Managing Time
Time at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century is being restructured. How we collectively organise our use of time is changing, as is how we personally see time. We are in the process of abandoning the time disciplines which structured our working and private lives for much of the last two centuries. This kind of restructuring has happened before, in the late eighteenth century at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, as the historian E.P. Thompson described in his famous essay ‘Time and Work Discipline’: ‘The transition to a mature industrial society entailed a severe restructuring of working habits – new discipline, new incentives and a new human nature upon which these incentives could bite effectively.’
The dissenting traditions of Puritanism and Methodism provided the concepts of time essential for the development of a disciplined industrial workforce. The restructuring required getting rid of ‘St Monday’ – the habit of taking Monday and sometimes Tuesday off to recover from the excesses of Sunday – and the regularisation of craftsmen’s patterns of short, intense periods of activity interspersed with idleness. Factories required everyone to turn up on time: punctuality was born. They also required a move from paying according to the task, to paying according to the time: instead of paying per pot or piecework, the employer paid per hour. Time became something to be bought and sold, and was intimately bound up with the work ethic in the writings of men such as Benjamin Franklin, who epitomised the spirit of eighteenth-century American self-improvement with his strictures on wasting neither money nor time. The proper use of time was divinely sanctioned, and would form part of that final arbiter of our behaviour, the Last Judgement: we would be held to account for our use of time. Thompson concludes: ‘In mature, capitalist society all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use.’ In 1967, when Thompson wrote his wonderful essay, he presumed that this capitalist exploitation of time had reached its apogee, and speculated on the possibilities of a future leisure age:
Puritanism, in its marriage of convenience with industrial capitalism, was the agent that converted people to new valuations of time…which saturated people’s minds with the equation that time is money. One recurrent form of revolt within Western industrial capitalism, whether the bohemian or the beatnik, has often taken the form of flouting the urgency of respectable time values…if Puritanism was a necessary part of the work ethos which enabled the industrialised world to break out of poverty-stricken economies of the past, will the Puritan valuation of time begin to decompose as the pressures of poverty relax?…Will people begin to lose that restless urgency, that desire to consume time purposively which most people carry just as they carry a watch on their wrists?…If we are to have an enlarged leisure in an automated future…what will be the capacity of experience of people who have this undirected time to live?…If we become less compulsive about time, people might have to relearn some of the arts of living lost in the Industrial Revolution…how to fill the interstices of their day with enriched, more leisurely, personal and social relations…?27
What Thompson didn’t bargain for was the insistent call of the mobile phone, filling the ‘interstices of the day’ which his generation never dreamt would be colonised by the demands of the job: the mobile follows us home, on the school run, even into the toilet. What we have to ask ourselves is, why did we flunk Thompson’s challenge? Did we ever have the choice? Instead of learning leisure, our compulsion to see time as a commodity to be spent purposively has intensified, despite the decline of any sense of religious accounting, and despite the easing for the majority of the ‘pressures of poverty’.
Thompson did not imagine that in the last decades of the twentieth century time would again be restructured as sharply and as violently as it was in the late eighteenth century. Would he have believed it possible that this would arouse so little resistance – indeed that such a large part of it would rest on voluntarism? No need of a nineteenth-century-style factory supervisor here to enforce timekeeping with disciplinary measures; the disciplines of this restructuring take place inside our heads.
What the Puritan dissenting traditions taught was how to spend time, instead of pass time. Now, in the twenty-first century, we are expected to learn how to manage time. It takes a tenth of a second for Google to find 9,170,000 items on time management. There are a lot of people out there offering to teach you or to sell you software which will help you manage time. Companies sign up their workforces to what amounts to a massive educational campaign to restructure their use of time. Since when did time become so unruly that it needed this much managing?
As soon as the word ‘management’ creeps into a sentence, there is reason for suspicion. We talk of managing what is often irreconcilable – it’s a rhetorical reflex which replaces the conflictual rhetoric of, say, the seventies – and the word usually indicates complex compromises and trade-offs. The responsibility for negotiating those is squarely placed on the individual, because time management is regarded as a personal skill. At the level of micro-management of time, employers cannot always order compliance, particularly from highly skilled workers; they can only hope for efficient time-use by training and by adding pressure to the employee. This is the first characteristic of our restructured time: it’s all down to us, individually. The contemporary disciplines of time are not externally imposed by managerial/professional work, but internalised, and we are made into our own timekeepers. We bear that sense of responsibility very keenly, blaming ourselves for our poor time management skills rather than entertaining the possibility that we’ve got too much to do. Poor time management is regarded as a sign of personal incompetence and inadequacy; we apply to ourselves and our use of time a rationale of efficiency.
The second characteristic of this restructured sense of time is that whereas industrial development required a huge degree of synchronisation – for example, in the factory – our experience of working time is becoming more and more individualised: there is a variety of shift patterns, part-time working and long hours. The debate over Sunday trading was the last gasp of the battle between ‘collective’ and ‘individualised’ time: by abandoning many of the restrictions on retailers opening on Sundays we gave up the idea of a communal day of rest, and took on the responsibility of finding and making our own point of rest. We have been decoupled, says sociologist Julia Brannen, from ‘shared or collective experiences of time, for example rituals and celebrations; for each of us is compelled to create our own time schedules, live in our own time worlds, deciding when to stop work and when to begin again’.28 If everyone just does their own thing, that’s dandy – only it isn’t always, because everyone is doing their own thing in an intensely competitive environment. The individualisation of time cripples any collective struggle over its organisation and how that reflects the distribution of power. There was a degree of protection in regularity and in negotiated hours – you know when the day is over and your job is done – and many of those most afflicted by long hours have lost that formal protection.
The third characteristic of our restructured time is the erosion of the boundaries between personal, private time and work time. E.P. Thompson pointed out that industrialisation drew a sharp division between work and life; we are now in the process of reintegrating them. You can attend a child’s school play in work time and then pick up your work emails in the evening at home, just as in earlier centuries the mother might spin some wool for the loom while waiting for the kettle to boil. This is billed as an improvement in working conditions, which provides more autonomy and enables employees to juggle family responsibilities with work. Will Hutton, head of the thinktank the Work Foundation, argues that this ‘time sovereignty’ is the panacea to solve the conflict between work and caring, to ease intolerable workloads; if we have control over our working hours, then the demands of the job are tolerable: ‘I suspect that what got