Humans in more or less our current modern form have walked the earth for roughly three hundred thousand years. For all but the last ten thousand or so of these many years, we lived as seminomadic hunters and gatherers. These timescales are sufficiently vast for the insistent logics of natural selection to adapt our bodies and brains toward an

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Several attributes and practices valorized by a monochronic understanding of time —which we could also call Rapid-Growth Capitalism time, or Productivity Fetishist time, or White Bourgeois time — are objectively in service of efficiency. And yet, big surprise, they are often highly inefficient.

In the 1950s, the anthropologist Edward T. Hall coined the terms “monochronic” and “polychronic” to describe different cultural attitudes to time management.

In northern Europe and the United States, which Dr. Hall labeled “monochronic” societies, he wrote that people tended to emphasize deadlines and work sequentially, completing one task before... See more