60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day are pretty good quantities. It’s easy to calculate a half, a third and a quarter of each of those periods. All that base 10 values are good for are dividing by 5 – and 60 handles that too.
Thats true of all the imperial measurements really- they start from a whole and divide it up- so the increments used are based on physical actions to portion something out whether its cutting a pound of cheese into portions or whatever – every time you half it you arrive on a whole unit. If you’re using decimal units you can only half things a few times before you get into funny fractions – 10 – 5 – 2½ – 1¼ – ? …. who’s got a ? button on their keyboard? – or a mark on their tape measure at ?cm?
So imperial units are derived from physical devisions of ‘stuff’ where as decimal works better as a means of adding things together or counting things out.
Our increments for time are based on manually dividing up a circle and treating that circle as representative of a whole day, or whole hour or whole minute- you can draw a circle and without adjusting the compass quickly divide it into 6 perfectly equal parts – they give you a datum for all the subsequent divisions and do all that accurately and precisely at any scale – whether you’re making a 12 hr clock face or a 60 second stopwatch or a 360° protractor.
There’s nothing stopping you from counting time in decimal. I can give you a 10 second head start or record a mix tape on a 90 minute cassette or speculate what the president will do in his first 100 days in office. But ‘telling the time’, rather than specifying an amount of time, works better in base 12 / 60