Out Of Time: We Are Working Less, But Watching More TV

Recent research on how we spend our time shows that we have more free time than ever before:

[from The land of leisure]

A pair of economists have looked closely at how Americans actually spend their time. Mark Aguiar (at the diaries ask people to give detailed information on everything they did the day before, and for how long they did it. The beauty of such surveyFederal Reserve Bank of Boston) and Erik Hurst (at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business) constructed four different measures of leisure.[“Measuring trends in leisure: the allocation of time over five decades”, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston working paper, January 2006] The narrowest includes only activities that nearly everyone considers relaxing or fun; the broadest counts anything that is not related to a paying job, housework or errands as “leisure”. No matter how the two economists slice the data, Americans seem to have much more free time than before.

Over the past four decades, depending on which of their measures one uses, the amount of time that working-age Americans are devoting to leisure activities has risen by 4-8 hours a week. (For somebody working 40 hours a week, that is equivalent to 5-10 weeks of extra holiday a year.) Nearly every category of American has more spare time: single or married, with or without children, both men and women. The only twist is that less educated (and thus poorer) Americans have done relatively better than more educated ones (see chart). And that is not just because unemployed high-school drop-outs have more free time on their hands. Less educated Americans with jobs—the overstretched middle class of political lore—do very well.

These findings will no doubt be scoffed at by many Americans who are certain that they, and nearly everyone they know, are overworked (and who may find time to write letters to the editor saying so). Indeed, a 1992 book by Juliet Schor, “The Overworked American”, became a best-seller by telling people something that they thought they already knew.

In fact, most of the official numbers have shown that American toil has not changed that much over the past few decades. Americans may put in longer hours at the office than other countries, but that is because average hours in the workplace in other rich countries have dropped sharply. In America, official studies tend to show women working more and men less, but the average working week has been fairly constant.

How then have Messrs Aguiar and Hurst uncovered a more relaxed America, where leisure has actually increased? It is partly to do with the definition of work, and partly to do with the data they base their research upon.

Most American labour studies rely on well-known official surveys, such as those collected by the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) and the Census Bureau, that concentrate on paid work. These are good at gleaning trends in factories and offices, but they give only a murky impression of how Americans use the rest of their time.

Messrs Aguiar and Hurst think that the hours spent at your employer’s are too narrow a definition of work. Americans also spend lots of time shopping, cooking, running errands and keeping house. These chores are among the main reasons why people say they are so overstretched (especially working women with children).

But the researchers go on to show that the number of hours spent on housework has dropped significantly, even for working women, so the sense of ‘having no time’ is a strange paradox, all around.

One other interesting trend is the rise of multitasking. Those recording their time in diaries for the studies reported an increase in blended activities: writing email while watching TV, talking to customers on the phone while making dinner, or working while flying. It may be this subtle bleeding together of work and non-work contexts that contributes to the paradoxical sense of being busy all the time, even though we are working far, far less.

And of course, there is the oddest element of the glut of leisure time: people spend it watching television:

[from What’s Offline Sunday New York Times by Paul Brown]

“Since 1965, there’s been a six- to eight-hour weekly increase in leisure for the average worker age 21 to 65,” Mr. Hurst told Kiplinger’s.

Mr. Hurst explains where all that free time is coming from: men are working less, with part of the increase attributable to stay-at-home dads.

“For women, all of the increase is from a decline in housework — less cooking, cleaning, laundry and grocery shopping than 40 years ago,” he says.

And what are we doing with all our additional free time? “Roughly two-thirds of the increase in leisure is spent watching television. That’s been consistent across population groups since 1965. More recently, we’ve spent more time on the Internet, less time reading and a little bit more time exercising. We’re going to church about a half-hour a week less.”

That’s 4 to 5 hours of television watching every week. Sheesh. It’s like Bill Murray in Groundhog’s Day: when given immortality and an endless time to educate himself, he instead spent the time flipping playing cards into a hat. We are granted a full day of additional leisure time, and squander it watching Ameridan Idol and Jerry Springer (oh, and all those other “really great” shows that people always talk about whenever I start on this topic).

I believe that the decrease in social involvement and the rise of commuting are psychological factors that make us feel time-crushed. We are spending more time going to and from work than in earlier generations, and we are less involved in community, social activities. We have replaced the latter with the structured and scheduled — taking the kids to dance classes, sunday soccer, the friday night poker circle — and it’s my contention that the increased orientation toward scheduled activities, rather than extemporaneous hanging out at the local pub, makes us feel time pressured. Its the act of scheduling things that brings the notion of time pressure into our thoughts.

I am sure that all of us remember those days in childhood when time seemed both endless and instantaneous, when we were playing in the neighborhood park with friends or in a treehouse in a neighbor’s yard. I believe that we have lost that feeling of being outside of time by scheduling every last event in our lives.

I think that’s one of the charming aspects of instant messaging. People see I’m online, and just ping me. “Hey, Stowe, did you read such-and-so?” I break out of the sequence of structured work for a few minutes of impromptu socializing. Time steps back. I feel at least an echo of that distant summer day, hitting fungos to my buddy, Carl, in the park. Momentarily, I am outside of time instead of out of time.