Counting the Minutes: Productivity and the Well-Lived Day between al-Ghazali and Benjamin Franklin

Read "Counting the Minutes: Productivity and the Well-Lived Day between Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and Benjamin Franklin" by Sophia Vasalou: https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article...

"Is time experienced differently by different people? In different cultures? Across different places and times? Is there a better and worse way to relate to time? And if we wised up to it, would it revolutionize the way we handle the most basic units of our lives: our minutes, hours, and days?

The answers to some of these questions will seem obvious to us self-conscious moderns, hounded as we are by the tempo of life ceaselessly ratcheted up by wave after wave of technological advances. When the social psychologist Robert Levine published his book The Geography of Time in 1997, against the background of a long string of studies exploring the cultural history of timekeeping, his general insight would not have surprised many readers. Put your feet down at one point on the earth’s surface, and you will find that the pace of life changes dramatically from what you knew it to be at another. Time in Brazil or Burundi is not time in Switzerland or New York. This can be seen by, among other things, comparing the performance of different countries on a number of simple but telling measures, such as how long pedestrians take to cover a distance of sixty feet in downtown areas and how accurate public clocks are.

An important way of describing different temporal cultures is in terms of a distinction between “clock time” and “event time.” Clock time is the type of time we are most familiar with: linear time divided into regular, fixed units and measured through mechanical (and now digital) timepieces. In cultures that follow clock time, the clock is the central cue in deciding when an activity stops and starts (a university lecture, a children’s party, night-time sleep). Cultures that live on event time inherit an older way of thinking about time, which is attuned to the more fluid and organic rhythm of natural events. Even today, farming communities in Burundi are more likely to fix time by reference to natural processes (“when the cows go out to graze,” “almost the morning light,” “when the rooster sings”) than to the standardized time units of our familiar clocks. These different attitudes to time, Levine observes, have a predictable correlation to economic status. The stronger the economy in a given locale, the faster the pace of life, and the greater the dominance of clock time."