Busyness and Our Concept of Time
Humans have always needed to tell time, but the clock, as we know it, wasn’t always the measure. For 10,000 years, humans lived in an agrarian culture and understood time through nature: the seasons, the rise and fall of the sun, and the sow-and-reap rhythm of crops. Eventually, humans invented simple devices to mark the hours within a day—sundials, hourglasses, and water clocks, which used the regulated flow of water to measure time.
The first mechanical clock wasn’t introduced until the 13th century. With the Age of Enlightenment centuries later, a scientific desire for more precision led to clocks becoming a valuable tool for framing the world. In her book A Sideways Look at Time, Jay Griffiths explains that during the 17th and 18th centuries, time moved from a fluid measure to become more “absolute and deterministic.”
The increasing precision of clockwork (coupled with the increasing number of clocks and watches) meant time was chiseled to fit snug to the clock,” Griffiths writes. “Time must be predictable, knowable, and visible.
With the Industrial Revolution, minutes and seconds became a pervasive measurement of time for the common person. The rise of manufacturing regimented time with worker output. Productivity was king, and time translated to money. Today—as the Industrial Revolution cedes to the tech revolution — timekeeping is even more meticulous. We know the exact time in every corner of the world. We leap between time zones and are experiencing for the first time in human history a thing called jet lag, where technology and speed outpace the body’s biological capacity to keep up.
When time became money, our relationship with relaxation also changed.
It used to be that the mark of accumulated wealth was leisure — restorative moments away from the toils of labor to enjoy other pursuits. Today, productivity is our top priority. Even the wealthiest among us toil away, packing schedules and squeezing every ounce of value from every second. Bill Gates gave up his golf game in “retirement” to do humanitarian work around the world because, as he told Fortune magazine in 2010, golf “takes up too much time to get any good at it.” (Golf courses around the world are developing nine-hole fast-track courses because people have become too busy to play 18 holes.) As we compete to be productive, busyness is as much a status symbol as anything else.
