The art of the queue: how to make the wait more bearable

Whether you're waiting to buy a ticket, go through security at an airport or pay for your shopping, queueing has become part of daily life. Americans, David Lindley wrote in The Washington Post in 1988, used to spend an average of 30 minutes a day waiting in queues – a figure that has doubtless increased significantly since then. In the intervening decades, our demand for instant gratification has also increased, making queueing ever more unpalatable. What are the factors that make queueing stressful, and what can you do to control your negative feelings while you wait?

In his PhD thesis at University of California at Berkeley, Ziv Carmon identified two types of waiting. There's predictable waiting – when you know how long you're likely to wait – and open-ended, anxiety-inducing waiting, when you have no way of estimating how long it will be. Thoughtful service providers do their best to introduce predictability – for example, by giving regular updates about how long you still have to wait.

Carmon also identified four factors that affect how we feel when queueing. The first is the length of the queue; the longer it is, the worse you feel when you first join it. To counteract this, some organisations, such as Disney, create "snaking" queues, so they appear shorter than they actually are. The second and third factors counterbalance one another: on the one hand, we feel a surge of optimism each time the queue moves forward, but at the same time our mood drops steadily the longer the queue remains stationary.

The fourth factor is what happens as we reach the end of the queue. If it speeds up at that point, we feel better about the wait. This suggestion is based on work by Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel prize-winning economist and psychologist. He found people would rather endure an unpleasant experience (immersing one hand in icy water) for 90 seconds than for 60 seconds, if during the last 30 seconds the water warms up slightly.

David Maister, former professor at Harvard Business School, notes that it's easier to wait if your time is occupied. That's why, for example, some telephone services play music or give news updates.

But what can you do yourself to make queueing less stressful? Increase your ability to predict waiting time. Listen for traffic updates in a traffic jam, or ask a receptionist how fast people are moving through the queue. Check your estimates against real time. Just as we tend to overestimate how long it takes to fall asleep, we also overestimate our waiting times.

While waiting, distract yourself in a pleasant and/or productive manner. For example, while sitting in the GP's surgery, make a list of the symptoms you wish to discuss.

Engage someone else in the queue in conversation, even if it's just to grumble about the delay. After all, as the saying goes, "a problem shared is a problem halved".

Telegraph, London