A decimal watch?
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[4 minute read or if you prefer, just under 3 decimal minutes]

So recently I have been thinking again about time and how we use
watches. I have written about this on here a couple of times and also
have a fediverse account that is watch and time related.

~ What time is it?:
gopher://sdf.org/0/users/r0/phlog/2022-10-29_what_time_is_it.txt

~ Binary wrist watch:
gopher://sdf.org/0/users/r0/phlog/2021-11-23_Binary_wrist_watch.txt

~ @binary@wristwatch.social:
https://wristwatch.social/@binary

Decimal time
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My current fascination is decimal time, where the day is spilt up into
"hours", "minutes" and "seconds" that are all divisible by 10. The
best known example of this is probably "French Revolutionary Time",
which was used (in France) for a short period in the early 1790s. Here
the day is broken down into 10 decimal hours, each of which is 100
decimal minutes and these in turn, 100 decimal seconds. Perhaps the
next best known "variation" would be Swatch's Internet Time,
introduced in 1998, where the day is simply divided into 1000 decimal
minutes, which they called ".beats". The only real difference here is
that Swatch really focusses only on these .beats/minutes but these
actually represent exactly the same length of time as the French
decimal minutes. So the systems aren't really that different and that
kind of makes sense, when you think about it.

~ Decimal time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time

~ Swatch Internet Time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

The advantages of such a system are that people generally find
base-ten easier to work with (albeit perhaps due to familiarity), plus
using the same base all the way down, makes for easier calculations
and conversions. Nonetheless, it never really caught on because of the
difficulty of changing people's habits and perhaps--I speculate
here--also because there were already large numbers of expensive
clocks that would need replacing.

Precision is not everything
---------------------------

A few years back I bought a single-handed, 24 hour watch. I don't use
it all the time but I quite enjoy it when I do--indeed, I am wearing
it as I write this. I love the simplicity of its interface and enjoy
observing the slow passing of the day at a glance. This is especially
easy on a watch like this, as one day is just one revolution of the
face. The bottom of the face represents the night, left the morning,
top midday and right the evening. Many have noticed the sundial like
aspect of this.

Another common observation of others is the lack of precision when
reading the time. It is hard to make out the time to less than about 5
minutes but in reality, that is not nearly so problematic as one might
expect. Most meetings and events tend to fall on the hour, half hours
and (very occasionally) on quarter hours. All of these are clearly
marked. In any case, if I am unsure, I tend to turn up early (just in
case), and that is rarely a bad thing.

By wearing this for a while, I realised that my primary use case for a
watch (any watch) is a just to do a quick check to see how close I am
to some regular, known point in time. Some obvious examples throughout
my typical day being "waking up", "dropping off the kids to school",
"getting into the office", "lunch time", "the end of work", "the kids
bed time" and "my own bed time". I often find I look at my watch, and
don't really take in the actual time. Indeed if you asked me the time
immediately afterwards, I probably could not tell you. I just see how
"visually close" I am and this tells me if I need to hurry up or not
(or if I am actually late already).

Yes I do occasionally need precision but with many other precise
sources of time close to hand (on my phone, my computer, clocks in the
office and at home ...) I can always get the information, on the rare
times I need it.

If I took this further, would it be a good idea?
------------------------------------------------

So recently it occurred to me that perhaps I could actually use a
decimal watch in my daily life. Not because it is "better system", but
more that I "could" do it and the downsides would (perhaps) be
minimal. Of course initially those times I mentioned "waking up", ...
"lunch time", etc. would be meaningless on a decimal watch because
they would be labelled differently. Instead of "lunch at 11:30", it
would be "just before 4:80" but within a week I suspect I would just
learn the new times without much effort (i.e. some event happens, you
look at your watch, and make a mental note of the new time for the
same occurrence in the future).

Now of course every day is not identical. If I have a quickly arranged
meeting, I would not be able to use the watch for this (since I would
have to negotiate and schedule with others using 'traditional time')
but as stated previously there are other sources of time close to hand
to use for such occasions. Also if I am doing something very unusual
for a while like travelling abroad, I could just use a normal watch
for that. I do actually own quite a few watches!

So yeah... this ... could ... work, right? XD Certainly it might not
be a "good idea" but then it might still be a "workable idea" and... I
do like odd stuff. There is a joy in doing things differently and you
always learn something new along the way, that you could not have
predicted beforehand.

In summary, yes I have already ordered a single-handed, decimal watch.
I don't have it yet but even if it turns out to be totally unusable
for real life (because my expectations are poorly thought out), I am
sure it will be fun. I will try and do a follow up post after I have
used it for a while and let you know how it panned out (even if the
answer is "badly").

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