For just one day, give up all clocks.

I made Harvard students give up their clocks. The results were revelatory.

The power of taking a break from monitoring the time all day.

John Edward Huth, a professor of physics at Harvard, is the author of “A Sense of Space: A Local’s Guide to a Flat Earth, the Edge of the Cosmos, and Other Curious Places.”

The relentless pace of modern life has resulted in a crop of new wellness trends that call for finding peace by abandoning all manner of modern tech: cellphones, computers, the internet, social media, etc. While these behavior changes have clear long-term benefits, I’d like to offer up a more radical change, one whose positive effects are immediate and undeniable: For just one day, give up all clocks.

I teach at Harvard, home to some of the highest achieving students around. For them, time seems to get chopped into atomized bits. I see students nervously check their watches in the hallways in between classes and craft daily schedules down to the minute. At some level they have no choice. Many of them got here by doing exactly this: prioritizing their learning through rigorous time management.

Anne-Laure Sellier is a psychologist who studies how we experience time. Broadly speaking, she says that we can be on either “clock time” or “event time.” Clock time is perhaps obvious, as we use clocks to define our activities. This regiments the life of a person with a calendar that is broken up into time slots for specific, interchangeable activities. That’s where most Harvard attendees, and probably most students, find themselves.

Someone on event time, on the other hand, uses internal cues to decide when to do things, usually in order of preference or convenience. They finish a task when it’s complete or when they feel like stopping, regardless of what the clock says.

While most people use a combination of clock time and event time, those who predominantly rely on event time often feel more engaged and in control of their schedules. Event-timers also see the connections between their experiences more clearly, according to Sellier, while clock-timers see the world as more disjointed and chaotic.

Most important, people on event time are happier, because they can savor moments more deeply than those constantly feeling the pressure of the clock. So how does a person make the switch from clock time to event time?

In my General Education course, I force students to become event-timers by asking them to give up time completely for a day. The rules of the exercise are straightforward: Pick a day when punctuality isn’t critical, turn off the internet, and put away all clocks and devices that betray clock time. The period without clocks starts at bedtime the night before.

The results, documented in their journals, are always astonishing.

“I realized how much of student life is structured around strict timing and instant responses,” one student wrote. “Being offline made the campus feel more spacious and less frantic, even though nothing around me had actually changed.”

One student noted that Harvard’s pace is relentless. “Ultimately, this day felt quieter, slower,

and more continuous — an experience I rarely have in my normal academic rhythm,” the student wrote. The student reported doing tasks until they felt complete rather than until they ran out of time.

Many students quickly tuned into natural rhythms to orient themselves, such as the path of the sun in the sky, the motion of stars, and the changing length of shadows over the course of the day. One student found that her dog had the ability to sense time, whining dramatically whenever she changed their routine.

Another student pulled an all-nighter and used the rising of the constellation Taurus just after sunset and its setting just before sunrise to mark the passage of the night. Some paid attention to human foot traffic, knowing that a large exodus from a building meant that it was around 5 or 6 o’clock and people were off to dinner.

This slowing down created more space for concentration. A first-year student wrote: “Paradoxically, removing time pressure made me more productive.”

Some students found that the anxiety they usually experienced was the result of relying too much on clock time. One wrote, “I get so fixated on deadlines and hours passing towards big final projects/exams. That kind of stress can be motivating for me, but when it gets to be really big, it tends to paralyze me.”

Not all students experienced a sense of peace, however. The exercise threw their normal habits into sharp relief. For example, one student reported feeling “unanchored” throughout the day and noticed the frequency with which they usually checked their phone and the time.

For their final project, two students chose to be blindfolded, driven to an unknown location, and dropped off before navigating on foot back to campus. They chose to go off-clock and off-internet. “On long stretches of road, with no phones and no music,” one of them wrote later, “Drew and I had a long conversation of the sort we had not been able to have in a long time.”

Overall, the exercise seemed profound to many, and they vowed to repeat it. Maybe we all should. Even in small doses, actively taking a break from time can actually bring us more in tune with its passage.

The freedom that lies beyond time is probably best captured in Peter Beagle’s fantasy novel “The Last Unicorn,” in which a talking skull monologues: “Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, week-ends and New Year’s Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls.”

In doing this exercise, my students found that they didn’t need to die to walk through the walls of time. They just had to be shown another way. 

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/03/20/opinion/giving-up-clocks-for-a-day/