Where Did All the Years Go? 

Where has the time gone? As I get older, I find myself asking that question more often, and apparently there is a psychological explanation for it.

Modern psychology tells us that time speeds up as we age because our brains process fewer novel experiences and things become more routine. Familiar routines require less cognitive processing, causing months and years to blur together.

And then there's what is called the Proportional Theory, looking at a year as a proportion of your total life. As a 5-year-old, a single year feels huge because it is 20 percent of the kid's entire life. Now that I'm in my 50s, that same year is less than 2 percent of my life, making it seem much smaller by comparison.

I can ask where the time went as we look toward the impending end of summer. When I was in grammar school, the two-month summer break seemed to last forever. Today, summer seems to be over almost before it begins.

And where have the months gone? It seems like just yesterday when I took down the Christmas tree, and September is already upon us.

But none of that has anything to do with CRM, so why am I bringing it up? Because we're hitting a milestone at?CRM?magazine that I can't believe we've reached already: 2026 marks the 25th year that we've honored the top technology vendors in the CRM industry

We've made quite a few changes to our awards program over the past 25 years.

We went from two separate awards (at one time, we had one for marketing and sales and another for customer service), to one award for all three that we now call the CRM Industry Awards.

We changed the format for selecting the winners, abandoning the labor-intensive spreadsheets in which we listed as many vendors as possible for each technology category and then asked our pool of analysts to provide scores from one to five over a number of criteria. Adding up all the scores and applying them through our weighted scoring system took days of complicated calculations, which is never an easy task for editors, who are, of course, much better with words than numbers. Today, we ask the analysts for their top five vendor recommendations for each category, then count the number of mentions to come up with the top five.

And almost every year we've changed the categories as new technologies emerge and others fall out of favor, become obsolete, or fail to live up to the hype.

And a few years ago we added "The CRM Top 100," where we identify 100 technology companies that have led the way forward in customer service, marketing, and sales.

The CRM awards have certainly undergone a lot of changes over the past 25 years, which would seem to belie the theory that time speeds up as we age because we have fewer new experiences and things become more routine. This theory also holds that we can slow the passage of time by bringing new experiences into our lives. Not true—for all the new things that we introduced over the past 25 years, the CRM awards have still flown by.

Another phenomenon related to the passage of time has to do with the level of interest that certain experiences generate. At an industry conference, why do different sessions seem to pass at different speeds? Two sessions might both be allotted 45 minutes or so, but one presenter could be more charismatic, and his material could be more relevant, interesting, and engrossing, making his session seem to pass more quickly than the other.

We certainly hope that the awards content we've presented in each of the past 25 years has been charismatic, engrossing, and interesting. But more than that, we hope the content has been relevant, providing value to our readers who might be looking to deploy a new technology, upgrade an existing system, or replace one vendor for another.

Psychologists have also theorized that there is a link between time perception and information processing. The more information our minds have to process, the slower time seems to pass. We, of course, also hope that the information we've presented is worthy of processing.