Unlocking Yourself From Hourly Rates
Much of human behavior is based on “clock time,” which divides our day into quantifiable units—hours and minutes. Those units dictate when tasks begin and end and, at work, allow us to “punch the clock.” It is a familiar, almost common sense system for a modern economy—but it isn’t the only way to think about how to plan and measure work. And it often makes us unhappy.
Clock time is largely determined by the rotation of the Earth, and the rising and setting of the sun. But the hour, 60 minutes, is entirely arbitrary. It is an unnatural fraction of a day, a legacy of Babylonian math, which was built on base 60, and of the Egyptians’ derivative preference for using base 12. If our ancestors had used base 10, as we do, an “hour” would be 20% longer.
Clock time isn’t the only way to organize behavior. Another approach is “event time,” in which we continue doing something until we finish or some event occurs, no matter how many minutes or hours it takes. You might, for example, start work not at 9 a.m. but whenever you finish breakfast.