Friday, January 30, 2004
Wonder where all the time goes?
So did the sniper-eyed trend-watchers over at the Marketplace section of The Wall Street Journal who compiled some fascinating figures on what Americans do with their time. The reason Marketplace undertook this quest is that companies wanting to advertise are having a harder and harder time getting Americans' attention. And no wonder.
Pardon me while I extrapolate.
There are 168 hours in the week, and we now spent 53 of them at work. Curiously and for whatever reason, Americans began working harder during the Clinton administration, going from a 48-hour to a 55-hour workweek. We've slacked off to the 53 during the Bush years.
That leaves 115 hours.
We spent 47.6 hours sleeping, based on an average night's sleep of 6.8 hours. We've been getting less and less shut-eye. In the mid-'70s it was 7.7 hours and in 1920 it was 8.8, but work and life were physically much harder then and, frankly, there wasn't much reason to stay up.
That leaves 67.4 hours.
Findings
The trend-watchers rounded up figures that show Americans spend 46.9 hours a week on exercise and sports, in transit, caring for children and pets and at worship. Americans also spend about three-quarters of an hour a day on the phone, which seems low to me, but because people now do something else while they talk -- run red lights, wander in circles on the sidewalk -- we'll omit phone time.
That now leaves us with 20.5 hours a week unaccounted for. Over seven days that comes to just under three hours a day of personal time.
EXCEPT:
The Journal says we spend almost 34 hours a week watching TV (19 hours of cable and 15 hours of plain-old broadcast, if you must know) and another 15 hours a week listening to music, reading newspapers, magazines and books, playing video games and fooling around on the Internet.
We'll put aside radio -- over 20 hours a week -- because we're generally doing something else while listening to it. Believe it or not, there was a time when American families sat around the living room and listened to the radio; that was back when people got more than eight hours of sleep a night.
All that other stuff accounts for 49 hours of our week, more than enough to absorb our remaining 20.5 hours. We now have a 28.5-hour time deficit. In other words, at the end of the weekend, you are more than a full day behind in your activities. Even if we went to an eight-day week you still would be 4.5 hours behind.
Where has all the time gone? Don't even bother to ask. You don't have any.
Scripps Howard News Service