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The Human Organization of Time: Temporal Realities and Experience
“What is time then?” asked St. Augustine some 1,600 years ago. It was a question he could not answer, and over the centuries that followed, it was one that few scholars dared to address. Yet there are answers to this question of the true nature of time, and this book discusses several of them as a means of approaching its central that humanity creates a variety of times and these different times affect the experiences of life—as times vary, so does life. Not so much focusing on watches, clocks, and calendars (though these are covered), the author argues that time is a fundamental component of the technological development of humanity. The book addresses the relationships between time and life on three fundamental (1) all times are not the same, (2) all times are social constructions, and (3) the times humanity creates direct the way humanity lives. The book addresses the major ways in which times differ (polychronicity, speed and punctuality, and orientation to past, present and future), how these differences are coordinated (entrainment), and how these differences affect human life, including such extreme effects that produce the best and worst of times. Building on these differences and the effects they produce, the author examines the possibility of humanity consciously creating more good times than bad. Throughout the analysis, a vital connection between time and life gradually emerges, namely, the impact of time on the meaning of life itself. Materials from several disciplines inform the discussions, notably theory and research from the social and behavioral sciences, in particular the organization sciences. The author uses historical examples extensively throughout the book, but also presents new results that derive from original data he has collected. The book will be valuable not only to those involved in the management and organization sciences, but also to sociologists and psychologists, who have largely avoided coming to terms with one of the central issues of human life—time.
382 pages, Hardcover
First published July 16, 2002
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October 30, 2017
Back when I was reading Good Boss, Bad Boss, I came upon a discussion of stand-up meetings that referenced "The Effects of Stand-Up and Sit-Down Meeting Formats on Meeting Outcomes" by Bluedorn et al. Digging a little further led me to this book.
The description promises a discussion on the nature of Time, how we perceive it, and how human constructs are built around it. Sounds fascinating. And boy, does it deliver!
The book is really dense with information and these notes leave out a lot more.
First, a note on form. The book reads very much like a scientific paper. There are a lot of interesting factoids, but every major assertion is backed either by the author's own research or by that of others. Eco and Kundera can synthesize all the knowledge they've accumulated throughout their career, but their books read more like their own thoughts and opinions than something laboriously research. Fried and DHH just draw endlessly from their one anecdote. Here, Bluedorn is doing Science. The rigor and attention to details are beautiful to see (if sometimes tedious) and lend much more weight to the material.
Now, on to substance.
Time is essential to how we conduct our lives, from undertaking the day's activities (what is a day, anyway?), to how we conceive our place in the cosmos, and everything in between. Our lives are governed by a multitude of interacting rhythms, like the day-night cycle or the work day or the calendar. How these rhythms interact and how we reacts to them varies tremendously between cultures and between individuals.
Cervantes wrote about a subjective perception of time that is specific to the individual. Newton wrote about an objective time that does not depend on the observer, closer to what a clock is measuring. The book also draws a distinction between epochal time, more subjective and tied to events, and fungible time that is the same no matter what. An hour is an hour. Funny enough, before the advent of reliable mechanical clocks, day and night were each divided into twelve "hours". Since the length of days and nights varies throughout the year depending on latitude, hours would be longer or shorter depending on the season.
Time is a nebulous concept and these are different aspects of it, akin to the blind men and the elephant. Here is a nice example: Bluedorn has a watch that tells time, which ties him to fungible time, and ancient sundials, and the primordial day/night cycle. But his watch was an anniversary present, so it also ties him to more the personal experiences of his wedding and its 25th anniversary. The watch stands at multiple positions on the continuum between fungible time and epochal time, depending on the perspective.
Another aspect the book delves into is polychronicity, the preference for engaging in activities in parallel or one after the other. There is a continuum that goes from doing one thing at a time (monochronicity) to two, three, or more things in parallel. It can apply at the micro level, such as ordinary multitasking, and it can apply at the macro level, such as "detailed planning followed by execution" (monochronic) versus "make corrections as you go" (polychronic). Despite a number of studies, there is no clear evidence that one end of the spectrum is arbitrarily better than the other. It depends a lot on the context and the type of work being done. It is also not clear if a person or organization or society's place on that spectrum is stable, or if they go in and out of it.
Punctuality became important with the Industrial Revolution, where factories needed to coordinate many tasks. It was helped by ever more precise time pieces. But even then, what constitute on time varies greatly by society and activity. This quote shows that even ancient Romans complained about the tyranny of the clock, even though in his case it was a simple sundial:
Fun fact: Bluedorn shows a punctuality award that his grand-mother received when she was a little girl. As I was clearing out my parents' basement, I found some of the same that I received back in grade school. That's an interesting connection.
Bluedorn explores the concepts of temporal focus, whether someone is focused more on the past or the future, and temporal depth, how far into the past or future someone tends to look. Where do you draw the line between near-, mid-, and long-term, between recent and distant past? It is interesting to note that people who look far into the past also look far into the future, and conversely, people who do not look far into the past tend to think more short-term about the future. The age of a person or culture has a strong influence on how far they look into the past, and therefore into the future. The book briefly mentions The Long Now Foundation, and their 10,000 Year Clock project, as an example of long term thinking into the future. He also mentions how, in linguistics, the use of the future perfect tense can make the future more concrete by casting that future into the past.
While he was gathering data, Bluedorn noticed that people's answers varied depending on whether he ask them to think about the past first, or about the future first. How far they looked into the past was pretty consistent, but they tended to have a longer future horizon if they had been asked to think about the past beforehand. This is a nice example of psychological priming and a reminder that the order of questions in a survey can affect the results.
One of the strongest points of the book, for me, was the relationships between past, present, and future. At a fundamental level, meaning comes from the connections between things. It is our connection to the past that gives the present any meaning. This, in turn, sets up our hopes for the future. More connections to a deeper past can generate a strong sense of meaning. And using the past as a predictor for the future, it can make use very hopeful. Conversely, a lack of connection to the deep future can lead to despair. Modern shallow temporal depth gives us fewer opportunities for connections, but we can manufacture stand-ins, such as the tomb of the unknown soldier and other commemorative monuments.
Carpe diem: how do people make the best of the time they have? Planning implies connection to the past and project into the future. It might have helped evolution for intra-group cooperation and inter-group competition. The flip side of planning is that procrastination can lead to a feeling of missed opportunities and falling behind. The book briefly touches on the importance of work-life balance and one's perceived control of time. To control your time is to control your life. Taylor confused the quantity of work that was possible from the quantity of work that was desirable. Young children have pure play (for its own sake), that gradually fades away to be replaced by games and organized activities (whose motivation lies outside of them: winning, surviving, etc.).
I'm going to close with the author's strange fascination with Daylight Saving Time. He's looked at and conducted some research into people's behavior when we go in and out of DST and identified some unwanted disruptions. He therefore advocates for getting rid of DST. But he totally ignores the reasons we have DST in the first place. I don't know if the economic incentives are still relevant, but it seems worth it to have a balanced look at this topic. Perhaps the benefits outweigh the inconveniences.
The description promises a discussion on the nature of Time, how we perceive it, and how human constructs are built around it. Sounds fascinating. And boy, does it deliver!
The book is really dense with information and these notes leave out a lot more.
First, a note on form. The book reads very much like a scientific paper. There are a lot of interesting factoids, but every major assertion is backed either by the author's own research or by that of others. Eco and Kundera can synthesize all the knowledge they've accumulated throughout their career, but their books read more like their own thoughts and opinions than something laboriously research. Fried and DHH just draw endlessly from their one anecdote. Here, Bluedorn is doing Science. The rigor and attention to details are beautiful to see (if sometimes tedious) and lend much more weight to the material.
Now, on to substance.
Time is the fundamental dimension of our existence. (Prigogine, page 20)
In the form of time is to be found the form of living. (Elliott Jacques, epigraph)
Time is essential to how we conduct our lives, from undertaking the day's activities (what is a day, anyway?), to how we conceive our place in the cosmos, and everything in between. Our lives are governed by a multitude of interacting rhythms, like the day-night cycle or the work day or the calendar. How these rhythms interact and how we reacts to them varies tremendously between cultures and between individuals.
In the seventeenth century both Cervantes and Newton wrote about time. Yet they reached fundamentally different conclusions about this abstruse phenomenon. (page 20)
Cervantes wrote about a subjective perception of time that is specific to the individual. Newton wrote about an objective time that does not depend on the observer, closer to what a clock is measuring. The book also draws a distinction between epochal time, more subjective and tied to events, and fungible time that is the same no matter what. An hour is an hour. Funny enough, before the advent of reliable mechanical clocks, day and night were each divided into twelve "hours". Since the length of days and nights varies throughout the year depending on latitude, hours would be longer or shorter depending on the season.
Time is a nebulous concept and these are different aspects of it, akin to the blind men and the elephant. Here is a nice example: Bluedorn has a watch that tells time, which ties him to fungible time, and ancient sundials, and the primordial day/night cycle. But his watch was an anniversary present, so it also ties him to more the personal experiences of his wedding and its 25th anniversary. The watch stands at multiple positions on the continuum between fungible time and epochal time, depending on the perspective.
Another aspect the book delves into is polychronicity, the preference for engaging in activities in parallel or one after the other. There is a continuum that goes from doing one thing at a time (monochronicity) to two, three, or more things in parallel. It can apply at the micro level, such as ordinary multitasking, and it can apply at the macro level, such as "detailed planning followed by execution" (monochronic) versus "make corrections as you go" (polychronic). Despite a number of studies, there is no clear evidence that one end of the spectrum is arbitrarily better than the other. It depends a lot on the context and the type of work being done. It is also not clear if a person or organization or society's place on that spectrum is stable, or if they go in and out of it.
Punctuality became important with the Industrial Revolution, where factories needed to coordinate many tasks. It was helped by ever more precise time pieces. But even then, what constitute on time varies greatly by society and activity. This quote shows that even ancient Romans complained about the tyranny of the clock, even though in his case it was a simple sundial:
May the Gods confound that man who first disclosed the hours, and who first, in fact, erected a sun-dial here; who, for wretched me, minced the day up into pieces. (Plautus, page 89)
Fun fact: Bluedorn shows a punctuality award that his grand-mother received when she was a little girl. As I was clearing out my parents' basement, I found some of the same that I received back in grade school. That's an interesting connection.
Bluedorn explores the concepts of temporal focus, whether someone is focused more on the past or the future, and temporal depth, how far into the past or future someone tends to look. Where do you draw the line between near-, mid-, and long-term, between recent and distant past? It is interesting to note that people who look far into the past also look far into the future, and conversely, people who do not look far into the past tend to think more short-term about the future. The age of a person or culture has a strong influence on how far they look into the past, and therefore into the future. The book briefly mentions The Long Now Foundation, and their 10,000 Year Clock project, as an example of long term thinking into the future. He also mentions how, in linguistics, the use of the future perfect tense can make the future more concrete by casting that future into the past.
While he was gathering data, Bluedorn noticed that people's answers varied depending on whether he ask them to think about the past first, or about the future first. How far they looked into the past was pretty consistent, but they tended to have a longer future horizon if they had been asked to think about the past beforehand. This is a nice example of psychological priming and a reminder that the order of questions in a survey can affect the results.
One of the strongest points of the book, for me, was the relationships between past, present, and future. At a fundamental level, meaning comes from the connections between things. It is our connection to the past that gives the present any meaning. This, in turn, sets up our hopes for the future. More connections to a deeper past can generate a strong sense of meaning. And using the past as a predictor for the future, it can make use very hopeful. Conversely, a lack of connection to the deep future can lead to despair. Modern shallow temporal depth gives us fewer opportunities for connections, but we can manufacture stand-ins, such as the tomb of the unknown soldier and other commemorative monuments.
Carpe diem: how do people make the best of the time they have? Planning implies connection to the past and project into the future. It might have helped evolution for intra-group cooperation and inter-group competition. The flip side of planning is that procrastination can lead to a feeling of missed opportunities and falling behind. The book briefly touches on the importance of work-life balance and one's perceived control of time. To control your time is to control your life. Taylor confused the quantity of work that was possible from the quantity of work that was desirable. Young children have pure play (for its own sake), that gradually fades away to be replaced by games and organized activities (whose motivation lies outside of them: winning, surviving, etc.).
I'm going to close with the author's strange fascination with Daylight Saving Time. He's looked at and conducted some research into people's behavior when we go in and out of DST and identified some unwanted disruptions. He therefore advocates for getting rid of DST. But he totally ignores the reasons we have DST in the first place. I don't know if the economic incentives are still relevant, but it seems worth it to have a balanced look at this topic. Perhaps the benefits outweigh the inconveniences.
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