An analog desk clock

I recently bought a desk clock, and it made me think about the way we see time in life

Last year, Nintendo announced the Alarmo, a smart clock that came with some some Nintendo exclusive features, such as custom themes and alarm sounds from popular Nintendo videogame franchises, and smart movement detection for alarms and the like.

Thankfully, I managed to resist—way too expensive and probably privacy-invasive—and my interest on it dwindled over time. However, that little itch for getting a proper alarm clock persisted, until now.

A few weeks ago my parents had to go on another trip for a hospital appointment (everything’s good, yay!), and on the way back they were going to buy me another piece of furniture from IKEA. However, they realized it would be too big to carry and my dad hadn’t brought anything to mount it to the car’s roof, so that was a bummer.

However, in one of the photos of furniture that they sent me, I saw a pretty classy analog clock (model name: DEKAD), and asked them to buy it for me, since I was already looking for one, and it would fit with the rest of my IKEA stuff, which at least made the trip worth it.

I got the black colored one, batteries were not included, I didn’t use it until yesterday, after buying some rechargeables. It’s a clock, it tells the time and rings an alarm. It also happens to be analog.

Sidenote: add Analog Office to your RSS feeds, thank me later.

After putting the batteries in and setting the hands to the current time, I stared at it for a while, and it felt like time froze to me.

The clock didn’t have a seconds hand.

For a second—no pun intended—I felt annoyed by that, I kind of wanted to know exactly what time it was.

However, I quickly moved on, I went to play some videogames, and after a while I glanced at it, and the hands position had changed. 😱

It’s obvious, of course it is, time moves forward, clocks keep ticking.—although this one doesn’t because it had no seconds hand but that’s not the point I’m trying to make here.

Time is not something to be fixated on, I guess that’s what makes analog clocks kind of neat? I have been so used to have numbers changing, everytime I look down at my watch, or my phone. A set of digits telling me exactly when I’m at through the day.

These thoughts had been brewing since I got an analog wrist watch recently¹, but well, I guess it took another purchase for these words to finally spew out of my brain, oops.

Not having that precision was really weird, but at the same time, kind of liberating.

Now, I’m not going to go ahead and tell you to stop using digital watches, or to remove the seconds hand from an analog one, that would be kind of dumb. I just mean that maybe if we stop seeing time as something to be measured exactly, we can improve our outlook in some things, such as mental health, or productivity.

This is not a new discovery or anything, of course.²

I recall some article that mentioned something along the lines of analog clocks representing time as a progress pie chart, instead of the discrete metric of 24 hours, 60 minutes and 60 seconds of watches today.

Maybe that very same post—or maybe it was a video? My memory is dying!—mentioned that students are usually more anxious during exams when the wall clock in the classroom is analog, not because it’s analog, but because they were taught to translate the hands position to exact hours and minutes, which takes a bit of mental effort to do.

Of course, the solution would be to not see time as hours and minutes, but as just progress.

I used to have a watch without any markers other than a dot at the 12-hour mark, I don’t know where it ended up, but it was one of my favorites at the time, it wasn’t even expensive, just a cheap one my father bought me downtown like 7 years ago. Sometimes a classmate glanced at it to see the time, but they would usually end up asking me anyway, since they didn’t understand it. I admit I felt a bit proud for that.

I ended up losing it, but maybe I’ll try to find something similar I don’t need to buy one anyway, it’s a matter of mindset, after all. I win this one, consumerism begone!

Seeing time as just progress just feels right, I guess. It’s a lesson I already knew, but it’s also easy to forget. I haven’t worn an analog watch in a couple weeks, but after thinking about all this, I will try to take one for a spin for an extended period of time.

This morning, I got to wake up with the ringing bells of an alarm clock for the first time in my entire life—if memory doesn’t fail me—and I have to admit, it was pretty cool, and noisy.

Next up: getting rid of calendars!

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