Chapter 2 - How Time Was Assigned

Time did not merely pass.
For a long while, it was assigned.

This is easy to miss, because assignment is rarely announced. It appears as routine. As schedule. As the quiet assumption that certain hours belong to certain things, and not to others. That assumption once carried more weight than it now does.

Time was allocated by institutions, roles, and shared expectations. Not perfectly. Not justly. But clearly enough that most people did not have to decide, hour by hour, what counted.

Work had hours. School had terms. Offices had opening and closing times. Letters were written, sent, and then—after a while—either answered or not. The passage of time did not guarantee a response, but it did delimit expectation.

You waited. Then you stopped waiting.

This assignment was not negotiated continuously. It was inherited. People entered structures that already carried temporal boundaries. Those boundaries were often arbitrary. Sometimes unfair. Frequently inconvenient. Still, they existed.

Time belonged to something before it belonged to you.

That fact is difficult to appreciate now, because contemporary language treats time as a personal possession. My time. Your time. Time to yourself. Time management. This language suggests sovereignty. It implies that time is something individuals allocate according to preference, priority, or discipline.

That implication is recent. And misleading.

For most of modern life, time was governed upstream. Individuals moved within schedules they did not design. The burden of allocation sat with systems, not persons. One could resent this arrangement. Many did. But resentment is not the same as responsibility.

When time was assigned externally, its costs were also externalized. You did not have to defend why you were unavailable. You were simply off duty. Or out of term. Or past the deadline. These phrases were not excuses. They were facts.

It is tempting to see this as rigidity. In some respects, it was. But rigidity has a property flexibility lacks: it settles disputes quickly.

If the office was closed, it was closed. If the term had ended, it had ended. The calendar, not the individual, absorbed the conflict.

That absorption mattered more than was understood at the time.

Time assignment functioned as a quiet coordination mechanism. It synchronized expectations across people who did not know each other and did not need to agree. You could be late. You could be early. But the structure itself remained intact. It did not require constant adjustment.

This is one reason older institutions appear slower in retrospect. They were. But slowness was not merely inefficiency. It was a temporal buffer that allowed events to conclude without continuous oversight.

Assignment created edges.

Edges are unglamorous. They are not creative. They do not optimize. But they prevent sprawl.

When time stopped being assigned in this way, it did not become free. It became ambiguous.

The reassignment did not occur all at once. It happened unevenly, sector by sector.

Work was the first to loosen. Or, more precisely, work time detached from place. Tasks could be completed elsewhere, which seemed at first like liberation. But detachment also dissolved the implicit signals that once marked beginning and end. If work could be done anywhere, it could be done anytime. Which meant it could also remain undone at any time.

The boundary did not vanish. It thinned.

Communication followed. Messages no longer traveled with delay built in. They arrived instantly, but expectation lagged behind. Or accelerated. Or both. It became unclear when a message demanded response and when it did not. The sender often did not know. The receiver was left to decide.

That decision carried weight.

Under assignment, expectation was bounded by schedule. Under discretion, expectation floats. Floating expectations do not disappear. They hover.

Hovering requires attention.

Institutions adjusted by redefining availability as responsiveness. This was framed as service. Sometimes it was. More often it was convenience—for the institution. Responsiveness allowed demand to be expressed without commitment. Requests could be made without fixing a time horizon. The response window became elastic.

Elasticity benefits the party that can afford to stretch it.

As assignment weakened, time migrated downward. Individuals became responsible for allocating their own availability, their own delay, their own closure. This was presented as autonomy. It felt like autonomy at first.

But autonomy over time is not simply freedom. It is exposure.

To assign time is to declare priority. To decline is to refuse. To delay is to signal hierarchy, intention, or neglect. When these signals were carried by structure, they did not attach to persons. When structure receded, they did.

The same action acquired a different meaning.

Not responding used to be neutral after a while. Now it is read. Stopping work used to be procedural. Now it looks personal. Availability used to be assumed or not. Now it must be performed.

This is where fatigue enters—not because people are busy, but because time has become expressive.

Every allocation now says something.

The loss of assignment did not produce chaos. It produced interpretation.

Interpretation is work. It requires attention, inference, calibration. It also never finishes. One can always reinterpret.

Under assignment, time resolved interpretation by ending it. Under discretion, interpretation persists until someone acts.

Someone must always act.

The burden of action does not fall evenly. Those with more authority can delay longer. Those with less must decide sooner. Time assignment once masked this asymmetry. Its disappearance reveals it.

Waiting, in this environment, is no longer free. But that will come later.

For now, it is enough to notice that when time ceased to be assigned, it did not become owned. It became managed. And management is not the same as governance.

Governance absorbs cost. Management redistributes it.

Most people now live inside this redistribution without naming it. They feel it as a background pressure: the sense that one should be reachable, that one should respond, that one should not let things go unanswered too long. “Too long,” of course, is undefined.

Undefined limits invite vigilance.

The calendar still exists. Schedules still exist. But their authority has weakened. They no longer settle expectation on their own. They require reinforcement, reminders, explanations.

What was once implicit now must be stated. What was once structural now must be negotiated.

Negotiation does not scale well.

This is not a moral complaint. It is an organizational observation. Systems that rely on continuous negotiation shift effort onto participants. That effort accumulates as fatigue, not as conflict.

People rarely say, “Time is no longer assigned.” They say they feel behind. Or overwhelmed. Or unable to rest properly. These are not personal failures. They are descriptions of a system that no longer closes its own loops.

Assignment used to do that.

It limited how much time could belong to anything. It declared an end without asking whether the end was convenient.

Without that declaration, everything becomes provisional.

Provisional states demand maintenance.

Maintenance is quiet. It is rarely recognized. But it consumes attention continuously.

This is why so much modern effort goes into deciding when something is finished. Or finished enough. Or finished for now. These distinctions proliferate because the older, simpler one—finished—has lost its authority.

Time still passes.

It just no longer tells us what that passage means.