or they even might get passive-aggressive. You most certainly have got messages with only an elusive ellipse, a questionable question mark, or the not so friendly smiley. Which all literary translate to “GIVE ME YOUR TIME, I WANT IT NOW, SO GIVE IT TO ME ALREADY.”

The same as we learned to respect people their personal space, we have to learn to respect their personal space-time. Sometimes it can take minutes, hours or even days for people to comeback to you, but that doesn’t mean they love you less.

Sometimes they might even never answer. This is the part which took me forever to get my head around.

You have to realise that no answer is also a valid answer.

No answer doesn’t mean yes, it also doesn’t mean no. There are many possible reasons for not answering you. They might have been low on energy, they actually hate your guts, your question was stupid, it was a girl you were talking to, …

There is no point however in trying to figure out what the reason could be and what this means. The only meaning is that you didn’t get an answer, and that’s cool. Maybe try again another day and perhaps with a different question.

Be respectful of their personal space-time and just let go.

My takeaways :

• Your personal space-time is yours. Protect it. Use your time and energy for what makes you happy, don’t sacrifice it just because people trying to claim it.
• Be aware of others their personal space-time. Similar to regular personal space it is different for everybody and might depend on the situation they are in. Just try to respect it as you wish they would respect yours.

Thanks so much for reading! If you enjoyed it, would mean the world to me if you shared it with someone. :)