https://annehelen.substack.com/p/the-diminishing-returns-of-calendar?utm_campaign=mb&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=morning_brew

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Time zones are unnatural. Growing up where I did in North Idaho — in the Pacific Time Zone, but just a few hours east and north of Mountain Time — I took that weirdness for granted. When my family drove south to ski at the little two-chair-lift mountain, we passed an area we referred to as “Time Zone Creek,” and then, just like that, you lost an hour. Earlier this week, a subscriber described a restaurant in Indiana — which has largely switched to Eastern Time, save 18 hold-out counties — where every time you call and make a reservation, they remind you of their time zone. Newfoundland operates on a half time zone.

There are a handful of states and nations with bifurcated time, running along rivers or mountain ranges or county lines. They make little sense to us now, but they were drawn with purpose: to keep the trains running “on time,” but also to make time itself organizable from afar. To coarsely summarize: before standardized time zones, noon was when the sun was highest in the sky. When clocks became available and affordable to the masses, you could set your (analog) clock by it, but clocks and other timepieces also unwound, went slow, ticked fast. Plus noon in, say, Havre, Montana would’ve been different than noon in Whitefish, Montana, around 200 miles West. That’s just how the sun works. But if every town’s noon is kinda different, how do you make a train schedule? How do you make time rational?

You make it (somewhat) arbitrary. Divide the world into 24 time zones, and slowly force people — often through colonial might — to abide by one, standard time for an entire wedge. Do it in the name of commerce, of travel, of ease of communication, of ease. Fast-forward a century and a half, and this rational/irrational time is just the way things are, so accepted as to become invisible, but with very real everyday effects on our lives: a sun that sets earlier or later, depending on your location in the time zone, or a legislative body that operates on a different schedule than half the state (see: Idaho).

We live with these realities because they make the rest of our lives feel manageable. But time did not have to be arranged that way. We have imagined time, at least in Western countries, as subservient to commerce, and attempted to export or forcibly impose that understanding worldwide. And just as there’s nothing “natural” about eating with, say, a fork, there’s nothing natural about the way we’ve organized time. It is ideological, which is to say, it is also political — and a means of imposing a particular type of order on others.

To illustrate this idea, I want to talk a little about academia (trust that even if you’re outside higher ed, you’ll recognize the dynamics at play here).

Earlier this month, academic Twitter was overwhelmed with debate over calendar use, sparked by this tweet (which I also used as our discussion starter about calendar use last week, if you missed it)

…and also this one:

In short: a lot of academics are resistant to using the digital calendars and calendar invites that have become the norm in many industries. As McMillan Cottom notes further down in her thread, male academics are significantly more resistant; others have told me that people with tenure and/or who are more senior are also allergic to any form of digital calendaring.

You could say it’s simple resistance to new technology, but that’s a cop-out. Resisting new technology is, itself, a power move: a way to make other people do more work to compensate for the work you’re not doing. If refuse to google the simple steps to save a file as a PDF, for example, and keep sending a file as a Word document, then someone else is spending their time downloading your file, saving as a PDF, and resending it. Not using a digital calendar is a way to communicate your position of perceived power over other (more junior) faculty, over students, and over staff — all of whom (in many faculty members’ minds) are subordinate to themselves.

But there’s another layer here, too. Many senior faculty, particularly faculty who entered academia before, oh, 2000, entered the institution (both actual institutions and the institution, writ large, of academia) with an understanding of their time as their own. Yes, they’d need to teach some classes, and attend a faculty meeting, and put out a sign on their door listing their three mandated office hours. But otherwise, they were in control — and able, at least theoretically, to “live the life of the mind” promised by a career in academic study. Importantly, the ability to live that life was facilitated by a variety of support staff: personal and departmental secretaries, but also, in many cases, their spouses.

For all but the highest echelons of faculty, that vision is no longer obtainable. There are more classes to teach, more students’ theses to advise, more meetings and trainings to attend, more mandatory demands on time, more spouses with full-time jobs themselves. Depending on the institution, a lot of those demands have to do with 1) ongoing, chronic, debilitating budget cuts, diminished public funding, and the imperative to educate more students with less; but also 2) the foundational transformation of higher ed into a “business” with corresponding structures and profit imperatives.