It is a popular view among scholars that the modern time-concept of everyday life grew as a result of work-organisation and discipline in factories during industrialisation. This concept consists of a greater stress on punctuality and a greater general awareness of time. Without denying this, this essay argues that there might have been other social processes and reasons behind the modern time-concept. In a comparison of early-modern Swedish court evidence covering four different socio-economic milieus and two different decades - the 1650s and the 1730s - some interesting facts are revealed. There are differences between the local communities studied, but the greatest differences occurred over time. This can be explained by a growing demand from the central judicial institutions for clearly written records rather than by a more detailed organisation of time in the communities, since Sweden did not experience a revolution in working conditions over these periods but changes in the bureaucratic strata in the period. One may therefore draw the conclusion that the modern time-concept was not only a result of work-discipline but also of communication, and that its genesis is older than the industrial revolution.