¹

• Something’s gone wrong with time – I don’t want to say ‘late stage capitalism strikes again,’ but pre-industrial societies in Europe had something good going.
• Is the agony of procrastination a trace of how we would prefer to go about our tasks?
• The rules of the pomodoro technique – a clever coincidence

If you study the evolution of work in human societies, I fail to see how you could not conclude that something has gone wrong with time. There’s a passage from Bullshit Jobs that I come back to often:

[This is in part because] most people who have ever existed have assumed that normal human patterns take the form of periodic intense bursts of energy, followed by relaxation, followed by slowly picking up again towards another intense bout. This is what farming is like, for instance… But even daily tasks, or projects such as building a house or preparing for a feast, tend to take roughly this form.

In other words, the traditional student’s pattern of lackadaisical study leading up to intense cramming before exams and then slacking off again… is typical of how human beings have always tended to go about necessary tasks if no-one forces them to act otherwise. Some students may engage in cartoonishly exaggerated versions of this pattern. But good students figure out how to get the pace roughly right.

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs (Ch. 3: Why Do Those in Bullshit Jobs Regularly Report Themselves Unhappy? (On Spiritual Violence, Part 1))

I went over Chapter 3 of Bullshit Jobs in a previous post, where I explored the possibility that we’ve got something wrong about what motivates us:

https://brologue.net/2023/12/23/three-amstrads-two-droll-daves-and-an-orange-on-a-black-tee/#really-dont-mind-if-you-sit-this-one-out

We run ourselves ragged with the pressure of studying consistently everyday, like people tell us we should, grinding for a piece of paper that, in spite of our indignation, does not guarantee us a job. I hope this might be some small catharsis to those constantly badgered by the black dog known only as, “Icouldbestudying.”

In spite of all external pressures nagging you otherwise, you don’t have to have your nose at the grindstone every hour God sends. By the same token, this isn’t to say you should leave everything to the last minute – “Good students figure out how to get the pace roughly right.”

Much of our prevailing attitudes to work can be traced back to the first industrial revolution in the 18th-19th centuries, and since that time, there’s a lot of things we used to do that we’ve forgotten. For instance, we never used to sleep in one solitary block. Burning the midnight oil once meant waking up for an hour every night to do some light task before falling asleep again.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep

Here’s another example: I was listening to a video from some guy on YouTube about ways to prepare yourself to, as the hot-button phrase goes, “work smarter, not harder” for exams (or work in general). Judging from his words – touting napping as “boosting performance” – I guessed that he didn’t live in a part of the world that does not already communally enforce rest.

That napping positively affects performance has been shown through academic research time and again, but what’s interesting is that his wording framed this as though it was an entirely new discovery. In fact, historical evidence shows us that the siesta was not just a Spanish thing in medieval Europe – people took long siestas during work across the continent.

Although Bullshit Jobs is not cited as a source in this video by Historia Civilis, almost all of the same points can be found in it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvk_XylEmLo

Workers would trickle in at sunrise, be fed, work lightly until lunch, where they’d break off for a couple of hours, take a siesta, before returning to work and finishing the day’s tasks in a frenzied burst of energy. If the work was done by the middle of the afternoon, they could go home. If not, they’d break for what was effectively a shorter second lunch.

What’s interesting, HC notes, is that this pattern of long periods of torpor followed by short bursts of hard work followed by torpor can be traced back to prehistoric societies (I.e. societies that existed before we started writing stuff down). Although we may have worked 9 to 5 in a field, at least half of that time involved socialising and eating.

From Graeber’s observations, that we continue to do this, in the age of the service economy and knowledge work, one might suggest that the nature of our work does not alter the nature of this pattern. That is, even though the ways we live and work have changed, and the amount of leisure time (and activities to fill it with) is greater than ever, evolution is not so fast as to completely erase a pattern we’ve been used to for tens of thousands of years.

But we are forced to act otherwise, aren’t we? The patterns of work today are at odds with how we’d rather prefer to do things. Oliver Burkeman, in Four Thousand Weeks, describes procrastination as our attempts to claw back the feeling we have control over our time, now that we’ve come to understand it as something to lease out to others, and not something that belongs to a higher power. We don’t want to appear incompetent, lazy, incurious, or unambitious to others, yet everyone² outside seems to believe that procrastination is a manifestation of these qualities.

It gets to a point that it’s as if every minute spent not doing something you ought to be doing accrues a kind of productivity debt which we must repay, or else we’re fuckups. And yet, that there will always be some work to be done suggests that our debts will never be repaid.

If you woke up tomorrow in pre-industrial Europe, people would consider there to be something extremely wrong with you if you worked non-stop from sunrise to sunset, unless there was a future event that necessitated it – say, a big midwinter festival lasting from November to February.³ Even then, that would be considered two days’ worth of work, since “work” was tacitly understood to be about half of the daylight hours.

For most of human history, work and life intermingled. We didn’t commute for three hours one way to look at bad screen for eight hours, then commute back to look at good screen for half an hour. And make dinner. And clean up. And recover from bad screen. And recover from making dinner…

For all of that time, for most people, time was task-oriented, and clocks did not exist. Most people measured the time it took to accomplish tasks by comparing it to something else. Graeber recalls his time working in Madagascar: rural people would describe walking to the next village over taking as long as ‘two cookings of a pot of rice.’ What HC points out is that, aggregating accounts through the ages, and the tasks used for measurement, humans naturally broke up time into chunks of thirty minutes, on average.

Time is not a grid against which work can be measured, because the work is the measure itself.

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs (Ch. 3: Why Do Those in Bullshit Jobs Regularly Report Themselves Unhappy? (On Spiritual Violence, Part 1))

In the 14th century, merchants funded and encouraged the construction of clock towers. HC points out the tower built at the Amsterdam stock exchange in 1611 – it’s as though clock towers popping up all over Europe heralded the arrival of capitalism, and thus the abstraction of time that changed how we perceive work. Once clocks entered the workplace, someone had the delightfully devilish idea to install bells that would signify the start and end of the workday. This eventually spread to schools.

The clocks we are all used to today break up time in hourly chunks that use one minute as a basic unit of measurement. Minutes and seconds are the smallest units of time sensible for human measurement. Anything smaller just wouldn’t make sense (would you measure an hour in milliseconds?) Think about that the next time you read a note from the boss adding up all the idle minutes we waste. Tell them they’d get a much bigger number if they instead kept track in nanoseconds.

Today, we are hired by the hour. Minimum wage is also established as being by the hour, and it’s likely your work’s contract described the number of hours you’re expected to work in a week. By contrast, pre-clock time, workers were hired by the day, and used actions that took roughly half an hour as a unit of measurement.

Knowing all this makes one particular time management trick much more interesting – the Pomodoro. It chunks work into roughly the same time, for one thing, and it’s sort of like an action-based unit of time in itself, like boiling a pot of rice. If our focus is on the process of work and not the product, I think it’s possible to coax out some arguments for letting the pomodoro and our work be the measure of time. On the other hand, although we would like to chunk our time into 25-30 minute blocks like we used to, the constant ticking sound emitted once a second by the pomodoro reminds us that the egg timer is a mechanical clock by another name.⁴

If someone were to ask you how long it might take to do something, like bake a cake, it’s not such a farfetched thing to say it might take two pomodoros (depends on the cake). Someone else who understands what a pomodoro is might interpret this as ‘about an hour, minus ten minutes of downtime.’

Granted, if you wanted to emulate the old, informal way of working, you’d have to spend 25 minutes working and 25 minutes resting every time. Even then, us 21st century folks have a lot of things that we could possibly do in those 25 minutes at rest, and a lot of those things also involve intense focus when the aim of the break is to switch off.

I know myself that equally intensive creative hobbies have as high switching costs as my work. Editing a video, or reading, or 3D modelling take a lot to get started. Once I’d get in the swing of things, I’d be dropped back into work and feel like, come the next break, I’d have to start over.

You’ve really got to force yourself to switch off for those five minutes. You might share my experiences when I say that, as someone who is ADHD, having to stop when you’ve got your flow going can feel like studying on Dante Must Die mode. If it’s something that involves a lot of heavy thinking, you just want to keep going out of fear that you might forget a new idea or way of doing something.

Here I’m focusing on individuals and myself, but no-one truly learns in a vacuum, even if you’re the ultimate introvert who studies in complete solitude. Time, as I pointed out last time, has network effects:

https://brologue.net/2024/01/01/f-is-for-friends-who-do-stuff-together/#u-is-for-u-n-me

The more people who can share time with you in sync, the more valuable that time is. It should follow that the more friends you can study with, the more valuable that time is.

I’ve tried to put some of my friends onto a Pomodoro study group before, but everyone I’ve ever asked has declined. It’s pretty clear to anyone that any attempt at studying with your friends may start off well, but quickly deteriorates as you find more interesting things to talk about. They’ve not said as such explicitly to me, but still – better to break the chain than to live in fear of it. The last thing a pomodoro should be is something to keep score of and measure your worth against.

It’s not clear if some of the rules of the Pomodoro are grounded in anthropological insights, or entirely coincidental. Probably the latter, I think. It’s no silver bullet to our predicament – hardly even a nugget – but it’s onto something.

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1. Photo credit goes to Dennis van Zuijlekom on Flickr: https://flic.kr/p/fdPq7o ↩︎
2. This being, as it were, the royal ‘everyone.’ In anthropology, if you ask someone what they believe in about a given subject, if they say “It’s human to…” or words to that effect, all you’ve got is one person’s prejudices about that subject and their attempt at applying a universal principle to make sense of things. Ironically, I’m guilty of doing this myself. Then again, I’m no anthropologist. ↩︎
3. Christmas used to last from St. Martin’s Day (11th November) to Candlemas (2nd February). And by ‘last,’ I mean that people prepared for it to literally be Christmas every day. Yet some of us still try to cram the Christmas feast over, at best, two days (Christmas included). ↩︎
4. Before we had mechanical egg timers, we would’ve used hourglasses to assist in cooking. At least in Europe, hourglasses approximately emerged a century before the first mechanical clocks. The turning of the hourglass, and the time it took for all the sand to run to the bottom, was the measurement, just like the boiling of a pot of rice. Just as the rice being boiled and ready to serve is the visual indicator that some time has passed, so too the last grains of sand in the hourglass funneling through the bottom. ↩︎