Watches lose ground to cell phones

Before she joined the ranks of telecommuters and stopped wearing a watch, 35-year-old working mom Jeannine Fallon Anckaitis also thought of her watch as "a handcuff" that she'd immediately remove when returning home.

"Even if I went out to dinner straight from work, I'd dump the watch into my purse to free my wrist," says Anckaitis, who lives in Swarthmore, Pa., and now works from home for an online auto site. "Taking off the watch symbolized being done with the pressure-filled commitments of the day, and settling into a pace where the time matters far less."

Indeed, the watch is a symbol of stress for many people. But it's not really time itself that's the problem, says historian James Hoopes.

"It's that we live in an increasingly synchronized world," says Hoopes, a professor in the division of history and society at Babson College in Massachusetts.

"You don't really relieve all the stress unless you get out of the world where time synchronization is so important."

He notes that, historically, the obsession with synchronization took hold in the railroad era, when watches were often kept in a pocket.

By World War I, watches began moving to the wrist, as a means of efficiency.

"The wrist watch was really a response to stress — the stress of battle," Hoopes says.

In today's age of globalization, he says, synchronization has only increased in scope.

Glen Stone gets a sense of that every working day at the World Trade Centre Toronto, as he walks by a wall of clocks that show times from around the world.

But as important as time is at the busy Toronto Board of Trade, even he has given up on wearing his own watch.

The 48-year-old Canadian says every time piece he's owned — including the first one he got at age 8 — has either broken or irritated his skin, whether they were cheap or expensive watches, digital, leather-strapped or metal.

He asks: "Know anyone who wants a drawer full of broken watches?"

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