Time, or more accurately the lack of it, has become something of a status symbol. Asked how we’re doing, and many of us are as likely to answer “busy” as we are to say “fine” or “good.”
And it makes us feel good to do so — it makes us feel like we’re in demand or accomplishing something important.
Many of today’s white-collar professionals are in fact quite busy. Until relatively recently, wealthy and well-educated people tended to live lives of leisure, while the poor toiled away for long days and little pay. Now that reality has reversed. In today’s economy, the wealthy are more likely to find there are benefits to working long hours than are the poor or less educated.
The business of today’s working professional is the subject of an opinion piece in the upcoming Sunday New York Times (available online here) titled “The Busy Person’s Lies.”
Author Laura Vanderkam logged and studied how she spent her time over the course of one year. It turned out to be the busiest of her life. She and her husband welcomed a fourth child into their family, she gave professional talks, published a book and traveled.
The author references a 2015 Pew poll finding that about 60 percent of working Americans said they didn’t have enough time to do what they wanted to do. And I suspect that number would be at least a third higher for professionals in the Washington, D.C. area.
But by logging how she spent her time, Vanderkam learned that “the stories I told myself about where my time went weren’t always true. The hour-by-hour rhythm of my life was not quite as hectic as I’d thought.”
It was a hectic year for her, but after analyzing the time logs, she found that she had enjoyed a lot of time off — enough time for eight massages, long weekend runs, and many dinners with friends. She spent 327 hours reading fashion and gossip magazines — nearly an hour a day.
She reveals how data show that most people overestimate how much time they spend working by about one third. Vanderkam found this to be true for herself. She thought she had worked 45 to 50 hours a week, when in fact her logs revealed that she had worked only 37.4 on average, and slept nearly 7.5 hours a night.
We tell ourselves false stories, Vanderkam says, about many things in life — including how we spend our time. She encourages people to log their time and budget it, just as we budget our money or monitor our weight.
This rings true to me. I know people who complain about their lack of time but spend much of their evening channel-surfing, playing fantasy sports or on social media. Sixty percent of people think they’re too busy, yet the average American spends more than five hours a day watching TV, according to a 2014 study.
The piece is worth reading. Best of all, it shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes out of your busy day.
Daniel Allott is deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner.
