Ever stared at a clock and wondered why on earth we’re stuck with sixty? It’s a weird number. If you’re like me, you probably wish everything was base-10 because, honestly, doing math with hundreds is just easier. But minutes in 1 hour haven’t changed for thousands of years, and there’s a surprisingly logical—albeit ancient—reason for it.
Time is a human construct, sure. But it’s a construct built on the backs of Babylonian astronomers who really, really loved the number 60.
The Babylonian Obsession with Sixty
Most of us count to ten because we have ten fingers. It’s simple. It’s intuitive. But the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians looked at their hands and saw something else entirely. They used a sexagesimal system. That’s a fancy way of saying they counted in 60s.
Why 60? It’s basically the "super-number" of the ancient world.
Think about the number 10. You can divide it by 2 and 5. That’s it. Now look at 60. You can divide it by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30. If you’re a merchant in a marketplace 4,000 years ago trying to divide a shipment of grain or an hour of labor, 60 is a dream. It prevents those messy fractions that ruin your afternoon. When we talk about minutes in 1 hour, we are literally speaking the language of people who lived in mud-brick palaces along the Euphrates river.
They didn't just stop at time. They applied this to circles, too. That’s why a circle has 360 degrees ($60 \times 6$). It all fits together in this giant, mathematical puzzle that has survived every empire, every war, and every technological revolution since the Bronze Age.
Why 60 Minutes Still Beats the Decimal System
Believe it or not, people have tried to change this. During the French Revolution, the government tried to implement "French Revolutionary Time." They wanted 10-hour days, with 100 minutes in each hour, and 100 seconds in each minute.
It was a total disaster.
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People hated it. It was confusing, it broke every clock in the country, and it felt "unnatural." The experiment lasted only a few years before they tucked their tails between their legs and went back to the Babylonian 60.
There’s a specific rhythm to 60 minutes. It splits into quarters (15 minutes) and halves (30 minutes) perfectly. If you have a 100-minute hour, a "quarter" is 25 minutes. That sounds fine until you try to divide an hour into thirds. In our current system, a third of an hour is a clean 20 minutes. In a decimal system? It’s 33.3333... minutes. Nobody has time for that.
The Biological Percieved Hour
Have you noticed how an hour in a dentist's chair feels like three years, but an hour at a concert feels like five minutes? This is what psychologists call "time perception."
- Dopamine levels: When you’re enjoying yourself, dopamine speeds up your internal clock, making the external world seem like it's moving faster.
- Memory encoding: Your brain packs more detail into "new" experiences, which is why childhood summers felt like they lasted forever.
- Age factor: As you get older, one hour represents a smaller percentage of your total life lived, making time feel like it's accelerating.
How Modern Technology Counts Those 60 Minutes
We don’t use sundials anymore. Obviously. Today, the 60 minutes in your hour are dictated by the vibration of atoms. Specifically, we use the International System of Units (SI) definition based on the cesium-133 atom.
The transition from "shadows on a stone" to "atomic resonance" is wild. In the past, an hour was just a fraction of daylight. In the winter, your minutes were actually shorter than in the summer because the "hour" was just 1/12th of the time between sunrise and sunset. Can you imagine the chaos that would cause today? Your Zoom call would start at different times every week.
Precision Matters
In 2026, our reliance on the precise measurement of these minutes is higher than ever. GPS satellites rely on the fact that the minutes and seconds are synchronized to a billionth of a degree. If the clocks on those satellites were off by even a tiny fraction of a second, your Uber driver would end up in a different zip code.
Real-World Applications: Making the Most of 60
Since we are stuck with 60 minutes, how do we actually use them? Most productivity experts, like those studying the Pomodoro Technique or the 52/17 rule, argue that we aren't actually "conscious" for all 60 minutes.
The human brain tends to flicker out after about 45 to 50 minutes of intense focus. This is why many university lectures and therapy sessions are capped at 50 minutes. It leaves a "buffer" of 10 minutes. That 10-minute gap is the unsung hero of the hour. It’s the time where we reset.
Fun Ways to Visualize 60 Minutes
- Light Travel: In one hour, light travels about 1.08 billion kilometers. It could circle the Earth about 27,000 times.
- Heartbeats: The average human heart beats about 4,200 to 5,000 times in an hour.
- Breath: You’ll take roughly 700 to 900 breaths before the clock strikes the next hour.
- The Earth: Our planet rotates about 15 degrees on its axis every 60 minutes.
The Cultural Weight of the Hour
In some cultures, the concept of a "tight" 60-minute hour is a bit of a joke. You’ve heard of "island time" or "Spanish time." In many parts of the world, an hour is a suggestion, not a mandate.
But in the globalized business world, those 60 minutes are a commodity. We "spend" time. We "save" time. We "waste" time. It’s the only currency that everyone gets the same amount of every day, regardless of their bank account. You get 24 blocks of 60 minutes. That’s it.
Practical Steps for Mastering Your Hour
Instead of fighting the clock, you can actually use the math of 60 to your advantage.
First, stop thinking of an hour as a giant block. Use the "Rule of Thirds." Divide your 60 minutes into three 20-minute chunks. It’s much easier to focus on a task for 20 minutes than it is for 60. Use the first 20 for deep work, the second 20 for collaboration, and the last 20 for administrative cleanup.
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Second, audit your "leakage." Most people lose about 12 to 15 minutes of every hour to "context switching"—that’s the time it takes your brain to refocus after checking a notification. If you check your phone four times in an hour, you haven't just lost the seconds it took to look at the screen; you've effectively deleted 25% of your hour’s productivity.
Lastly, embrace the 10-minute transition. If you have back-to-back meetings, end them at the 50-minute mark. Those remaining 10 minutes aren't "empty" time; they are the structural support that keeps the next hour from collapsing.
The 60-minute hour is a relic of the past that happens to work perfectly for the human brain and modern physics. It’s a bridge between ancient Babylon and the atomic age.