PHOTOS BY LIPO CHING/STAFF
CHAPTER I | 27 OCT 2013
Technology has reshaped our sense of time, slicing our days into tiny units and blurring the lines between work, family and play.
By Katy Murphy
kmurphy@bayareanewsgroup.com
With radio signals controlling her solar wristwatch, a Berkeley physicist times her life to the second whenever she's in her native Munich, delighting when she walks out on the metro platform just as the train arrives.
"I want to know the exact time. I want to know it's two minutes and 22 seconds past one," said Birgitta Bernhardt, a Lawrence Berkeley Lab scientist who is researching the smallest units of time ever measured — quintillionths of a second.
Bernhardt laughs when she talks about her fixation, but as fellow citizens of the digital age, we all share it to some degree. Seconds matter — to us, to our society, to our economy — more than ever. Technology has made it possible to do so many tasks from anywhere, and so quickly, that growing numbers of tiny moments, each with its own value, fill our days in a way new to our human experience.
We may not know the length of a quintillionth of a second, but sometimes it seems as though work, family and play bring us a seamless flow of quintillions of tasks every day.
In the 19th century, the railroads forced towns to synchronize their clocks — until then all ticking on their own local time set by the noon sun. Today, the technological drivers of our global economy are bringing the whole Earth into sync.
UC Berkeley professors teach online classes with assignment deadlines set on global Greenwich Mean Time. Call center employees in Manila clock in as the sun rises in New York. A sleeping watch salesman in Carmel bolts awake for a 1 a.m. call from Hong Kong about a rare Rolex, and a Palo Alto tech CEO holds a 6:30 a.m. conference call with a French client whose clock says it is 3:30 p.m.
The railroad has come again.
From left, Kris and Josh Bonifas sell vintage and new Rolexes from their family watch and jewelry store, Fourtané, in Carmel.
Kris Bonifas, left, helps customer Michael Finkel as his brother Josh Bonifas, far right, helps Daniel Son look at vintage Rolex watches at Fourtané in Carmel.
A Paul Newman Rolex Daytona, shown on Kris Bonifas' iPhone, sits with an actual Rolex Daytona, at left, and other Rolex watches at Fourtané.
How much of our work lives is overlapping with our personal lives?
A 2012 Good Technology poll of office workers found 80 percent reported working an average of seven hours per week at home in addition to their regular workday. The survey also found:
7:09 a.m. is the approximate time when the average American first checks his or her phone.
50% check their work email while still in bed.
68% of people check their work emails before 8 a.m.
57% check work emails on family outings.
38% routinely check work emails while at the dinner table.
40% still do work email after 10 p.m.
69% will not go to sleep without checking their work email.
Seven days a week for more than 25 years, John Bonifas opened and closed his jewelry and watch shop in Carmel-by-the-Sea, rarely taking a day off.
But when he stepped onto Ocean Avenue at day's end, he left his business and his customers at the door.
His 30-something sons Josh and Kris aren't behind the counter at Fourtané every day, but they are open for business day and night, all week long.
"If I really need to get some info from my brother on his day off … I'll call and text several times," Kris said.
Josh specializes in vintage Rolex watches, understated pieces of history that evoke nostalgia for a pre-electronic era. But with clients and suppliers calling from all time zones, prices in the thousands of dollars, and smartphone cameras and websites moving the timepieces at a dizzying pace, his job embodies the fragmented, global time of the modern economy.
The digital age that threatened to kill the mechanical watch business instead brought it new life — and made it intensely competitive.
"If I don't pick up the phone, it just goes to the next person within two minutes," he said of the risk of losing a deal.
So Josh keeps his iPhone close. An important call could come in at 1 a.m., interrupting his sleep; in the second quarter of a college football game in Mississippi; in a hospital delivery room.
It's a family joke that minutes before his daughter's birth, he was on the phone, making a deal.
"I got the lecture that I'm not ever present any more, which is true," he said. "I'm always distracted on some level."
The mobile workplace has definite advantages — chief among them, not having to go into the office on the weekends, said Steve Hoover, CEO of the Palo Alto-based technology company PARC, the legendary Xerox research center that inspired Apple's first computer.
"The fact that I can take my daughter to her dance class and work for 15 minutes while she's doing her class, that's great," he said.
But figuring out how to negotiate their time with these newly blurred boundaries is a challenge for the 38 percent of college-educated Americans who do at least some work from home each day. That number is growing and double what it was a decade ago.
"It's not so much the time, it's that you've got to switch your head from your work world to your personal world in these microslices," Hoover said.
What if you sneak a look at your phone while your wife is away from the table and see a troubling email? he asked.
"Can you push it out of your brain and focus on where you're at?"
Retzlaff Winery owner Bob Taylor checks the condition of grapes at his vineyard in in Livermore.
Silver canisters are used to ferment white wine at the Retzlaff Winery in Livermore.
Bob Taylor, of Retzlaff Winery in Livermore, uses a refractometer to check the sugar level of grapes. At the precise moment of ripeness, harvest begins; this year, it came in early September.
After the harvest, wine is stored in wooden barrels at Retzlaff Winery in Livermore.
The time is ripe
Hoover observes that the blending of our work and personal lives returns us to the unceasing labor of our agricultural past when the cows needed to be milked every day.
That old way of life is still in effect at the 12-acre Retzlaff Vineyards in Livermore. But unlike the Bonifas brothers, who have some control over when and where they conduct business, the natural clock governs the vintner's work.
"Mother Nature dictates when we do it and how we do it," said winemaker Bob Taylor, echoing farmers going back tens of thousands of years.
In early September, a test of his merlot grapes brought a surprise: The berries were the precise balance of sugar and acidity that demanded immediate picking, days earlier than expected and just after the chardonnay harvest.
That moment is hard to predict and impossible to ignore.
"I thought I was going to have a few days to catch my breath," the 80-year-old vintner said in the middle of a 16-hour work day and seven-day week.
But once the harvest is over, the pace of life relents, and Taylor cherishes the downtime that so many of us find elusive.
"You talk about time," he said. "Here's a thought for you. A lot of really wise people put together a book they called a Bible. It said that you need to take off at least one day a week and think about other things. We ignore it at our peril."
Big moments in TIME
A chronology of keeping time
3000 B.C.
Ancient calendar
Scholars believe that as early as 3000 B.C., the once-nomadic people on the British Isles used Stonehenge to create a rough calendar that they needed for farming.
The first pendulum clock
Invented by Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, this precise clock was the most accurate timekeeper for centuries until the 1930s. Its disadvantage was that it had to be stationary to work.
Time zones established
Railways forced a shift from local time — with each town setting its own clocks — to standard time. In 1883 railways adopted Standard Railway Time, creating four time zones in the United States. (Standard time was not established in U.S. law until the Standard Time Act of 1918.).
The atomic age
Timekeeping is no longer based on the Earth's movements in relation to other planets, but on the atomic clock, which counts the hyper-regular switching of cesium atoms (or other elements) between two energy levels. The clock would gain or lose about a second in around 100 million years. Because of such accuracy, atomic clocks have become the most accurate timekeepers to date.
Advent of smartphones
Many of us use phones to keep time. But more than that, smartphones fundamentally have changed how we see and organize our time, blurring the line between work and home and slicing our days into smaller and ever-more efficient units.
It's hard to fully relax and lose track of time when reminders are everywhere you look, said Kathleen Kilroy-Marac, an anthropology professor who taught a course on the "Anthropology of Time and Memory" last year at Sarah Lawrence University.
At just 6 years old, her daughter would often ask, "Are we running late?"
Her college students, too, seem to have internalized the minutes ticking by on their smartphones. They rarely find themselves "lost in the flow of time," a phrase social scientists use to describe the state of being immersed in a project or daydreaming.
"In a way, there's a constant awareness of time that produces a sort of anxiety," said Kilroy-Marac, who is now at the University of Toronto.
She remembers having a much different sense of time when she was growing up. Fond memories of daydreaming while watching telephone poles going by her back-seat window come to mind when she thinks of family vacations.
Now, she said, "There's always something to insert into the time. Being bored is made out to be the worst possible thing you could be."
UC Berkeley postdoctoral physical chemistry researcher Krupa Ramasesha spends her day in an attosecond lab on campus. Paradoxically, her work — trying to capture the movement of electrons in quintillionths of a second — is slow and painstaking.
UC Berkeley post-doctoral physical chemistry researcher Krupa Ramasesha demonstrates the use of fast laser pulses, measured in attoseconds, to resolve the motion of electrons in semiconductors.
UC Berkeley chemistry and physics researchers Birgitta Bernhardt, left, and Krupa Ramasesha check their smartphones outside a UC Berkeley lab. Bernhardt, from Germany, and Ramasesha, with family in India, often chat with people many time zones away.
Managing time (and work) in the digital age
Buy online: Cut out the time spent shopping for toiletries and other repeat purchases.
Combine exercise and work when you can. One-on-one meetings while walking helps to keep you fit. A change in scenery can also open people up and make for a better meeting.
You are in charge of your smartphone and not the other way around. Don't try to impress people by how fast you respond to an email that doesn't need a quick response. Allow your mind to let go of work: Take time away from your phone.
Before going on vacation, formally delegate tasks so you can really let go of your email and phone meetings.
— Steve Hoover, CEO of PARC
Stepping out of time
Each morning, Krupa Ramasesha puts on dark glasses and slips behind a heavy, black curtain in her basement laboratory at UC Berkeley.
Along with Bernhardt — the German physicist obsessed with telling precise time — the UC Berkeley scientist is taking the slicing of time to an extreme, trying to capture the movement of electrons in quintillionths of a second.
Paradoxically, their work is slow and painstaking, requiring the scientists to immerse themselves deeply in the "flow of time" Kilroy-Marac describes.
Text messages and emails to Ramasesha languish for hours while she is in the attosecond lab measuring moments too tiny to comprehend. Her world of lasers, mirrors and vacuum chambers leaves no room for the split-second interruptions and diversions that punctuate time outside the lab.
"We don't even know if the sun is out or not, or if it's raining," she said.
But after hours of uninterrupted — no cellphone, no iPad, no outside communication — work on subatomic time, she re-emerges into the beeping, humming, jumping electronic world, checking her friends' Facebook posts, emailing her parents in Bangalore, half-watching TV.
Bernhardt also lives an electronic social life, setting spur-of-moment meetups with friends and video-chatting with relatives nine time zones away. ("Sleep well," her grandmother concludes when it's noon in California.)
Although she sometimes feels that life is too rushed, her research could lead to computers and phones 20 or even 50 times faster than now, says the attosecond lab's principal investigator, Stephen Leone.
Despite her work pursuing inconceivable increments of time, Bernhardt has trouble imagining how humanity will be able to keep up with the speed of information.
In a decade or two, she predicts, "we will have a retro phase where we think of the good, old values." Of 2013.
Follow Katy Murphy at Twitter.com/katymurphy
Chapter II: