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Our false worship of time distorts behavior. Because we’re not just doing our job but making sure our job fits into a forty-hour workweek that happens between eight and five (with a half hour or an hour for lunch) we have to jump through hoops to make the job fit the clock.

The clock turns us into liars. We call in sick when we have to take care of family business. Or we put in long hours to make up for not being able to accomplish the task at hand.

The clock disrupts engagement. On any given day you either feel overworked (I can’t believe I have to do all of this in forty hours!) or underworked (I can’t believe I have to be here for forty hours!).

The clock discourages innovation and creativity. You can’t be motivated to solve the company’s problems because even if you do you are still judged on how much time you put in. You can’t serve two masters.

We aren’t blaming this all on The Man. Our attitudes about time are so ingrained that we are all guilty of this kind of misguided thinking. Even those who work for a progressive company—even those who are in a largely results-driven work culture—aren’t immune from these outdated attitudes.

We show up at work and instead of thinking about what we can do to drive results, we try to figure out how we can both accomplish our goals and do it in a way that fits within the narrow confines of an eight-to-five day.

We feel admiration (or envy) for the people who log the most hours at work because we feel they are somehow working harder.

We complain about how many hours we’re putting in, as if this makes us heroes.

We eat sometime between eleven thirty and one thirty and only for an hour, because that is the acceptable time to eat and the acceptable duration for eating.

We’re skeptical that people who are on flextime programs are putting in enough hours to do their job.

We worry that coming in at eight fifteen will brand us as being “late.” Or we get excited about coming in at seven forty-five so we can be seen as being “early.”

We don’t question for a minute that work should be measured in terms of time, that some jobs are “part-time” and others are “full-time” and that forty hours is the norm.

When we talk to people about these attitudes we find that people understand that the system is broken. When we first started creating the model for what would become a Results-Only Work Environment, we didn’t need to tell people that attitudes about time were misguided. Everyone knew it intuitively, and once we started giving them the opportunity to talk about these unwritten rules it was like a revelation.

Before the Alternative Work Program was formalized at Best Buy, Cali was charged with running focus groups for the 320 people who were going to take part in the experiment. A typical group was made up of 10 to 15 people and they were a mixed bag of hourly employees, lower-level salaried employees, and upper-level management. The goal of these groups was to figure out how to create a program that addressed this somewhat amorphous issue of trust. A lot of the comments were all over the map and addressed technical concerns (making sure there was good communication, clear goals, feedback tools to monitor how the pilot was going), but the refrain was that people were desperate to get control over their time.

There was an epic sadness to these meetings, because everyone knew what they were missing. Even if they didn’t articulate it this clearly, they knew that their jobs were robbing them of precious time. Time with their friends and family. Time for professional development. In some cases—if they were triple booked for meetings all day long—even time to do their jobs.

Why do we put up with this? Where does time get its awe-some power over our lives? You might think that some important researcher and thinker has done a long-term, multivariable study that proves that we need to have this business model based on time because the data shows that people