As it appears to be the season for new gadgets - well, seems like a new mobile phone rocks up at my employer’s every January - the first day at work can eagerly find me watching a loading scroll bar or other fancy-pants UX effects letting me know ‘everything’s fine, we’re just updating here…’ and wondering at the elasticity of An IT Minute. 

I’m definitely thinking there’s stretch in that measure. 

Sometimes it’s a couple of 60 second moments. Often it’s quite. A. Bit. Longer as stuff goes on the background. You hope. So when that ‘minute’ finally expires, and you can crack on with the next micro task (as my concentration is certainly shot to shit now), spare a thought for other measures of 1/60th of the next hour or so. 

Most famously, I guess, is the New York minute, famously caught in Don Henley’s song where the measure is an expression of compression rather than extension. Everything happing in the city being at another speed from the rest of the world - which is ironic, as it was apparently coined in Texas. Not that I’m (or anyone else) is inferring the Lone Star state is slower, but perhaps it takes an out-of-towner to spot those kind of cultural snips. 

You’d think something as simple as a minute wasn’t likely subject to this kind of susceptibility to interpretation, but according to Harvard wonks, up to 40% of us underestimate time (take careful note if your job involves writing project proposals) and nearly a third over-estimate it (looking at you lot, swinging on your chair and wondering if it’s too soon to check your social updates.) 

And while we’re at it, why shouldn’t a Minute not be subject to the needs of measuring ‘our now’? The sixty-second minute has been with us for at least 5,500 years, which makes you wonder, given how accurate a second of time is, the Sumerian’s found it necessary for such fine-slicing of time back then. Were there scribes really waiting on tenterhooks for the transfer of data from one cuniform-inscribed tablet to a new one (‘why do these old clays take so long to back up?’ I can’t imagine hearing someone exasperate in Sumer.) 

Anyway, better get back to it, I’m not going to get those minutes back and someone from the traffic department will be over to remind me there’s 429 trillion cycles in the latest atomic clock’s second - so there’s no excuse for not having had enough time to finish that project. To which the best reply is ‘won’t keep you a minute…’

And Happy New Year all :)