Stalin's government wanted factories to run continuously, so it split the working population into five groups, assigned each a different rotating day off, and staggered everyone's schedules so production never stopped. The new system was called the nepreryvka, the continuous workweek.
A letter in the newspaper Pravda in the weeks after the new calendar took effect captured it: "What is there for us to do at home if our wives are in the factory, our children at school, and nobody can visit us? It is no holiday if you have to have it alone."
I've been thinking about the nepreryvka a lot lately because I fear we are running a subtler version of it, and we haven't yet admitted it isn't working.
What these people were benefiting from, Hartig concluded, wasn't free time. It was the fact that other people also had the same free time. He called the effect “the social regulation of time.”
In previous generations, Americans often did roughly the same things at roughly the same times. We worked during the day and rested in the evening. We took weekends off together. We ate dinner around the same time. We watched the same shows on the same nights. Most of that is gone now. As political scientist Robert Putnam documented in Bowling Alone, TV made entertainment individual and thinned out our in-person communities—bowling leagues, card clubs, civic groups.
The relationship psychologist Scott Stanley has a phrase for this pattern: sliding versus deciding. Too often, we don't choose the life we lead; we slide into it, one small convenience at a time. Stanley uses the frame for couples who slide into cohabitation and then marriage (and who are subsequently more likely to get divorced), but the concept generalizes. We slid into a desynchronized society the way people slide into cohabitation: by each individually reasonable step, without anyone actively choosing this way of life.
The solution isn't to abandon flexibility. It's to deliberately build a few shared rhythms back into our society. A standing Tuesday night dinner with the same people. A class you show up for every Thursday. A running club that meets in the morning. A church, a civic meeting, a volunteer shift. The specific thing matters less than the quality it shares with the others: you are doing it at the same time as other people who expect you to be there.
The Soviets ended their experiment because it was painfully obvious what it was costing them. The version we are running is subtler, because it looks like convenience, and because no one ever proposed it from a lectern. We slid into it, and there’s no single leader we can hold responsible for the decision.
That means we have to decide our way out.
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