Living Without Time: Conclusions
23 Feb 2025
Last month I decided to run an experiment where I hid all time indicators from my life. You can read about why I did it and the rules of the experiment here.
Before concluding what I learned, here are some extracts from my experiment diary.
| Day | Entry |
|---|---|
| Day 1 | A lot of anxiety, feels like I'm floating in space. Not knowing the time feels strage. There is a strong feeling of transgression. As if I am walking around with a secret, something people would object to if they knew. I keep having to fight the urge to calculate the time based on events I know happen at specific times. I have this urge even without any practical need for knowing the time. |
| Day 2 |
Based on the sun I think I can understand +/- 1h what time it is. With practice I suppose I could become much more accurate. Old books where characters agree to meet at "sundown" or "midday" without specifying further make more sense to me now. I suppose if you lived a pre-modern life without back-to-back meeting all day, one hours accuracy would be enough. Today when I have nothing scheduled, it does feel very freeing. Also I feel more productive. If I want to work, I work. There's no "right" time to do anything. Caffeeine has much more serious consequences now. It breaks my last clock, the internal body clock. After drinking a coffee and the sun having gone down, I truly have no idea of what time it is. Also the lack of "synhronizing events" that give me an approximate understanding of what time it is, really makes this feel more extreme. A bit scary even. |
| Day 3 |
I feel extremely energized and have been working productively much more than usual. Hard to say if it is because of my time experiment, the general excitement of big changes, or the new year inspiration still lingering. Amazed by how many small things I didn't notice before that reveal the time. Terminal timestamps, WhatsApp messages, even the iPhone clock icon tells the time! |
| Day 5 | Feeling more adjusted, initial fear is gone. |
| Day 7 | I really don't think much about my experiment anymore. The fact that I cannot say exactly what time it is has stopped bothering me. |
| Day 8 | Very stressful experience trying to arrange a museum date. Too relaxed with time, never a firm grasp on how much time I have to prepare. |
| Day 11 | I saw by the timestamp on a message that I woke up around 7:30 today. It seems that not having time in the evening has made me adhere more to the sun and go to bed earlier. I cannot fully explain why, but there's something unsettling about it being dark for a long time, and not going to sleep. It's as if the "it's only middnight" excuse falls away, because you don't know that. |
| Day 12 | Had a lot of caffeein. Again it became difficult to count on my body to tell me when I should go to bed. When this happens it becomes a bit scary. |
| Day 13 | In the beginning I couldn't help calculating what time it was by remembering the offset my wristwatch was running at. Now I don't even look. |
| Day 15 | Relief in knowing the time again. |
Conclusions
In the first few weeks after the experiment ended I did notice a big change in my use of time. I was not checking the clock without a specific purpose, and overall it felt like knowing the time had become much less important.
This was undoubtedly a nice feeling, but as my regular life continued, and I had to attend scheduled meetings, coffee dates, dinners etc., I have slowly drifted back to checking the time approximately the same amount as before the experiment.
Not knowing the time is only relaxing when there are no, or very few, scheduled events in your day. On normal days it ends up adding more stress than it removes.
I do not believe anymore that the reason we have clocks everywhere is an unhealthy obsession with time without purpose. Rather I think it is simply a result of the world we live in. We micro-manage our days, not just in work-life, but outside of work as well.
But I do wonder if all of this time optimization has made us more efficient, or if running from one task to another actually has impeded our ability of making good long term decisions.
Speaking for myself, I think it has. Too often I might work for weeks on something that was not a good idea to begin with.
The actionable change I will do based on this experiment is to add more slack to my routine. Time where I do not have anything planned, and where my mind can just drift. Apart from providing some much needed stress relief, I think that will help me with decision making.
Measure twice, cut once type of thing.
PS: I still maintain that time the way most imagine it is only a concept, albeit a useful one for modern life.