Barbara Yong doesn’t get it. Neither does her husband.
Nor, perhaps, do most Americans.
The Yongs have enough trouble grappling with their law practices and three young children to know that when it comes to free time, there just isn’t enough. It’s the truth. Ask anyone.
Some, though, will say it isn’t so.
Time-use experts John Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey contend that Americans aren’t as bad off, time-wise, as we think we are. In their new study, “Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use their Time,” the scientists argue that despite all the intrusions upon people’s lives these days–from jobs and housework to social obligations and cellular phones–Americans in the ’90s have more leisure time than ever before.
Not everyone, of course. Barbara Yong, who is 39, doesn’t have as much free time as a 60-year-old empty-nester. Jim Yong, 41, isn’t as carefree as a 20-year-old single male. But in general, Americans have close to 40 hours of leisure time a week, five hours more than in 1965, the researchers found.
“We were as surprised by the results as anyone,” Robinson said.
It’s a hard concept to grasp, especially as we try to cancel the dentist appointment on the cell phone while in the car stuck in traffic on the way to the store to get something quick to make the kids for dinner, all after a long day on the job.
But it’s not such a long day, at least statistically, say Robinson and Godbey, who maintain that Americans are working less than they did 30 years ago–about 50 hours a week. This amount varies quite a bit and includes paid work, household-type obligations and commuting.
Their research dates back to 1965 and involves “time diaries,” detailed hour-by-hour logs of how thousands of Americans spend their time.
The problem with some research, Godbey said, is that people tend to exaggerate, especially the amount of time they work. “They think that confers importance, and they also assume productivity is directly related to hours spent. It isn’t,” he said.
There’s also a major perception problem. “People think they are working longer hours, but in reality, they mistake the pace of work for length of time spent working,” said Godbey, a professor of leisure studies at Penn State University. “On average, the number of hours people spend working has diminished.
“People mistake working faster and being more rushed with working longer. Rushing and stress are a huge problem in our society and all of our data and lots of other people’s show a more rushed society.”
Another crucial question: What is meant by free time? If people have almost 40 hours of it a week, where does it all go?
Free time is not, for example, time devoted to child care, housework, cutting the grass, “personal maintenance” or even sleeping. It is, however, time spent on such things as socializing, hobbies, reading, recreation and sports, organizations, cultural events and, last but not least, television watching.
The biggest free-time bandit is TV.
The average American spends 15 hours of free time a week watching television. That’s more than twice as much time as the next most popular free-time activity: Socializing.
“In the stuff we’ve been gathering, we find people telling us they don’t have any free time because they’re watching television. . . . Well, television is a free-time activity,” said Robinson, a professor of sociology and director of the Americans’ Use of Time Project at the University of Maryland, which gathered the data for the book.
And that hour-eater, the TV, is getting greedier. Socializing “seems to be going down some. The TV in some cases seems to be directly related to that,” Robinson said. He said that this isn’t necessarily due to cable or better programming.
The authors say Americans face several time paradoxes. Besides feeling more rushed and stressed even though we have more free time, our bonus time is often spent on activities, such as TV-watching, that bring minimal enjoyment or fulfillment.
Another problem is that most of Americans’ free time isn’t gathered together in some usable period. Like spilled popcorn, it’s just scattered here and there throughout the week. A nibble here and there is not as satisfying as one big bowl.
“If you ask, `Do you have more free time now or five years ago,’ most say five years ago,” Godbey said. “Part of the reason for that is that it doesn’t feel free to them because most of the increase in free time comes on weekdays.
“It comes in periods of an hour here, 45 minutes there. It’s just enough time to watch a rerun of `Coach.’ It’s not going to the lake to take a boat out.”
Why does Mr. Busybody, the retired neighbor, seem to be able to investigate everything that’s happening on the block? Why does a crowd of teenagers always seem to be hanging around the mini-mart? Why does that guy who walks by your desk at work 20 times a day have nothing better to do?
The answers mainly lie in demographic differences, according to “Time for Life.” There’s an increasing gap between free-time haves and have-nots. For example, in the course of the past 30 years, the 18-24 and the 55-64 age groups have been the biggest gainers of free time.
Those who are unmarried and those without children have gained more free time (six hours) than those who are married (two hours), especially those with preschool children, a group that has made less than a one-hour gain in free time during that period.
“These results suggest a `rich get richer’ trend as far as free time is concerned,” Robinson and Godbey note. “The groups that chose to forgo or relinquish work and family responsibilities have been the major beneficiaries of the gain in free time.”
Thus, the skepticism of people like the Yongs is not unfounded. Both Barbara and her husband, Jim, 41, are lawyers, putting in 12-hour days or more commuting from La Grange to downtown Chicago. They have three children ages 2 1/2 to 10 and are winners in life in many ways but losers in the free-time derby.
“There are clearly things we can’t do,” Barbara Yong said. “Like we can’t find whole blocks of time to go play golf on Saturday or Sunday, which we used to do. That kind of stuff is gone.”
The Yongs concur with one aspect of the research by Robinson and Godbey, that the technologically induced pressure and pace of their professional lives blunts the pleasure of whatever free time they may have gained.
When at the office dealing with clients, Barbara Yong said, “It used to be that there were always telephone calls and letters and you’d have to respond to people. But now it’s almost every single thing I do gets either faxed or Fed-Exed to somebody, and it’s the same thing right back to me, and that’s regardless of whatever else I might have to do that day.”
“You know you can’t say to somebody, `I’ll get back to you in two days.’ It doesn’t work that way anymore.”
For his part, Godbey is philosophical about ways to deal with the perceived time famine Americans face. Americans, he said, have made their newspapers and magazines “quick reads.” We’ve become experts at “multitasking,” doing more than one thing at a time, such as watching a cable TV movie while eating dinner and socializing. Instead of exercising with tennis for two hours, we work out on a Stairmaster for 20 minutes while leafing through a business magazine.
Complain though we will about not having enough, Americans are, nevertheless, getting a true time freebie this summer: The National Institute of Standards and Technology says that an extra “leap” second will be inserted just before 7 p.m. Chicago time on June 30. The purpose is to keep clocks in synch with the spinning Earth.
While it’s just an instant, Godbey was optimistic we can put the bonus to good use.
“We’re a nanosecond culture,” he said, referring to the standard operating unit of computers.
“That’s a billion nanoseconds you’re talking about there. Who knows what we can do with that kind of time?”
