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About MARIAL MARIAL in the News Warped
speed: Where has all the time gone? Our eternal opponent is time. We can stop, but the clock won't. Need a breath? Tough. Today revs faster than yesterday. Hang on:
We want more than fast. We want instantaneous. We get money from a machine, dinner from a drive-through and sex on the Internet. But no matter how quick the fix, we want it faster. Researchers at the Universities of Maryland and Michigan urge us to slow down and smell the irony. They insist we have more free time --- 5 hours more a week than in 1965. Yet, time --- not money --- has become our most precious commodity. Pollsters first detected the shift in 1995. "That's a landmark in societal development," said John Robinson, director of the Americans' Use of Time Project at the University of Maryland. Part of the conflict --- do we have more free time or not --- comes from the very work ethic the culture is founded on. A settler nation built on capitalism craves efficiency. Time isn't money. It's oxygen. "We don't have a value that says a fast life is more virtuous," said Bradd Shore, an Emory anthropologist. "But a life in which you're more productive and do more things is virtuous." While we hoard every millisecond, some researchers suggest we double-check the Day-Timer. We're not starved for time. We just multitask every nervous second until the day feels unbalanced, like an overstuffed duffel bag. "The future is something which everyone reaches
at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he
is." The house revs up at 6 a.m. Her husband makes pancakes. Her daughter walks their two Shih Tzus. Her son takes out the trash. They're out the door by 7. In the afternoon, it's time for kids and their activities, time to start dinner. Then, she checks the list and starts again. "I used to think after I got home from work there was a lot of time to have a leisurely dinner, a walk, then wait for the sun to go down," said Kea, a 50-year-old insurance agent. She's among the women whose workweek has jumped since 1965. Today's woman working outside the home averages 23.4 paid hours a week --- a 30 percent climb, says the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Add that to the after-work carpool: 83 percent of children age 6 to 17 participated in at least one extracurricular activity in 1997, according to the National Survey of America's Families. Nothing eats Mom's time like working all day then making dinner. Women average 45 minutes a day preparing meals, compared with 13 minutes by men. That's accelerated a trend in easy-to-make meals. The average American ate a frozen dinner about six times a month from March 2000 to February 2001, a 33 percent increase since 1992. Many sit-down restaurants such as Outback Steakhouse, TGI Friday's and Applebee's now offer curbside takeout. "We've moving away from things we don't like. Cooking is one of them. Eating is not," said Harry Balzer, vice president of the NPD Group, a marketing research company. Like a lot of us, Kea is caught in that bind. "The sun goes down before you can think about dinner," Kea said. "The kids have so many extracurricular activities." At home, technology has saved labor. But some of us have taken the time savings and plowed them into things that make more work. Take laundry. Women with washing machines at home spend almost twice as much time doing laundry as those without, according to University of Maryland research. We've used the extra time to buy more clothes, which we conveniently wash more often. In a similar example, in 1920, when three of every 10 homes had no electricity and heavy marketing of washers had just begun, women spent an average of 82 minutes a day caring for clothes. By the late 1960s, when nearly all homes had washers, women still spent 69 minutes on laundry. "We have become more affluent because of the rising value of time," said W. Keith Bryant, professor emeritus of policy analysis and management at Cornell University. "We have chosen to spend some of the increased affluence on more and cleaner clothes." "Father said clocks slay time. He said time is
dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when
the clock stops does time come to life." Somehow, society stepped on the accelerator. Life feels as fast as NASCAR. Gentlemen, start your e-mail! It's so fast we can't relax. One in six U.S. workers report they can't, or don't, use up their vacation time. Americans average 13 vacation days a year --- the lowest of any industrialized nation. We can't even relax at home, where the walls between office and home are more virtual than ever. When the cellphone rings or AOL declares "You've got mail," chances are, it's the boss. There are 110 million cellphones in the U.S. There are 112 million adults with access to home computers. Like a trick of the eye, they conspire to bend time. All that connectivity makes us feel rushed. Wherever we are, we're at work. Technology forever wooed us. You can go faster, came the whisper. Our knees buckled every time. But the speed of development also gives us pause. Just more than a decade ago, the technology to scan the human genetic code would have taken thousands of years to complete. But last year, scientists drafted the human genome, our genetic map. Within three decades, computers may model human cells. "The evolution of biological life and the evolution of technology have both followed the same pattern: They take a long time to get going, but advances build on one another and progress erupts at an increasingly furious pace," National Technology Medal winner Ray Kurzweil wrote for Scientific American in 1999. "Each hour is a little bucket of time to fill.
The railroad hurried us, beginning in the 1830s. We began setting our clocks by the trains. The clock, not the sun, now defined our time. The workweek was 60 to 70 hours by the 1880s. Companies mass-marketed watches in 1888. The first timepieces had just an hour hand. Minute hands followed. Finally, sweep second hands appeared. More acceleration. Henry Ford's assembly line in 1913 increased productivity. Fewer people made more stuff. After World War II, the workweek steadily slipped under 40 hours. Fewer farms pushed the number down. In the 1960s and 1970s, women joined the labor force in droves. By the 1980s, a working woman could plan on a 30-year career, up from six years in 1900. Fast-forward to 2002. With Mom working, who's keeping house? It's not Dad. He's doing more than in 1965, but it's still half as much as Mom. Gladly, the marketplace fills our need for speed. Jiffy Lube lubes our cars in 10 minutes. The World Wide Web makes us armchair experts on anything in a moment. CNN broadcasts from Afghanistan in an instant. Networks "crawl" information across the
bottom of their broadcasts. New York University professor Todd Gitlin
said the crawl contributes to what he calls a "national attention
deficit disorder." We bore easily. And the brain processes
only so much information. The optimum rate for comprehension is
about 300 words per minute. Gitlin estimates the sound bite of a
presidential candidate on network news shrank from 42 seconds in
1968 to 7.8 seconds in 2000. "I rather doubt that the creation of the Internet affects the way we read Shakespeare," said Celia Klin, a University of Massachusetts at Amherst professor who researches text comprehension. "On the other hand, it may affect the probability that people read Shakespeare." "Half our life is spent trying to find something
to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save."
Robyn Pluta, an Acworth consultant who wanted four hours more a day for her recent 35th birthday, didn't see a rush growing up. Her parents worked for AT&T. Pluta and her sister would let themselves in after school. They helped their mom make dinner. They wrestled with their dad. Everyone played Sorry, Life or Uno on family night. She wants that pace for her kids, 5-year-old Kyle, 2 1/2-year-old Ryan and 3-month-old Krysten. "I don't want them to see all this multitasking," she said. "If they see this constant rush, rush, rush, they'll feel they're always sharing." Pluta talks about slowing down, but she rushes into the fray, clutching her Palm to-do list and wearing her cellphone earpiece. To steal back time she and her husband "power cook" six to eight hours one Saturday a month, slicing, dicing, boiling and sauteeing. Meals are stored in a freezer in the garage, saving time and money. But best of all, cooking day is one of the rare days that Pluta and her husband, Butch, spend time together. "It's sad but true," Pluta said. "We keep in touch on the cellphone." Drive-through burger in 108 seconds? What's for dinner? TGIF? < More MARIAL in the News |