What Research Says About Control and Ditching the Clock

Source: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels

The world's first mechanical clocks were tower clocks built in Europe around 1270 to 1300 during the renaissance period. These clocks did not yet have dials or hands but told the time by striking bells. Bells we can still hear today in many places around the world. People then had some sense of what time of day it was, but only in general terms. It was used to mainly help people come together for community gatherings such as prayers, funerals, town meetings, etc.

In the late 1700s, a new timing device was developed, similar to what is used today. A device that could tell the exact time by hours, minutes, and seconds. As a result, people began to behave and organize themselves in different ways than they did before. The industrial revolution is the best example of how people started to use the clock. During the industrial revolution, people started to work in assembly lines and in shifts around the clock. People punched in and punched out to measure their workday’s worth. Public transportation developed where the clock determined when a train arrived and left the station. In general, increasing efficiency was the goal, and the clock was a great tool to accomplish that. However, breaking down the day into hours and minutes also implies that every minute of the day should be accounted for, which can be very limiting.

A World Governed by the Clock

Fast forwarding to 2023, clocks are everywhere, from the mobile device we carry with us at all times, to the sophisticated watches we have that not only tell us the time, but also our heartbeats at every moment and the number of calories that we burn. We also now live in a society where time off work is valued, and people appreciate the idea of needing to unwind once in a while in order to recharge and perform better. However, many of us even use the clock as a device to help us efficiently plan our time off.

One can say that this is a bit of an oxymoron. The whole goal of taking time off work and recharging is to not be efficient or accountable for every second of the day. When one wants to recharge, one wants to reflect, be mindful, and be in the moment. By continuing to break down the day by hours and minutes, we turn our “time off” to just another task we need to do efficiently and “on time." In a culture obsessed with timeliness, we don't make room for different ways of controlling our time.

Making an Impact or Being Efficient

In my research, we asked people to break down their day either by time units of hours and minutes or by the tasks that they needed to complete that day. We then measured how relying on these two different ways of thinking of their day, affects their sense of well-being and control over their actions.

The results we found were quite surprising. The general assumption is that people who are punctual and break down their day based on time units are in control over their actions and are perceived as more put together than those who break down their day by tasks, where it is not clear what time their day will start or end. However, our research showed the opposite results.

Those who broke down their day based on time units reported a lesser sense of control over their actions and attributed a large portion of their outcomes to luck or coincidence (for example, "I did well on the exam because I got lucky and it was easy"). Those who broke down their day based on the tasks that needed to be completed reported a stronger sense of control over their actions and attributed it mainly to themselves (for example, "I did well on the exam because I studied hard and therefore knew the answers to most questions").

We took this further and examined how this effect on the sense of control over one’s actions can be applied when it comes to actions that can benefit the environment or the community, such as reducing global warming or donating money to charity. Again, we found the same counterintuitive results.

Those who were asked to break down their day by time units reported less willingness to donate compared to those who broke down their day based on the completion of tasks. Furthermore, when compelled by us to choose a charity to donate to, those who used time did not care about the cause of the charity but more about its performance (such as impact and efficiency). Those who ignored the clock and looked to task completion cared about the cause of the charity (e.g., donating to cancer research, poverty, illiteracy, etc), in addition to examining the charities’ performance.

Going Back to Our Natural Roots

People who use the clock are probably more efficient in getting things done, but they are less in tune with their emotions and with their ability to be “in the moment." The fact people use an external mechanism to guide them makes them also see the world as a random, chaotic place where whatever they do does not really change the outcome; therefore what is the point of donating, as it will not make a difference anyway? People who use an internal sense to guide them through the day ("Is the task complete? Can I move to the next task?") see more connections and more cause and effect in the world at large and therefore believe that donating can make a difference.

Career Essential Reads

Fired? Don’t Sign Anything!

Why Rejection Is a Worthy Goal

Being more efficient and getting things done might have fit the industrial world of the 1800s and 1900s well; however, our world today emphasizes connections among people, the effects an action of an individual can have on the world, and the opportunity to stop and take a breather—all of which might fit better a world where people use the clock less, and start taking control over their own personal sense of time, similar to how it was before the first mechanical clock was invented.