Just recently, we had "Daylight Savings Time" something-something in California. I heard at least one person complain about software problems with this. The quantification of time remains a complex issue that you probably shouldn't ever try to write software for yourself unless you are a specialist with a deep understanding of this topic. I will not go into extensive details about the specifics of stuff here as to not tire you (the reader) and because I wouldn't know what I was talking about.

Everyday Experiences of Time

Each day begins with the rising of the sun and ends with the setting of the sun. You can verify "midday/noon" by when the sun is directly overhead—you can see this by how shadows are cast.

During different seasons, we would say the days are longer or shorter. In this sense, we can understand time in a relative way. Timing events like when to wake and when to sleep with the seasons, you can see how the generic "8 hour workday" of the modern world does violence to how we might more naturally experience time doing some work more closely tied to the earth.

So the sun gives us a rhythm for each day.

When counting more than one day, we look to the moon. The moon will appear differently on different days of a month. Note the word "month" comes from a form meaning moon. In other languages I have experience with, we also find that this is the case. For instance, in East Asian languages the character used for months is the same one for moon.

Calendars measuring time based on cycles of the moon—lunar calendars— have been developed in many different civilizations. The following line from the Psalms plainly states this reality we all experience:

He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knowest his going down.
(Psalm 104:19, KJV)

You may have heard something like "Chinese people used the lunar calendar, but in the modern world we use a solar calendar". This is a big oversimplification of this complex issue of counting time—Wikipedia on the Lunar calendar says:

The most commonly used calendar, the Gregorian calendar, is a solar calendar system that originally evolved out of a lunar calendar system.

Our current "best" calendar (the Gregorian calendar) is a smash-up of lunar this and solar that with additional calculations mixed in. I couldn't recreate it off the top of my head. I'll let Microsoft and stuff keep track of it for now...

Modernity on Time

Fluent English speakers will be familiar with the phrase "like clockwork". Clocks, for many people, represent precision. A clock represents the accurate accounting of time past. ¹ Luxury watches are something people spend thousands of dollars on because among other reasons people admire the craftsmanship of a visible and audible "mechanical genius". To behold a well-made clock is to see the apex of human hands buildling automated quantification—while a digital "quartz" watch may be more accurate, this opacity of this sort of device (you can't see how it works; it is like a "black box") makes it far less... romantic. ²

To the modern person, a "day" is not so much defined by the cycles of the sun and the moon, but by a quantification imposed by "the establishment". A day is 24 hours, we are told, and of those you should spend 8 working, 8 sleeping, around 1 on a lunch break possibly, and the rest attending to various other duties. For many, the "6 day work week" doesn't exist. ³ You get "productivity" obsessed people trying to "squeeze more work out of less hours".

Indeed, for the modern person, we are often trained to think of time not as humans but rather as machines. A boss does calculations—"how many widgets per an hour can I produce and at what cost?" This boss may then add or remove coffee machines, raise or lower rages, and exercise other buttons, switches, and levers to extract as much hourly output as possible from his (or her) hybrid workforce of humans and machines.

Our bodies groan under the unnatural structure of this quantified toil. Looking at what people ackshually do in offices, you will be unsurprised to find a lot of "slacking off". This isn't just because people are "lazy"—it is also because we are trying to "install" largely "incompatible software" on ourselves.

This isn't to say that nobody actually works as they do in business school theory. Rather we can look at how certain "rhythms" of switching between various activities (as well as social arrangements) are more or less natural to us.