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 to [Alan] Milburn [the former Health Secretary who resigned to spend more time with his family] – and the raft of executives who are also resigning from top positions – is not the long hours, but the inability to control them.’29 Many in the most educated, skilled section of the labour market are prepared to trade time for autonomy, or what appears to be autonomy.
While the lack of boundaries creates some kinds of autonomy for those in senior managerial positions, for many it can become what Barbara Adam described in her book Timewatch (1995) as an ‘unbearable, unfathomable burden’ as workers shift between different forms of time, all of which ‘need to be synchronised with lives of significant others and the society’.30 So that, to prolong the above example, when you get home from the child’s play there’s an even larger email inbox, with urgent information for the meeting you have to attend the following day; that evening the child runs a temperature, and your mother calls to discuss a hospital test, and there’s no time to catch up. Inevitably, shifting back and forth between family time and work time is constantly throwing up conflicts between competing demands which sometimes cannot be managed: do you turn up for the meeting with the schoolteacher, or finish off the report for the boss? Robert Reich in The Future of Success (2001) describes his dilemma when a critical business meeting was scheduled to clash with his son’s sports game. In the end he opted for the latter and forwent the chance of a major work assignment – a decision which requires considerable material and emotional security.
A fourth characteristic of our restructured sense of time is the internalisation of efficiency. There’s a reflex by which we calculate a cost/benefit analysis of whether an activity is worth the time we are investing in it. This can apply to doing the shopping, changing a nappy, compiling a report or attending a meeting. Are we doing something in as short a time as possible? It’s as if we have absorbed the ‘time-motion’ studies of the late-nineteenth-century American management theorist Frederick Taylor, and are applying them not just to manufacturing processes but to our entire lives. The American housewife who produced a cookery book on Taylorist principles of time-efficiency in the 1920s was ahead of her time. Closely allied to efficiency is productivity: instead of being asked if we’ve had a good day, we’re now asked if we’ve had a productive one. Nothing contributes more to frustration and impatience than attempting to live life efficiently. It allows no margin of error, no room for the ebb and flow. Listen to anyone talking about a day that has gone wrong and it’s a tale of how their aspirations to efficiency were frustrated by traffic jams, cancelled trains, crashed computers or flight delays. But the aspirations continue, encouraged by the fantasies held out by advertising, which continually promises us more time.
Finally, the fifth characteristic of our restructured time is that we are in the process of shifting back to task-based time rather than the employed time instituted early in the Industrial Revolution. The boss now says, ‘I don’t care when or how you work, I’m just interested in the results.’ All too often, this simply means exacting more work than can feasibly be done in the contracted hours; once again, the burden of resolving the irreconcilable is left to the individual.
Clashing priorities, too much work, and it’s all down to us to manage it. Of course we fail. No wonder we come to hate time so much – it makes us feel inadequate because we can never control its passage: it’s either too fast or too slow. So we blame time and complain that we have too little of it, when in fact time is one of the most democratic of resources. The richer and the more well-educated we are, the more likely we are to be dissatisfied with time. In his book An Intimate History of Humanity (1994) Theodore Zeldin quotes a magazine columnist who concludes: ‘What we lack more than anything else is time.’31
How did we lose control of our time? How did we lose sight of the power relationship which underpins working time – effectively making the bosses’ jobs a lot easier for them, because they don’t need to supervise the hours of unpaid labour offered by Pete and thousands of others. How did we lose sight of Marx’s insight into the essential precondition of human freedom – time and energy? Perhaps by being too busy managing time and trying to cobble together some vestige of shared time with partners, friends or family to understand the freedoms we’ve lost, let alone to find the time to start imagining which of the old-fashioned protections need to be restored and which new freedoms we need to realise. In the ‘extended present’, always brimful of preoccupations, comments sociologist Julia Brannen, there is such a constant state of busyness that the future never arrives, and the past is forgotten: ‘It not only stops us from imagining the future, it stops us from doing anything about it or making it better.’32
Time is only one part of the story. For many people it’s not so much the time they spend at work, as the effort that is required while they are there. They complain of being rushed off their feet, of always having more work to do than time to do it in, and of there never being enough people to get the job done. By the end of the day they’re exhausted: 36 per cent of us are too tired to do anything but slump on the sofa.1 The nineties
