Once area the article doesn't discuss at all is how middle east and Indian cultures understand time. Can anyone offer any commentary on this?
Personally, I like it that people are not angry with you when you're really late (again, traffic jam). I experience this as relieving.
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.
...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.
Maybe in the south they fulfil more tasks, but they were not planned in advance.