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Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time
by
John P. Robinson and Geoffrey C. Godbey
Using monitored time-diaries to learn
how citizens spend their time, John P. Robinson and Geoffrey C. Godbey suggest
that citizens spend their time differently from the self-reports they give to
media pollsters, which claim that people have less free time now than in the past.
The authors suggest that citizens in general have more free time now than in the past, though the amount of free time varies with groups, especially age groups. Older individuals have much more free time than in the past. Robinson and Godbey attribute part of the problem to a particular victim mentality, a victim of time mentality. Much of the victim-of-time problem is due to believing unnecessary activities are necessary.
In addition citizens spend too much free time on activities they find unenjoyable. We are heavily into busy-ness and rotating the fields, moving from one banal interest to another with little vision and few imperatives. Misused freedoms and wishful thinking pass for accomplishments. Citizens report that their
favorite work or house activity is playing with children; their favorite
personal activity is sex; their favorite free time activity is active sports.
Americans, however, spend a daily mean of a whopping five minutes playing with children; four minutes having sex, and ten minutes playing sports. No doubt there are many
whose daily efforts in those activities are several times the mean, which means
that most people spend a fraction of that puny mean on sex, sports and
children. I will go out on a very strong limb here and guess that the mode for each
of these three activities is zero minutes a day. Compare that to a mean of 129
minutes watching TV, 89 minutes traveling, 39 minutes preparing food and 24
minutes shopping. Amazingly, the mean number of minutes spent at parties
dropped from 15 in 1965 to six in 1985. So much for the party animal generation.
In a finding that changed the velocity
of a few eyebrows the authors find that employed women and employed
men spend similar numbers of hours in “total productive activities”—family care
time + paid work time + commute time—which contradicts constant reports of work
load disparities among men and women. Men spent a mean 14.5 hours on house and family
work. Women spent 25.6 hours, but men made up the difference commuting and at work. The authors don’t include any range data. There may be large numbers of families with women doing a double shift balanced by large numbers of families with "I’m-nothing-but-a-paycheck-to-her" men.
Most of the increase in free time went
to men 55 and over. In 1985 men aged 55 to 64 spent only 21.5 hours per week on
paid work, mostly because of early retirements. In 1965 that age group worked
longer hours than any other age group, about 38 hours a week. And most of that extra
free time went into TV viewing. Between 1965 and 1995 TV viewing went up six
hours per week. For many younger families, workloads have increased.
The authors argue that we should
engage in one task at a time, fully focusing on it and experiencing it. Multitasking
activities that all require mental effort tends to deaden our experience. The
authors call doing too many tasks at once, doing tasks too quickly and
constantly rotating tasks "time deepening." Constantly rotating the crops, while
putting little enthusiasm into them, is a recipe for dehumanization.
We look for activities to provide whatever
is missing in our lives without pouring on the right types of efforts. We avoid
activities that require serious commitment. We are more interested in constant
novelty. The number of wants and "needs" have increased. The authors
conclude that time should be seen as an important value issue.
The fantastic tables in Time for Life are more fascinating than the clunky text. The authors decided to be vacation philosophers rather than moral philosophers. The authors oppose philosophies of passive leisure, yet they do not bring themselves to explicit moral philosophies. They prescribe active leisure, which is not much of an improvement over passive leisure. The authors’ prescriptions for solving the paradoxes of hedonism and modern life are not quite empty, but they are nowhere near good. The authors predict a massive decline in the number of hours worked, which may be true for the
leisure classes, but not for the non-leisure classes. Finding ways to make work more personally and socially valuable is an even bigger challenge for the future than finding ways to make leisure more purposeful, but the authors have little to offer. Many people are hell bent on trying to convince us that technologies that make us mentally and physically passive are good for us or that passivity is not really passivity, but the authors have little to say about harmful technologies.
The overall means in Time for
Life do not say enough about the distribution of various groups. Many people
may think they are more pressed for time because they are more pressed for
time, which does not show up here because early retirees and other members of
various leisure classes have a large impact on the averages. The authors should
have included more distribution data.
Time for Life has been criticized by others for using unrepresentative samples and coming up with some questionable statistics such as the large amount of time spent on needle point. The amount of time spent on private or embarrassing activities might also be mistaken.
In 1965 busy people might have considered it a civic duty to fill out time diaries. By 1985 they might not have. I also do not remember seeing much mention of dropouts, something that would make a big difference in this type of research, though I probably was not looking hard enough. Worth skimming. 367p (H) 1997
—J.T. Fournier
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