Wednesday, September 2, was immediately followed by Thursday, September 14, in 1752, as Britain abandoned the Julian calendar and adopted the Gregorian one.

This isn't the first time in human history that a significant stretch of time has been lost or overlooked. In fact, most of us already erase an hour from our lives each year without a second thought.

Word on the street is that the correction sparked riots among people who felt cheated and demanded the missing eleven days back.

It is a marvelous story—and almost certainly a myth.

I have no doubt the change probably caused confusion and annoyance—particularly around wages, rent, debts, bills, contracts, and feast days—but from what I learned, there's no evidence of people staging riots specifically because the 11 dates vanished.

It's not like the entire country was waking up from a coma. People did not literally lose 11 days.

The normal succession of weekdays continued; only the date labels changed. Someone who went to sleep on Wednesday, September 2, awoke the next day, Thursday—but it was now dated September 14.

The calendar change was necessary because the Julian calendar assumed a year lasted exactly 365¼ days. The actual solar year is a little shorter, and that small annual error accumulated century after century.

By 1752, the calendar had drifted about 11 days from the seasonal reality it was supposed to measure. That mattered especially in calculating Easter and other dates tied to the spring equinox.

Sure, there may have been localized grumbling, political rhetoric, and practical disputes, much like today’s standard-time versus daylight-saving-time debate, which shows that a change in society’s official timekeeping can provoke confusion, disrupt routines, and become a political argument about whose daily life is being inconvenienced.

This reminds me of the time I tried to get people riled up with an April Fool's Day joke 20 years ago. Cell phones were becoming popular, and in that era, the phone companies sold us blocks of minutes each month. Similarly to how AI companies use tokens today.

The premise of my joke was to spread the mistruth that Congress had introduced a bill changing how we measure time by creating hours that contain 100 minutes, rather than 60, and that the legislation was backed by a coalition of lobbyists for AT&T, Cellular One, Sprint, Nextel, and the rest, all of whom wanted us to use up our minutes faster.

It didn't get any traction. Maybe if there had been Facebook back then.

But the underlying premise still holds: how we measure time is a human system. And whether we measure our own time at all has real consequences.

Time matters in design. We use it to verify construction dates, interpret historic records, coordinate deadlines, meet review periods, manage permitting, and keep projects moving. Every project is a series of decisions made under a clock.

For independent designers and small practices, however, the most expensive time problem is often the time that simply disappears from the record.

A client requests “one more” exterior option. A plan revision takes longer than expected. A consultant call turns into a half-day coordination exercise. A permit comment leads to an extra round of documentation. If those hours are not captured, they are not merely forgotten—they quietly come out of your profit.

If you don’t measure your time, you can’t manage your profit.

Here's how every untracked hour directly impacts your business:

• Margin erosion: Scope creep silently eats into your net profit when extra design iterations go unrecorded.
• Proposal precision: Realistic proposals aren't built on wishful thinking; they’re built on data from past projects.
• Value-based pricing: Knowing your true hourly baseline gives you the confidence to price flat-fee projects profitably.

The AIBD Hourly Rate Calculator and Proposal Templates (found in the Designer Docs library) can help you set and present fees with confidence. But neither can compensate for missing data.

Start with one habit: record your time as you work. Not tomorrow. Not at month-end. Today.

👉Start tracking your hours with Open Time Clock today​

At the end of the day, time tracking is not about obsessing over minutes. It is about recognizing the value of your expertise.

Every hour you document is evidence of the work you do, the problems you solve, and the professional value you bring to a project. Capture that value, use it to make better business decisions, and build a practice that does more than survive.