[marc0]

Wonderful article, and quite insightful. While reading I was asking myself if it wouldn't be a good idea to provide tools to enlarge our possibilities of time perception:

The dominant time perception in North-America / EU is linear: the work day is segmented and tasks and appointments are scheduled. Calendar apps and project management tools help us with this. But what if I wanted to take, say, the circular time persepctive? I'm not aware of any tools or apps that would support such a perspective.

Maybe one should think of ways to open our management culture to other time perspectives, maybe even enabling us to shift between the perpectives and unify them. Something like a 'multi-cultural project management tool.' I can imagine that this could have quite some impact in globalized economy, and maybe even could be the basis for a new management philosophy

[ryan-allen]

I grew up in Australia and at 19 started the 9-5 'grind' type job which I kept going for a few years.

When I started contracting and working from home, I found that I could not shake the association of the hours and what they mean. No matter how hard I tried.

If I started later than 9 or 10, I was 'lazy'. If I took the whole morning off and was working until 11pm it was 'a disaster of a day', even if I worked less hours. For some reason if I was working later than 6pm it seemed like something was wrong.

I have no idea how to reliably change the perception of time once it's ingrained. It's certainly a strange phenomenon.

[_red]

Beyond just that, is the notion of "work week" - not just the notion that we work on Mondays but not Sundays - but that there is some distinction between "work" and not.

Most of these things are the result of religious ritual and early 20th socialism efforts.

They are truly damaging to the human psyche and each individual should work to eradicate these fictional ideas from their being.

If you were a primitive agrarian, sometimes the cattle need to be tended to at midnight on Tuesday - sometimes fruits should be picked on Sunday morning - etc.

Beyond that is the notion that your "work" and you are somehow distinct and different. After 20+ years of being self-employed, I see this artificial distinction almost as a form of mental illness. You are you. There is no difference between 2pm Tuesday you and Saturday you.

[nhaehnle]

I think it is fairer to say these things are, for all practical purposes, the result of capitalism. Socialism was really just a backlash against capitalism.

To be slightly more precise and elaborate, historically the fixed work week and working hours became widespread with capitalism (monasteries and militaries had routine as well, but they never caused it to become so pervasive in society).

In capitalism, exact management of working time started because of a combination of two things: First, the owners of expensive machines wanted to have reliable schedules of when their human operators were present, so as to maximize the owners' profits. Second, the power relationship of capitalism made it possible for these owners to severely punish an employee who didn't show up on time, and the owners pushed this possibility to the breaking point (hence the backlash of socialism).

Nowadays, a similar dynamic also applies to most service jobs. The people running retail stores or call centres want their employees to reliably follow a schedule, so that the profit of the owners can be maximized. Power relationships are still such that most people working these kinds of jobs have little de facto choice but to comply.

So much for what happened historically. Now, an interesting question is whether this is inherent only of capitalism, or whether it may be inherent of economic systems more generally.

For example, if we envision a form of market socialism where firms compete in a market but are entirely controlled by workers through some democratic means, would we still adhere so strongly to fixed schedules?

In part, the self-interest of the employee suggests that our relationship with work schedules would relax.

On the other hand, it is now actually in the workers' self-interest to ensure that their machines are utilized as well as possible, and that retail stores are taken care of efficiently, and so on. So I would actually expect that work schedules would remain relatively rigid, at least in service oriented firms and physical industry.

Being able to rely on somebody else's schedule means you can be more efficient, and that's a powerful force of the market.

Even if the attitude to work schedules were relaxed somewhat under socialism, path dependence is a strong factor as well: now that most people are kind of used to 9 to 5 or similar, chances are that any change away from the status quo would be rather slow.

[kstenerud]

"For example, if we envision a form of market socialism where firms compete in a market but are entirely controlled by workers through some democratic means, would we still adhere so strongly to fixed schedules?"

One of two things would happen: Those wishing to maximize profits would push the less dedicated out of the company, or there would be a gradual trend towards putting in minimal effort because everyone else is outputting less than you for the same pay (or you're making those with more seniority than you look bad).

In fact, we've already witnessed the second phenomena in socialist countries and in many unionized jobs.

[nhaehnle]

Genuine question: Have there been examples of socialist countries or unionized jobs where profit was made and shared among employees rather than taken either by private capital ownership or by the government?

At least as far as I know, there hasn't been a country-wide experiment with a setup like that, where employees actually have a self-motivated incentive to work harder. (Now that I think about it, that's really quite a terrible indictment of both socialism and capitalism as it's been tried so far!)

In a sense, early-phase startups are like that, and those seem to work quite well ;-)

The law-firm model is a bit like this as well, I suppose, and small boutique shops in creative fields.

Another example may be existing coops like Mondragon and many other smaller ones. Those are not in the headlines much, but they also seem to be doing well despite competition from firms that are run along more capitalist lines.

[kstenerud]

Co-ops and communes are about as close as you'll get to that kind of experiment. From what I've seen, they start out great, but then as they grow either in size or in age, they begin to show stress fractures from the usual social problems that plague all human political endeavors. It almost seems as if we're doomed to mediocrity in the long run.

[derefr]

Mayhap it's simply an artifact of social psychology: if you're working later than 6pm, everyone else is off work and out having fun, and you're cloistering yourself with your work when you could be out socializing. (Even if you'd rather not.)

If you get, say, stationed on a submarine doing night missions, the group you'll mostly be socializing with suddenly gets off work around 7AM. The urge to keep to a 9-5 fades quickly.

[sophacles]

I think there is really something to this - I barteneded my way through college, and for a couple years after (in order to travel and take care of some youthful exuberance that was incompatible with a standard job). As a result, my "money shifts" were Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, and my days off were typically Monday and Tuesday. A lot of my friends and social circle were in the service industry as well. As a result when I decided to do the career thing, it took several years to get over "Tuesday is a day off" and "Saturday is super productive" type thoughts. Similarly, I still find evenings to be more conducive to work than mornings because my schedule was bar hours - 4 or 5 pm - 3am, and relaxing after work makes no sense, I prefer a relaxing, slow start to the day.

[mercer]

I jumped straight from being a student to being a freelancer, so I didn't really experience 'normal' work hours until much later (as a contractor working on location).

I found that I did slowly gravitate to normal hours because of precisely this reason. My friends started having regular jobs and so I ended up having to adjust my working hours to that.

In fact, I was worse off because I didn't really realize I was conforming to normal work hours, but clients realized that they could approach me whenever they wanted, which was usually in the evening or the weekend.

It took me a while to learn how to not answer every email or phone call at odd times, and re-condition my clients.

[liotier]

You could work whenever you want to and be just as efficient - but you would lose the benefit of social synchronization.

Having non-work time simultaneously with the people you want to share your life with is a huge factor in working at the same time.

[kirsebaer]

This is programmed into as a child. It's your operating system as a future worker, to be used by your future manager. Days of the week, standing in line, sitting quietly, not complaining. It starts out as fun, a game in pre-school, but then...

This obedience-training is the main point of school, certainly not developing creativity and initiative.

There are school-like places where children are free to do what they like. Free to play, free to fail. Check out Sudbury Valley School. It's an international movement. See the new book "Free to Learn".

[contulluipeste]

"It starts out as fun, a game in pre-school, but then..."

For some of us (like me a few other subjects that I remember) the conforming game was never fun. To force someone to wake up and then to sync to an activity program, and then to sleep some programmed hours, and so on... it was necessary maybe, but I never recall it to be felt as "fun".

[fsiefken]

Good idea there are bits and pieces already ranging from philosophical notions of duree, to various time/task management ideas like ZTD, pomodoro. Regarding cyclical time I make use of of solar-lunar iphone app and portable sundial to remind me of the circular nature of time and my place in the grand scheme of things. One could argue that prayer/time-out schedules of christians, jews and muslims also help in this regard. Someone on HN made designed a calendar/time system counting down instead of up among some other things.