#99 - Are We Obsessed with Time?

Obsessed with Time?

Some time ago, during a performance review with one of my team members — an Indian colleague who reported to me — I asked for feedback on our collaboration. He paused, smiled gently, and said:

I laughed at first. But later, the words echoed.Too obsessed with time? The idea felt absurd — and then oddly plausible.

In my world, punctuality isn’t up for discussion. It's expected. You show up on time. You start on time. You finish on time. It's so woven into the fabric of professional life that we don't even notice it's there — like gravity.

But has this devotion to timeliness always been with us? Or have we learned it, absorbed it, industrialised it?

When Time Was Local

I recently read an article by a friend — Malgorzata Litwinowicz-Drozdziel — in which she points to the nineteenth century as an era of standardisation.

Intrigued by this idea, I began to dig deeper. The explosion of standardisation in the 19th century changed the world we know so profoundly that we often react with surprise at the scale of these transformations.

Official (standard) time was introduced in Poland for the first time on 1 August 1919, as Central European Time. A little over a hundred years ago, Poland had no national standard time.

Until the 19th century, each region — and even each city — around the world used its own local solar time, with noon occurring when the sun was at its highest point in the sky.

This was not a problem — until the arrival of the railway and the telegraph, which required time synchronisation. The first country to introduce standard time was Britain, where the railways adopted Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) in 1847 as a uniform standard. The International Meridian Conference, held in Washington in 1884, established Greenwich as the Prime Meridian (0° longitude) and divided the world into 24 time zones, each spanning 15 degrees of longitude — officially beginning the global standardisation of time.

Punctuality and Industrialisation

According to Ha-Joon Chang, the higher the level of a country’s industrialisation, the more importance its people attach to punctuality — because their work is organised by the clock. Punctuality, therefore, is most likely not a cultural trait, but rather a consequence of economic development.

Being on time became a necessity rather than something nice to have. If you are late, you will not catch a train. People in a meeting have their own trains to catch, they cannot wait — and the show must go on.

The Stress of Standardisation

In a world of growing technological complexity and increased interaction between people, standardisation is inevitable. The question is how to use it wisely, so we don't become thoughtless, ever-stressed robots on a production line.

Giacomo Cabri and Guido Fioretti bring an interesting perspective to the discussion. They propose a standardisation method that focuses on defining boundary conditions rather than very detailed recipes.

Flexibility Within Structure

In our punctuality discussion, we could picture this as defining time frames rather than exact points in time — giving space for reshuffling activities and allowing for some level of flexibility.

I find this a powerful way of thinking about balancing the need for standardisation with the flexibility required to act in an uncertain, changing environment. Examples of well-implemented boundary-conditions thinking include checklists or some project management methods that advocate focusing on goals rather than specific tasks.

Learning to Live with Time

Either way, there is no escape anymore from standardisation. We may not like it, but we have to learn how to use it as a component of our resilience toolkit.

Perhaps my colleague was right — maybe it’s not time we need to control, but how we relate to it.

References and Notes

Cabri, G., & Fioretti, G. (2022). Flexibility out of standardization. International Journal of Organization Theory & Behavior, 25(1/2), 22-38.

Chang, H.-J. (2023). Edible economics: A hungry economist explains the world. London: Allen Lane.

Gawande, A. (2010). The checklist manifesto: How to get things right. Profile Books.

Litwinowicz-Droździel, M. (2024). Colonisation of the future, the time of the émigré, the history of the Earth: Ignacy Domeyko’s Moje Podróże. Acta Poloniae Historica, 130, 113-132.