the measure of all things

Why measure things in temporal units? 

1. It makes things concrete, dare I say materialist. 
2. It makes things comparable - at least, if a lot of things are measurable in time.
3. It builds in clocks, which many blog posts have written about as helpful to sandbox play and the avoidance of quantum ogres

What can one measure in time?

1. Damage - how long you can survive without receiving medical attention
2. Distance - how long to travel between points on a pointcrawl
3. Exhaustion - how long it’s been since you got a good night’s rest; how long you can function until you pass out
4. Mana - how long you need to meditate in a place of power to charge this, or how long the ritual needs to be, or how long a cooldown period you get
5. Morale - how long a unit  will endure dangerous battle; how long a force will endure crappy conditions marching/camping under hunger/plague/harsh discipline
6. Obscurity - how many days of research in the library, or buying drinks at bars, are required to uncover this fact
7. Proficiency - years of training in a skill
8. Projects - how many person-hours are required to create this
9. Rarity - a once in a minute/day/year/century event
10. Relationships - how long someone will care about you before needing the relationship renewed (by, depending on the type of relationship, patronage, or a date night, or whatever)
11. Resistance - how long you can get beaten up, or hold your breath, or endure ______ before folding
12. Standard of Living - how many people need to be working full-time to support both you and yourself (okay not technically a unit of time but integrates well with them
13. Stealth - how long you can do this without someone noticing
14. Wealth - how many hours of labor are embodied in this

How can one measure things in time?

1. Openly, so that players can tactically work with it, or secretly, so that they have to guess.
2. Smoothly, such that you know exactly how long something can take and can put it on Fantasy Calendar or whatever, or stochastically, rolling to see how much things advance or whether the event happens.
3. (If something doesn’t happen according to visible clocks in reality, being open and smooth is going to feel gamey!)
4. Using aforesaid Fantasy Calendar, or a physical timer like on your phone or a little hourglass (useful especially if you use some kind of microisotime where the time represented by a combat round is around the time IRL resolve it

What am I missing from any of the above? And what shouldn’t be measured in time?