Brigid Schulte's Blog
February 7, 2014
Thirty Hours of Leisure a Week?
I began this book quite by accident. As I describe in chapter 1, I was appointed to an internal working group at the Washington Post when an analysis of our readers found a big gap between male and female readers, particularly between the ages of 18 – 44 – what our demographic researchers call “the frenetic family” demographic. Our committee – comprised of all women journalists – took one look around the room and came up with an immediate hypothesis: if women weren’t reading the newspaper, it was because they were too busy. Most of the women on the committee were, too – rushing around in the morning making toast, packing lunches, signing school forms. Most of us read the paper we worked for later in the day, some sections as late as 10 pm just before bed!
Being journalists, we wanted to get some data to prove our hypothesis. Someone suggested looking into time studies. I volunteered. Not knowing anything about time-use research, I simply googled “women” “busy” “time” and up popped a time-use researcher named John Robinson who was considered one of the premiere researchers on time and how people use it. I called him up, told him about our study and how we thought that women had become too busy to read the newspaper.
“Wrong,” he said.
“What?”
“Women aren’t busy. Women have 30 hours of leisure each week. They have more leisure time now than they did in the 1960s, even though more of them work in the marketplace.”
I quickly scanned through the previous frantic week. A yoga class. Pizza movie night with the kids. A family birthday party … Maybe seven hours, I figured, tops.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t have 30 hours of leisure.”
“Yes, you do,” Robinsons maintained. “Come and do a time study with me and I’ll show you where your leisure is.”
And that is how this whole journey began.
I did the time study. He found 27 hours of what he called leisure, and I called bits and scraps of crappy time - 15 minutes here, 10 minutes there, every time I exercised, or was flattened in bed, listening to NPR trying to get OUT of bed. All of that Robinson labelled leisure.
So I went on a journey to find out why my time felt shredded into what I came to call time confetti, and to look for that blissful sounding state that time-use researchers call time serenity.
Along the way, inspired by my friend, Larry, I asked two questions: Why are things the way they are? How can they be better?
The book is a report of what I found.
Being journalists, we wanted to get some data to prove our hypothesis. Someone suggested looking into time studies. I volunteered. Not knowing anything about time-use research, I simply googled “women” “busy” “time” and up popped a time-use researcher named John Robinson who was considered one of the premiere researchers on time and how people use it. I called him up, told him about our study and how we thought that women had become too busy to read the newspaper.
“Wrong,” he said.
“What?”
“Women aren’t busy. Women have 30 hours of leisure each week. They have more leisure time now than they did in the 1960s, even though more of them work in the marketplace.”
I quickly scanned through the previous frantic week. A yoga class. Pizza movie night with the kids. A family birthday party … Maybe seven hours, I figured, tops.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t have 30 hours of leisure.”
“Yes, you do,” Robinsons maintained. “Come and do a time study with me and I’ll show you where your leisure is.”
And that is how this whole journey began.
I did the time study. He found 27 hours of what he called leisure, and I called bits and scraps of crappy time - 15 minutes here, 10 minutes there, every time I exercised, or was flattened in bed, listening to NPR trying to get OUT of bed. All of that Robinson labelled leisure.
So I went on a journey to find out why my time felt shredded into what I came to call time confetti, and to look for that blissful sounding state that time-use researchers call time serenity.
Along the way, inspired by my friend, Larry, I asked two questions: Why are things the way they are? How can they be better?
The book is a report of what I found.
