"Occupied time (walking to baggage claim) feels shorter than unoccupied time (standing at the carousel)". That is true, since say a 5 minutes traffic jam seems

"Occupied time (walking to baggage claim) feels shorter than unoccupied time (standing at the carousel)". That is true, since say a 5 minutes traffic jam seems like eternity compared to say 25 minutes of driving. Wonder if we can apply this principle to any situation. For example customer perception of progress in a consulting project is much better when you are hitting all kinds of milestones while developing a feature such as design, prototyping, development, testing, deployment. Ironically if we say we are doing all of those in parallel, it doesn't work very well.