Rethinking time: ubichronic time and its impact on work

ABSTRACT

Modern technology is ubiquitous i.e., “always there” – available to us when we want it and engaging us even when we don’t actively seek it. This constantly available ubiquitous technology influences people’s perception of time. This conceptual paper explores how ubiquitous technology creates a new time vision we call ubichronic time. We argue ubichronic time is qualitatively different from existing time visions and highlight the new values and behaviours associated with it. Specifically, people who have an ubichronic time vision perform disparate activities that span short durations across the day, find specific tiny units of time valuable and cram many repeated activities into a day. We also argue ubichronic time will have profound implications on the way we work and as such propose new concepts and research directions on how the way we work needs to adapt at the individual, team, and organisational levels.

KEYWORDS:

• Time
• nature of work
• ubiquitous technologies
• internet enabled technologies
• ubichronic time
• conceptual development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. While guild apprentices and journeymen could theoretically be exploited by guildmasters, that these were scarce, skilled labourers meant there was high labour mobility which deterred exploitation (Epstein, 1998). For example, guild tailors would negotiate their hours worked (less than 13 hours and only on official workdays) (Chance et al., 1979). In contrast, industrial revolution textile workers could be expected to work 14–16 hour shifts six days a week (Anonymous Undated).

2. Originally, Saunders et al. (2004) included eight dimensions. Both the long-term/short-term and abstraction dimensions can be viewed as particular cases of the discontinuous (continuity dimension)-epochal (homogeneity) perspective. For the long-term/short-term dimension, particular ranges of time are more valued than others. For the abstraction dimension, abstract time is a special case of continuous time, and concrete time is a special case of discontinous time. Also, long-term/short-term is viewed by Saunders et al. (2004) as a wholly group (society) level concept. Our focus is on individual temporal concepts that aggregate to the group.

3. Saunders et al. (2004), suggest that time is homogeneous when each time unit is viewed as having the same “duration” as the other. It is possible that two time units with the same duration might differ in value. However, when compared to the other sub-dimension i.e., “epochal” where time units differ qualitatively the notion of value becomes apparent.