Not so long ago, the divisions of time were clear. There were eight hours for work, eight for recreation and chores, and eight for rest. No more, say futurists Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor. They say that modernity—e-commerce, e-mail, conference calls, even stop-frame videos that freeze sporting events until we have time to view them—has changed the very stuff of our lives: time. Modernity has softened the clock, Wacker and Taylor write. It also has elongated hours to the point that talking about operating 24/7 is "no longer a metaphor at all," they say. They argue, in The Visionary’s Handbook, that changes in time make for one of the Nine Paradoxes That Will Shape the Future of Your Business.

Wacker and Taylor say the solution is to come up with a new rhythm and a new language that fit the new sense of time. They say the starting point for finding that new pace and those new words is to understand that we are living in what they call "the pressure tense." It is a wonderful term that we will let them explain in the excerpt that follows.

We live today not in one tense but in two—the present and the future. Once, deep ties held us in place—career, extended family, marriage. Today, we have sacrificed depth for breadth. In so doing we have weakened nearly every link that ties us to here and now. We now live in both present and future tenses simultaneously, anxious to step forward into the future and certain we have to do so, yet nostalgic for the present moment before we ever leave it. Think of life today as being lived in the "pressure" tense (present + future).

Newspapers are a great example of the new paradox of time. In an op-ed piece that appeared in the New York Times on Nov. 23, 1998, author Bruce Feiler wrote: "For all the griping about the tabloidization of American news, there’s a subtler shift going on in news coverage that’s arguably even more corrosive. Increasingly, stories no longer report on the past; they report on the future."

Feiler went on to cite numerous examples, such as news articles, days in advance of the event, reporting (or misreporting, as it turned out) that President Clinton would appear irate in his videotaped testimony in the Monica Lewinsky affair.

Feiler couldn’t be more right. Take the front page of any newspaper, read the first few paragraphs of the articles there, and it will seem as if the future already has occurred. Speculation gets treated as fact. Next week has become an element of history. Articles are based less on reporting than on predictions. Who, what, when, where, why, and how—the cornerstones of journalism as it was once practiced—have been largely replaced by a single question: What next? But the question seems always to be addressed not in the interrogatory but in the declarative mode: Here is what’s next.

But if Feiler is right about the phenomenon, he couldn’t be more wrong when he attributes it to an "omnipresent (and omniscient) media insider" or to journalists succumbing to the temptation to "think they’re seers." Feiler is slaying the messenger. As is almost always the case, newspapers have simply gone where their readers already are. If more and more news articles commingle the present and future tenses, it is only because more and more the pressure tense is where the consumer is living.

Yes, articles about corporate earnings focus less on the actual results and more on what the results say about the future of the stock and the company—with predictions based on how results compared with securities analysts’ expectations. That may seem presumptuous, but business pages have every reason for taking this approach. Virtually every stock has embedded in its present price the estimated value of a company’s earnings for a year, or even much longer, into the future. While investors care about a company’s present situation, the long-term future is often much more important in determining a stock price. Stocks live in the pressure tense as much as people do.

Industry also lives in the pressure tense. The new practice of "anticipatory feedback" is built around telling employees in advance what mistakes they are going to make and then instructing them on how to avoid what would have been inevitable. In effect, anticipatory feedback takes the lessons of the past, projects them into the future, and asks people to act on them in the present. Twenty years ago, the approach might have been a good concept for a science fiction movie or a television series.

Products live in the pressure tense. Once, we talked about the concept of "planned obsolescence." Your Oldsmobile Delta 88 broke down after 90,000 miles because that’s when cars of that generation broke down. Your car’s style broke down after 50,000 miles because General Motors made significant changes in the model’s look every three years, to try to force you back to the showroom before the car wore out physically after five years. You continued to drive the Delta 88 not at risk to your safety but at risk to your cool. Today, products have moved past planned obsolescence to inherent obsolescence: Products become outdated not by any master plan but by their very nature. The more futuristic they are—the more high technology goes into them—the less likely they are to survive beyond the present moment.

The Northstar system allows your Cadillac to travel 100,000 miles before its first scheduled maintenance, but, by the time your car reaches 100,000 miles, its technology will be three generations removed, already grandfatherly. Motorola’s 1998 launch of the world’s first digital, global communications system put the company at the bleeding edge of low-earth-orbit satellite technology, at the very moment that the technology may have become obsolete. Not long before the launch, Fermilab fired a neutrino 235 miles into the core of the planet, proving it is possible to stop launching satellites and send media messages through the earth. Apple Computer’s G-4 chip didn’t just replace the older G-3 chip; it superseded it immediately and absolutely, especially for Macintosh users who are the cutting edge of establishing taste in computer chips. With the highest technology and the highest technology users, there is no middle age, just very young and very old.

Consumers live in the pressure tense. We become nostalgic about our purchases almost at the moment we make them, knowing that they won’t last long, knowing further that the best of them will last the least time. Caught between present and future, we spend half our time worrying that the long term won’t turn out the way we want and the other half worrying that we are going to miss something in the present moment. When we do miss something—a meeting, a plane, a game—our anger is absolute.

You might even say that road rage stems from the pressure tense. When we drive, the car radio provides loads of diversions. Compact disk players, tape decks, and audio books can distract us while we wait for the traffic to clear. And there’s always the cell phone. But hours lost on a freeway are hours lost forever, and that realization is tough to stomach if you’re focusing as hard as you can on realizing a specific future. It’s not just on freeways, either, that time rage and time confusion and time angst boil over. A study not long ago found that people standing in a line know pretty much how long they have been waiting—up to the four-minute mark. After that, they move from real time to fantasy time, and the perceived waiting time begins to grow exponentially, however long the clock says they have been in line. At five minutes, people might say they’ve been in line 10 minutes; at eight minutes, the fantasy waiting time has grown to 20 minutes. Airlines get people who are standing in line to return to reality by sending attendants out to ask what flight people are waiting for. But, even then, after about 10 minutes the pressure of lost time sets in and perceptions of waiting time mushroom out of control.

Workers live in the pressure tense. They often are assigned more work than they can reasonably handle in a given period, so, caught in the present while preoccupied with a seemingly untenable future, they engage in a sort of fantasy time. The perception of the time requirement will grow exponentially in a worker’s mind and convert inevitably into frustration. As a manager, you can distract workers briefly by walking the line and engaging employees in diversionary conversation, but even that won’t end the problem.

The old saw is right: Time is money. Intel once figured out how much money it was: It took the number of people in a meeting and multiplied them by $50, then by the number of hours the meeting lasted. Intel then compared that dollar total with the average profit on a Pentium processor to figure out how many processors were "consumed" in a meeting. For the calculation, profit was figured at $100 a processor, meaning that having 12 people in a room for two hours consumed 12 Pentium processors. The meeting better be worth that.

But, in the pressure tense, time is more than money. Money can be made in the stock market in a few ticks. Time, though, is scarce, and irrevocable. Unlike salary, it can’t be deferred. Unlike assets, you can’t invest time and make it grow. Busy people are busy absolutely. The more of the clock they fill, the more of the rest of the clock they need. And the more unsettled the clock becomes, the more they suffer.

Time is also respect, and it’s disrespect. Years ago, we got stuck in a traffic jam on our way to the Walt Disney studios in Burbank. We were careful to call constantly from our car to alert Disney brass of our probable late arrival. When we finally got there, an assistant to the man we had traveled across the country to see said: "He’d wait for Robert Redford, but he wouldn’t wait for an [expletive deleted] like you." True story. And $20 million in potential financing down the drain.

How late you are for a meeting is no longer determined by any absolute standard. It’s determined rather by how important the most important person in the room is. One minute late for a CEO whose time is being valued at $18 a minute is $18 late, and while you could presumably make that up out of your pocket, you can’t really make up the damage because time, finally, is status, too. By contrast, 10 minutes late for a meeting with your colleagues may be within acceptable bounds, but being on time for a meeting with your colleagues is showing them respect, and respect counts more than money. The act of abusing their time is the ultimate show of disrespect.

In organizations, all discontinuities in time ultimately become issues of self-worth because whenever separately calculated clocks collide, someone gets hurt and someone gets yelled at.

A little more than two decades ago, Corning was faced with a classic present-future dilemma. In kitchens across America, the company was thought of as the nation’s pre-eminent maker of ovenproof casserole dishes and sturdy measuring cups—sold under the Corning Ware and Pyrex brands. But the company’s research-and-development department had recently invented a new glass-based product called fiber-optic cable that might someday revolutionize the nascent telecommunications industry. How to resolve the problem? How to move into the future without destabilizing the present? In Corning’s case, the answer was: both wisely and humanely.

Eventually, nearly all of its consumer-products division was sold to Borden, but on the condition that the headquarters remain in Corning, N.Y., so that lifetime employees wouldn’t find themselves and their families uprooted. Thus, the company kept its past alive in the present and future of its community, even while divesting itself of its historic product line. Or, rather, most of its historic product line. Corning retained its Steuben crystal-and-glassware line, thus keeping its past alive in the present and future of the company.

Corning has never fully escaped the disastrous legal consequences of the silicone breast implants it manufactured jointly with Dow Chemical, but the company today is one of the world’s leading providers of fiber-optic cable. With a variety of joint-venture partners, Corning controls about a 50% share of the U.S. market and a 35% share in the rest of the world. Its fiber-optic business is projected to grow about 30% annually well into the next decade. By paying attention to its story, by working both sides of the pressure tense, Corning made the present live in the future, and made the future a reality in the present.

As Corning showed, the only answer in the pressure tense is to find a time metric, an organizational rhythm into which all the separate clocks can be plugged. To find, also, a language that will allow you to talk about the present and the future in the same breath. For, the final paradox of time is that the more accurately we define it, the more time can be anything it needs to be, anything we make it.

From the book The Visionary’s Handbook: Nine Paradoxes That Will Shape the Future of Your Business by Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor, which is published by HarperInformation, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2000 by Watts Wacker and James Taylor.