Planning time is not the interval between a proposal and a decision. It is an organised distribution of opportunities to know, revise, contest, wait and commit. Calendar duration matters, but it does not explain the process. Two plans can occupy the same number of months while producing entirely different institutional sequences: one may allow decisive knowledge to enter early, another may accumulate unresolved dependencies until revision becomes costly. Organized time names the architecture through which planning transforms uncertainty into commitment.

The distinction between time and temporality is therefore fundamental. Clock time measures duration; temporality describes the ordering, tempo and timing of events. A meeting held before a design hardens is not equivalent to the same meeting held after land, finance and political commitments are fixed. Sequence alters causal capacity. The planning process is path-dependent because every decision changes what remains revisable, and because the cost of change increases as actors accumulate sunk commitments. This makes delay a political rather than purely administrative category. Some intervals add no information and merely reproduce fragmentation; others allow environmental knowledge, negotiation or public scrutiny to enter. Productive and pathological delay cannot be identified by duration alone. They must be distinguished by what an interval changes: whether it resolves uncertainty, broadens legitimacy, preserves reversibility or simply transfers cost to another actor. The temporal politics of planning also concerns unequal capacities to wait. Institutions, developers, residents and consultants do not experience delay symmetrically. One actor may absorb months as portfolio risk while another experiences the same period as existential uncertainty. Acceleration can therefore redistribute power as effectively as regulation. Compressing consultation, advancing a decision or postponing infrastructure does not merely alter the schedule; it reallocates opportunity and exposure. For Socioplastics, organized time enables planning documents to be read as event structures rather than as static artefacts. A corpus can register when a requirement appeared, which actor introduced it, what uncertainty it resolved and what later decisions it made possible or impossible. Such a sequence turns the archive into a temporal instrument: not a repository of completed objects but a record of how alternatives close, reopen and acquire institutional weight. Organized time adds to Socioplastics a temporal grammar of causality. It makes duration secondary to sequence, and transforms planning history from a line of dates into an operational map of when knowledge, authority and irreversibility enter the field.