The clock rolled towards 3 a.m. Another night was ending and the sun would be rising out the window of my home office if I didn't get to bed soon. At least here in the United States. The Eastern Time Zone is so called in the rather patriocentric world view that we here in the States use in the naming things, so Nova Scotia or Bermuda or the whole of Africa and Europe be damned. We, the right coast of America if you look at a traditional map with a giant N pointing at the top of the page, are the capital E - East and it is our clocks that tell the One True Eastern Time.
In this naming misfortune born many years ago, a larger problem comes to light. Eastern Time begs the question - east of what? And as absurd as the practice of continually referring to any fixed location on a spherical surface as The East, it was, indeed, a better solution to the more universal reference of "GMT -5." Why, in The Year of Our Lord 2008 we would all reference our current time by the standards of the best scientists of Old Colonial England is mystifying, and yet anywhere in the world I can relate my time as five hours removed from Greenwich. Greenwich, England is the center of time in a manner that should appear to everyone as silly as declaring the Earth the center of the universe, but it persists.
But I'll leave Greenwich, England alone for a moment. They didn't ask to be the outdated standard of time keeping. The problem of using old standards in a global society is not theirs alone. I'm in the East, at least if you agree with the definition of my society in my nation. My clock tells me it is very late at night, or very early in the morning, in this part of the world. Yet right now, at this very moment, London bustles with morning traffic. In Seattle, coders dreaming of becoming the geek Cinderella billionaires of the next Wired Fairy Tale are on their 14th espresso and the clock hasn't yet struck midnight. In Tokyo, they've already experienced 17 hours of the day I will awake to face tomorrow. By long standing conventions, our clocks all say something that makes sense to us, locally. Our clocks, like our references to where East lies, are being severely challenged in a world that knows no midnight, no morning, and no borders.
The problem of the long standing tradition of local references of time and place hits knowledge workers, the creative class, or whatever euphemism you use to describe the enlightened, technology-enhanced working class with surprising frequency. Someone that communicates for a living, creates digital files, spreads ideas, lives, breathes, and occasionally sleeps in the new world of commerce and culture begins to leave all the conventions of the old world, and old economy behind. We, the individuals that keep pace with this new world, have much less attachment to place and borders. We understand that even the most cherished ideas are just that - ideas - and as such know no place. This means a church is just a building, but the beliefs of the people that live according to the principals taught there matter. It means the core ideas of a nation are not attached to the sand or hills or mountain rocks, but in the people that will defend and nurture and spread these ideas regardless of lines drawn on maps. And it means that, over time and with exposure to this world, the clock is just numbers. It is a way to keep track of a world that doesn't need sunlight to thrive, isn't afraid of the dark, and has no regular workday.
In this world I describe, a cultural and commercial shift that has only started, the most frustrating structure of all, the bureaucratic weapon of mass destruction, the end of creative freedom is not a terrorist group or radical ideology. It is a clock. More precisely, it is the millions of adherents to the clock – the clients, bosses, agencies, offices, and co-workers that still live in a "9 to 5" world.
This reliance on the schedule of yesteryear manifests itself many ways, from snide remarks at the office directed at productive night owls that never attend the morning gripe session over McSausage and Venti Mint Whatever to the outright refusal of managers to bend the rules away from the traditional day at the office. It means office managers than never notice workers that stay late, but always notice if someone is late. It is a schedule that creates its own belief system – that to really work is not to create but to be present at a given set of hours. From grade school marks for tardiness to the punch clock of the work force, the workday is engrained deeply in the old society.
As such, many workers and businesses are losing out on a bigger picture. Confined to the old worldview, restricted to a sunrise commute and sunset return, the day passes in a predictable, controlled way. The working hours in the East are designed for the East. The West has a 9 to 5 day that starts 3 hours later, or when many office workers in the East are at lunch. Other parts of the world are so far out of sync with any given time zone that new age managers in technology and manufacturing congratulate themselves on creating a 24-hour work cycle, sending work from New York to California to India to Turkey to England to New York in a fluid transition of files and knowledge that means the business never stops to sleep. This global distribution of work is all fine and good and its merits and downfalls could fill an entire book independent of this one, but what is it trying to fix?
The answer, it would seem, is to maximize productivity. Productivity. The number one priority for every business. All the good intentions of management will improve it. Create more units - ideas, files, manufactured objects, etc. - in less time. Do more of what you do, do it for less money, and do it quicker. If this is the problem, the 800-pound assumption is the middle of room that many businesses refuse to point out is right there on the wall. Or on your wrist or on the screen on your iPhone. It is the clock. It is the schedule itself. The predictable, practical schedule of business, what I refer to here as 9 to 5, is not, in fact, the most productive way to work.
This is a simple truth that artists, writers, geeks, and others outside the mainstream suit wearing professions have known for years. The best work, the most intense inspiration, the tremendous focus required for doing great things that matter do not happen, at least with any regularity, on schedule. Increasing productivity then, if by productive we mean producing more great work, is not a matter to be solved with an elaborate international IT infrastructure designed to outrun the clock, but in an honest look at how such work happens and how your best people would get more accomplished.
[This post was written last year for a book I'm working on called Time Slicing. Your comments are welcome.]