Who Owns Time? The Centuries-Long Evolution of the Workday

In his 1748 Advice to a Young Tradesman, Benjamin Franklin famously wrote that “time is money.” Today, the phrase feels almost self-evident. Businesses buy labor by the hour, employees sell their time for wages, and technology promises to help us squeeze more productivity out of every minute. Yet for much of Western history, people wouldn’t have understood what Franklin meant. Time wasn’t something you could buy, sell, or precisely measure. It was experienced through sunrise and sunset, the time to sow and the time to reap, and the ubiquitous ringing of church bells.

The Rhythm of the Seasons

Long before Franklin’s aphorism, work followed a very different rhythm. For much of medieval Europe, there was not a universally accepted 9 a.m., no eight-hour workday, and no expectation that every hour held the same economic value. Most people experienced time through the natural world. Sunrise signaled the beginning of work. Sunset brought it to an end. Seasons determined when labor intensified or slowed, with harvests demanding grueling days and the depth of winter inducing idleness. “Rest was woven into the natural calendar rather than negotiated with an employer,” said Paolo Aversa, Professor of Strategy at King’s College London. 

The church played a central role in organizing daily life and was “the first institution to impose an artificial order on the day,” according to Aversa. Bells marked the canonical hours for prayer — not precise clock time as we understand it today, but recurring moments that structured the day. “The great French medievalist Jacques Le Goff called this ‘church’s time,’” Aversa explained, which created “a shared, sacred grid that told everyone within earshot when to rise, work, pray and sleep.” Religious feast days and holy days punctuated the calendar, creating regular pauses in work that reflected spiritual life as much as economic necessity.

This does not mean medieval people worked less. During planting and harvest, labor could be physically exhausting and stretch from dawn until dusk. People certainly raced against time: farmers hurried to harvest crops before the first frost; merchants rushed to complete journeys before winter roads became impassable; craftsmen worked until daylight faded. But they were racing against nature’s clock, which, Aversa said, had limits “no lord or guild had the power to appeal.” Time was a force to contend with, not yet a commodity to be measured, priced, and sold by the hour.

That relationship would begin to change in the late Middle Ages with the spread of one deceptively simple invention: the mechanical clock. 

Sample Policy: Flexible Work Schedule Policy

The Mechanical Revolution

Medieval Europeans already had ways of organizing the day, if imprecise. The church, for example, observed canonical hours such as terce, sext, and nones, calling communities to prayer with church bells. But these were not fixed moments measured by identical 60-minute hours. They were tied to the position of the sun, meaning a “third hour” in summer was not exactly the same as a “third hour” in winter. Time still expanded and contracted with the natural world.

The first mechanical clocks appeared in the late 13th century, and though rudimentary, introduced to society the concept of punctuality. For the first time, hours became standardized, independent of daylight and the seasons. An hour in January became the same length as an hour in July. “From that point onward, time gradually ceased to be something read off the sky and became an abstract, uniform, countable quantity,” Aversa said, “and whatever can be counted can be priced.”

Standardized time did not create the industrial revolution, but it made it possible. Factories and mills depended on workers arriving together, machines running in sequence, and production following predictable schedules. “By gathering work into one place and one schedule, it drew a sharp line between the employer’s hours and the worker’s own,” Aversa explained. Time was no longer simply experienced — it became something that could be tracked, managed, and exchanged. Employers increasingly purchased hours of labor, while workers sold them. 

Even today, we use expressions like “clocking in,” “watching the clock,” “being on the clock,” without thinking much about where they came from. Yet each reflects a world in which time itself became measurable and ultimately marketable.

Bright Lights

Even as clocks standardized the workday, nature still imposed one significant limit: darkness. For centuries, sunset brought most forms of labor to a close, regardless of how carefully the hours had been measured. 

Electric lighting transformed that equation. “Gas lighting had begun to stretch factory evenings early in the nineteenth century,” Aversa said, “but Edison’s commercially viable incandescent lamp of 1879, followed by the Pearl Street generating station in Manhattan in 1882, removed the constraint altogether.”

Factories no longer depended on daylight, offices remained open after sunset, and businesses could operate in multiple shifts. If the mechanical clock standardized working time, electricity extended it. 

The Dissolution of the Workplace

Today, digital technology is reshaping work in a different way. Just as the lightbulb extended the workday, smartphones, laptops, and cloud computing are dissolving the physical boundaries that once separated work from personal life. The modern challenge is no longer whether people can work after hours, but when work is expected to end at all.

Aversa referenced a 2013 study performed by Melissa Mazmanian, Wanda Orlikowski and JoAnne Yates, which studied professionals’ relationships with mobile devices. The researchers identified what they dubbed the “autonomy paradox.” 

“The same devices that gave individuals welcome control over when and where they worked drew them, collectively, into an escalating norm of constant reachability,” Aversa said. By promoting the concept of remote and hybrid work, the pandemic escalated this phenomenon into a norm.

Aimee Blanchard Parsons, an attorney with Ogletree Deakins in Portland, Maine, noted a similar paradox in the modern workplace. In her experience, remote and hybrid work have “significantly reshaped employment for many,” particularly women, providing tangible benefits while simultaneously exacerbating existing concerns about technology intruding into employees’ personal lives.

The paradox is that the same flexibility that makes remote work attractive — freedom to work when and where one chooses — also removes the structural guardrails (commute times, office closing hours, physical separation) that historically protected personal time, Parsons said.

Those benefits should not be overlooked. Remote and hybrid arrangements can eliminate commuting time, give employees greater ability to structure work around childcare, eldercare and other personal obligations, and open employment opportunities to workers who live far from major business centers. Employers, meanwhile, can recruit from broader talent pools, potentially reduce overhead and gain another tool for attracting and retaining workers.

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Nor does Parsons attribute the erosion of work-life boundaries to remote work alone. Laptops and cellphones had allowed professionals to work from home for years prior to the pandemic. Rather, she sees the combination of those technologies with the widespread acceptance of performing core working hours from home — and the resulting removal of structural guardrails — as having worsened the problem.

For remote workers, Aversa noted, there is no shared signal to distinguish work from the personal; no bell, no factory whistle, no flick of a light switch. There exist only the blue glare of the computer screen and the regular ping of notifications, arriving day or night. “The boundary between work and life has become something each person must construct, and defend, alone,” Aversa said.

Parsons similarly sees individual boundary-setting as an increasingly important part of flexible work. “The blurring issue is highly dependent on the ability of individual employees to create their own balance by setting personal boundaries and guardrails,” she said, rather than relying exclusively on boundaries that were previously imposed by the physical workplace. Employees, she added, must actively make those decisions around family and personal needs that may themselves change over time.

For employers, the challenge cuts both ways. Flexible work can provide a meaningful recruitment and retention advantage, but organizations must also ensure that flexibility does not effectively translate into unpaid overtime or contribute to burnout among employees. In a workplace no longer reliably bounded by walls, commutes or closing hours, employers and employees are increasingly left to determine where working time ends for themselves.

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‘Right to Disconnect’

If technology has steadily eroded the boundaries that once defined the workday, a growing question is whether the law should help draw new ones.

That debate has given rise to the so-called “right to disconnect”: the idea that employees should be able to disengage from work-related communications outside their working hours without facing adverse consequences. Versions of the concept have gained traction internationally, while similar proposals have periodically surfaced in the United States.

Supporters argue that such protections provide a modern substitute for boundaries that technology has weakened. An employee who has technically finished work may nevertheless feel pressure to monitor email, respond to a supervisor’s text, or check a late-night notification. Clearer rules, proponents contend, can protect genuine off-duty time, reduce burnout, and help prevent work performed outside scheduled hours from going uncompensated. The argument is particularly relevant in a world where simply receiving a message can create an expectation of availability. Unlike the factory whistle or the closing office door, a smartphone provides no obvious signal that the workday is over.

But opponents say a legally defined right to disconnect could undermine one of the principal benefits of modern work: flexibility. An employee might choose to leave work early to pick up a child, attend an appointment or exercise, then answer emails later that evening. Colleagues may work across different time zones, while industries and individual positions can have dramatically different needs for after-hours communication. A rigid rule designed around a traditional workday could therefore prove difficult to reconcile with arrangements that deliberately allow employees to decide when they work.

Toolkit: Managing Flexible Work Arrangements

Parsons sees that tension as central to the debate. For employers, she said, the challenge is balancing the recruitment and retention advantages of flexible work against the risks of employees effectively performing unpaid overtime or experiencing burnout. Employees, meanwhile, may value both greater control over their schedules and meaningful periods in which work does not intrude.

There is also a question of whether legislation is the best way to establish those boundaries. Without legal restrictions, employers can set expectations around response times and distinguish genuinely urgent communications from those that can wait. Employees can likewise establish personal boundaries around when they monitor workplace communications, as technology expands what is possible and continues to transform work time.