Tempo 4: The Production Possibility Frontier

Much of the middle part of this article is based on: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-chronicle-of-timekeeping-2006-02/

How do we experience time? If we took away our clocks and calendars then what would we be left with? First of all, there is the planet on which we sit, its sun and its moon. The planet turns on its axis giving us the day. The apparent movement of the moon through the sky, its waxing and waning gives us the month. And movement of the earth around the sun gives us the year. Time is cosmic.

Our bodies respond in kind. Our circadian rhythms are synced by daylight. There is the peculiar case that the average menstrual cycle and the average lunar cycle are the same (although they do not sync) and no one knows if there is an actual connection. While we are not as sensitive to the cycles of the year as organisms that grow or migrate or hibernate, conditions like seasonal affective disorder indicate that we are not separate from the progress of the year. And of course we have our heartbeat - the literal pulse of blood around our bodies. The heartbeat varies between 40 and 100 beats per minute - around the duration of a second. Hours, minutes and seconds seem to originate in the Babylonian culture of the Mesopotamia (where writing also emerged, writing is its own attempt to escape and manage time) - 12 hours divided by 60 divided by 60. To bring us to the beats of our hearts.

We already have many tempos in ourselves and in our world. Our sense of time does not exist outside our bodies. However the standardisation of time took a while. Hours were the day divided into 12 and thus depended on the time of year and your latitude. Sundials worked when you had the sun and water clocks worked when water wasn’t ice. The needs of the Catholic Church for instruments to enable the strict observance of prayer times led to the first weight-driven mechanical clock was installed in 1283 at Dunstable Priory in Bedfordshire, England and the standardisation of the hour - the French hour. a young Dutch astronomer and mathematician named Christiaan Huygens developed the first pendulum clock in 1656. Pendulum clocks were about 100 times as accurate as their predecessors, reducing a typical gain or loss of 15 minutes a day to about a minute a week. In 1675 Huygens devised his next major improvement, the spiral balance spring. The spring was the microchip of its day, a revolutionary technology that made careers and inspired the imagination (Hobbes opens Leviathan with a discussion on springs). This revolutionized the accuracy of watches, enabling them to keep time to within a minute a day.

The ability on humans to collectively track time improved. The longcase clock with a deadbeat escarpment was accurate to a few seconds a day. John Harrison’s marine chromometer allowed for the accurate measurement of longitude and thus improved navigation, trading, and military capabilities. The industrial revolution allowed for the mass production of clocks and watches - which were needed as massive railroads were built across America. A standard time was required across all stations that required technology to maintain. The railroads also required the creation of organisational charts and structures to manage the people and relationships that made up these enormous enterprises. While the Church had required clocks to manage the religious time of people within a closed institution, industrialisation and transport fused the need to manage people and commercial time across space.

While we’ve always experienced our work through the lens of time (day, month, year), time management now seems to be more about time managing people than people managing our time.There are timesheets, rosters, clocking in and out. Our time is bought and sold. Some time is considered more expensive than others (weekends, holidays). Some people’s time is considered more valuable than others. Time is money and we buy and sell time all the time. When we sell our time it becomes the property of our managers or clients. Office workers live our lives through our email inboxes and our calendars. We try our best to control our calendars but we are often unable to do so. We negotiate the sharing of time with each other - sending, accepting or declining calendar invites, arguing over agendas, adding and removing people.

A poorly understood concept related to time is that of productivity. For most managers, “productivity” simply means “do more stuff”. That’s not what it means to an economist - instead it is defined as “how much output can be produced with a given set of inputs” and these inputs are typically:

1. Labour - which is “per worker or per hour worked”

2. Capital - which are the capital services provided by “assets that can include physical capital, like equipment, machines, structures and vehicles, as well as intangible capital such as intellectual property.

A lot of business people talk as if getting people to work longer hours will improve productivity. It won’t. It will improve output and may even decrease productivity (as tired people are less productive).

Productivity is poorly understood in many places of work - especially when the quality of output is also hard to measure. So managers fall back on crude approximations - lines of code written, sales calls made, hours spent in the office.

Over the last 500 years, the development of our technologies of time has been far more successful than our ability to understand what that time means and how it translates into other things. Time may be money, but that transformation remains mostly mystical and alchemical rather than scientific. And some of this is by choice. No one wants to be on someone else’s clock. People reclaim their time through evading tracking measures where they can. So if we want to understand the relationship between time and work, we need to use clocks that are collectively owned and that allow for privacy rather than clocks that demand that we account for all.