michael-dean-k/

For the last two years my lock screen clock has been set to Khmer, the language of Cambodia, with numerals I (still) can’t parse. The point is to not poison the flow of my day with chronos.

I started this experiment because I realized how obsessively I would check the time, as soon as I woke up, through morning and evenings and weekends for no real reason, in situations among friends where the hour was irrelevant. Time was a commodity, something to budget, forecast, control. Only when I got off the clocks did I notice a whole layer of quiet, instant calculations I’d perform to steer the immediate future (ie: it’s 9:43pm, which means I have 17 minutes until 10pm, which means I can only do 15-minute things until the 10pm-things start to happen). Chronological time alienates you from kairos, the ripeness of any given moment.

If we pick up our phone 96 times per day (the average), then we’re aware of the time every 10 minutes. We’re a society stuck in time. Lewis Mumford said that the clock (not the steam engine) is the central machine of the Industrial age, the thing that dissociates us from our natural rhythms.

Of course if I have back-to-back meetings or multiple trains to catch, then I need to be in manager mode and know time to the minute; but in all other moments, I strive to be temporally oblivious. I don’t know the time right now. I assume it’s somewhere 8-9am, and when Christine rings the doorbell I’ll assume it’s almost noon, and I’ll look outside to see the sun and shadows to confirm it’s no longer morning. When I’m hungry I’ll go eat, but unfortunately that brings me near the stove clock which breaks the spell (I’ve tried scrambling the stove clock, and that obviously annoys my wife). Whenever possible I default to removing clocks from UIs, or turning them to analog to create a second of friction, or, when iOS forces me to see ##:##, I revert to foreign numerals I can’t comprehend. Not every room in your home needs a clock. You should never know the time in the room you write.

I have finally reached peak flow, and realize this as I skip downstairs to the bathroom. I better not learn the time. I inevitably do. I see a missed call from my mom at 2:37 pm, and notice it’s 7:16, not too late to call back. But, the reason I write this log, is that 7:16 didn’t register. It was like a local variable in context of the task of calling my mom. I didn’t realize 7:16 in the context of what I expect to do for the rest of the night, 4 hours until I typically crash. That came a minute later, at 7:17, that totalizing and neutralizing “end of today” feeling. But what if tonight is different? Nothing stops me from going until 3 AM. Without that possibility, I am tamed. The problem isn’t time, it’s in calibrating your presence based on anticipation, expectations, clocks.