• Where has all the time gone?

    Posted on June 11th, 2008 by and currently 6 commenting.

    We just finished a project for one of our clients who wanted to connect with moms. We traveled and talked to moms in various cities about the reality of their lives. It’s no surprise that moms today are time-crunched and trying to do about 50 things at once. For example, in the 60s and 70s, the average time to make dinner was 2 to 3 hours. Today it is 30 minutes.

    In one of our team meetings, someone asked a very simple question: “Why is it so different today? My mom worked when I was growing up. But she was still able to cook every night. What’s changed?”.

    Stop and think about that. Because the answer isn’t really that obvious. It’s true. There were a lot of working moms when my generation was young. And sure they were also juggling 50 things. But there does seem to be an element of truth in the fact that there WAS more time back then.

    Is it the fact that kids are (arguably over) scheduled today? That the days of coming home and getting on your bike and riding all over the neighborhood and playing in the woods unsupervised are over. Now mom has to spend time supervising kids when she didn’t have to before. Is it the homework? Moms told me that their kids are coming home with 1-3 hours of homework a night! WHAT! Are you kidding? These are 7 year olds. They just sat through 8 hours of school. Give me a break (I am now on a no-homework mission for my kids).

    Is it the myriad of ‘convenient’ options now available? My grandmother also worked and still found time to come home and make spaghetti sauce from scratch. Because she had to. There wasn’t any Ragu. Now she just buys it in a jar. Microwave meals. Frozen dinners. You name it. The interesting thing is that all these extra conveniences haven’t created any FREE time, have they?

    So where has all the time gone?

    Greg Cordell, our Chief Inspiration Officer, had an answer. Cell phones. When I thought about that, it actually made a lot of sense. Not just cell phones. But email, text messages, free long distance, and any other feature/technology/service that, in the interest of convenience, had made, my life at least, more inconvenient. I thought about how many times at 5:00 I’m answering just one more email, or checking that message that just came through on my phone, or checking my personal email (which at this point has 700 unanswered messages – no time to respond).

    In the interest of convenience, we’ve increased access to ourselves. The opportunity to disrupt, not support, what we’re doing. It reminds me what my grad school advisor used to tell me – that when computers came out everybody said ‘great, it’s going to save all this paper’. But really it’s just made it easier for us to use MORE paper!

    Now I know it’s not all bad. And there are good things about being hyper-connected. But I for one covet that free time and long to find a way to get it back. I won’t be one of the ‘masses’ lining up for the new iPhone. I’ve managed to avoid a crackberry for this long… I suppose I can wait a little longer for internet at my fingertips.

  • Anonymous

    As a mom of one (and soon to be two!), I can definitely tell you I feel pressed for time, all the time. I did succumb to the Crackberry, which has had its good and bad points. On the one hand, I can check e-mail while sitting in the doctors’ offices, or waiting to pick my son up from school. On the other, I feel like I’m always ‘on.’ And since I work from home – great for having a more flexible mom schedule, I feel like I never leave the office. There’s a lot of pressure out there to be Super Mom and do it all. I have to remember to try and do the best I can, spend as much time with my kids as I can and the rest will come. Not always an easy task, though.

  • http://lgbusinesssolutions.typepad.com/solutions_to_grow_your_bu/ Lewis Green

    Justine,

    Not only has technology made Mom’s lives harder and created less time, I believe that our decision to make technology a part of our lives 24/7 has created more stress while not necessarily making us better at what we do.

    In my own life, I started as a daily writer at a large newspaper. My only technology was a IBM Selectric typewriter and there was no cable news. Not only did I have enough time to research, write and proof my stories, an editor had the time to carefully edit them. Today, modern journalists have little time for research or fact checking, as they are tied to ever-increasing deadlines and have to deal with cell phones, e-mail and a myriad of distractions because of the technology they are tied to.

    The same can be said for my life as an entrepreneur, marketer, author and communicator. Technology has shrunk my creative time and not made my life either easier or better. Here’s the weird side: I wouldn’t trade my PC for a 1000 IBM Selectrics.

  • http://www.twitter.com/getdonovan Jay Donovan

    Hyper-connectivity. The promise and the problem. I am not as good at it as my younger in-laws, who are multi-tasking machines. My job requires me to “fake it” though. Some how I manage and in that time, I have found as many positives as I can, despite thinking deep down that… yes, we humans definitely were not designed to work this way. We’re supposed to pick berries and kill antelope with sticks, right?

    Unfortunately, I am betting that Hyper-connectivity, as a trend, is here to stay. Youth grow up accustomed and essentially dependent on the technology that surrounds them. I think in many ways, insulation from the trends that existed before a certain generation, help protect it from the possible negatives of their own current “technecesity”. They just don’t know any better and they find out about previous trends, after that fact— maybe admiring the previous era and explaining the retro trends (surfacing from 20 years earlier) that seem to follow every generation.

    My dad is an elementary school Principal, and he told me that there were kids in his school that didn’t even know cars ever existed sans remote door locking systems. They have no memory of life before microwave ovens. They would probably hate not having microwave ovens.

    Maybe the real problem is WHERE you fall on the timeline and at what time you realize there is actually a timeline at all. For adult mothers and/or fathers that maybe spanning that chasm, possessing knowledge about their own generation and the ones that came before and after it (their parents/their kids) the perception is the key to finding out where that missing time is going.

    For those swimming against the current (myself included), the problem is time. Maybe when the millenials of today reach adulthood the problem will be need for even more stimulation.

    Like I said initially, deep down I am not sure that humans were designed to consume and use so much information with such speed… but on a regular basis, humanity astounds me with new abilities to be cruel and kind, desperate and fulfilled, creative beyond explanation and in general, reach new levels that were never before thought possible.

    My bet is that the long term view will reveal how humans develop as consumers of more and more information. Our progress will not be visible from inside the trenches or at the level of a couple of generations. Because of that, the brands that solve “perception” dilemmas for these cusp consumers, will be valuable. I may not be saying anything new here.

  • http://www.mergeweb.com Adam Landrum

    I think Steven Covey (or actually, it’s his partner Hyrum Smith) said: “The phone is just a tool. We can actually decide when to use it and when NOT to use it” (I paraphrase).

    Most people assume that if the phone rings that it must be answered. Same can go for email, text messages, cell phones, etc. I’ve recently had to ask our employees not to answer personal cell calls during business meetings!

    Keeping up with blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media is a major time-suck. But I’m choosing to do it. Who’s fault is that?

    I guess until we decide to prioritize what’s more important–and not put technology before our kids, family and friends–we’ll be asking the question: “Where has all the time gone?”

    We have the same amount of time in a day that we’ve always had. We’re just choosing to use it differently, and we find that we have “less time” for the more important things in life.

    And that’s sad.

    But it’s not technology’s fault. It’s how I choose to use it–or how I choose not to use it…

  • http://logiclane.wordpress.com Brand Logician

    I am with Adam. It is up to us to decide how to use our time. In the same way that “guns don’t kill people” technology is not the to blame for our lack of time. It is simply our unwillingness to chose when to be ‘on’ and ‘off’. We need to be more willing to say ‘no’ to things that are fun but not enriching (to ours or our family’s lives).

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