Past Times: The Contrasting Timings of Everyday Activities

Abstract

Theories of changing experiences of time rest on sets of assumptions about past lives and past temporal experiences. This chapter analyses ‘day in the life’ diaries from 1937 that are held in the Mass Observation Archive. The striking feature of the narratives provided by diarists from 1937 was the strong collective timings of daily activities that resulted from clearly defined institutionally timed events, particularly the start and end times of work, mealtimes but also events such as Sunday lunch, Monday as wash day and market days. In this context, the 1937 diarists exhibited no sense of the need to (micro-)coordinate or schedule their activities to align with those of others, a narrative that was particularly prominent in the contemporary accounts of temporal experiences reported in Chap. 5. One explanation for this empirical finding is that flexibility in the timings of paid and unpaid work together with greater variety of options for leisure and consumption has facilitated increasing individualization of temporal experiences, reducing constraints to the allocation of activities in daily lives and undermining the strength of collectively timed activities. This does not, however, mean that contemporary lives lack temporal rhythms. Rather, analysis reveals a temporal ordering of the day in which activities with fixed temporal locations in the day or week and that required coordination with other participants determined the sequencing of all daily activities in ways that produced discernible temporal rhythms. While contemporary lives are subject to much weaker collective timings of activities, those activities still retain a temporal order.