Is it possible to estimate speed without knowledge of time?

Question

Is it possible for a man cutting logs in the woods to know how fast he is working without a clock? He is also not very good at estimating the time in his head. For example, he normally can cut 30 logs, into 150 smaller logs in 3 hours. How does he know if he is working faster or slower than usual? One way might be how sweaty he gets, or how tired he is, but that could just mean he is taking unnecessary steps or having a bad day.

Well, the reason I ask is because it would be useful to have the knowledge of your speed without a clock in many situations. Just one example is when you're taking a test, you could tell how fast you're going without having to look up at the clock and calculate your speed every 5 minutes.

Answer 1

Your subjective experience of time tends to be affected by your degree of concentration, so it's hard to judge how long a task is taking. The woodcutter tracks time by the natural clock of the sun.

In test-taking your best strategy is usually to just keep working and don't worry about the time. If you want to do some last-minute guessing on the answers you didn't get, you'll know time is getting short when the faster students put down their pencils.

Answer 2

It's more like saying that passage of time is a sense that some people can judge better than others.

You'd need to do an experiment to test a task - compare someone's judgement of how fast they are doing it with how fast it's really being done. It might improve with time.

Answer 3

Speed ~~ rate of change/time. So realistically you can't estimate it without knowing time. Any other forms you could use to measure it i.e. amount of sweat, number of logs, ect.. produce to many variables; type of wood, grain of wood, what he had for breakfast, how hot it is outside, what clothes hes wearing, how many knots are in a log ect.