Time is what we make of it

Over the weekend, we gained an hour. Not really, though; we just acted like it.

There are lots of jokes around water coolers this week about the change. One not-so-great one I used to make was that I would start a Daylight Savings Time law firm, where we only defend clients who committed crimes during that extra hour – giving us a perfect alibi. Tired bits aside, this twice-yearly change is a ripe moment to reflect on the nature of time and how we measure and allocate it.

There are only two units of time that really are set in stone. It takes us 365.25 days to orbit the sun, and it takes us 24 hours to spin around our planet’s own axis (barring a leap second here and there). To varying degrees, everything else is pretty much made up.

Sixty seconds to a minute and sixty minutes to an hour feels right because we’ve been conditioned to it, but that wasn’t always the case. During the French Revolution, that nation took up what’s been called “decimal time,” a system with 10-hour days, 100-minute hours, and 100-second minutes. Despite its mathematical elegance, the population was resistant to the change, and the whole plan was scrapped after less than two years. (However, the math actually lines up somewhat nicely: one decimal second is 86.4% of a standard second.)

In the early twentieth century, Soviet Russia tried a similar experiment with its calendar. Each week had five days instead of seven, and one of those days was randomly assigned as your weekend. This model kept the factories humming around the clock, but it led to a breakdown in social structures. If your day off was one day, your spouse’s is another, and your best friend’s is yet another, well, you just would never see them. After a little more than a decade, the Soviets scrapped this plan in favor of today’s seven-day week.

Of those seven days, the majority of us work five of them and rest on the other two. But it was only in the late 1800s that many workers started to get Saturday off, and again, only in the early 1900s was it codified as standard practice in the United States. With two synchronized days off, suddenly, there was an explosion of interest in a relatively new idea: leisure. Sports leagues, travel companies, and cultural venues welcomed this change with open arms.

Writer Alan Watts noted that time was “one of the conventions by which we tend to be fooled more than almost any other.” He says that humans are “a time-binding animal—that is to say, a creature who is visibly aware of the fact that his life moves, as it were, along a line from the past through the present and into the future.” We care a lot about our units of time, but our dogs, and the squirrels they bark at, and the trees those squirrels live in, and so on – they don’t. It’s a firmly human construct.

This is all to say that as long as we follow some rough bounds, time is what we make of it. We don’t have to have a five-day workweek, and indeed, there is nearly universal evidence that we’d be happier and better off with a four-day one. And within those days, there is lots of value in both synchronous and asynchronous work, giving us even more flexibility in shaping our schedules.

Although, in the short term, it would be nice to finally stop fiddling with our clocks.