Customer Reviews

Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time

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I have been preparing lectures on stress management and came upon the work of the authors' Use of Time Project which has tracked Americans expenditures of time over decades. This book has caused me to re-think all of my assumptions, and fits in beautifully with some of the brand new books coming out in the wellness field, including Dean Ornish's Love and Survival: The Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy and Paul Pearsall's The Pleasure Prescription: To Love, To Work and To Play. Time for Life shows, in methodical yet eloquent thoroughness, that the sense of hurry sickness and time famine is illusory and unnecessary: we in fact have ENOUGH time and money to be happy, yet we think we do not. The final chapter is worth the price of the book: called Brother, can you spare some time? it points out that the pace of life is a political issue, and that the commercialization of leisure can be critiqued and questioned, that while most of us lead lives of unbelievable privilege, happiness eludes us. This does not have to be the case. This is a scholarly book, yet accessible to the lay reader, particularly if you skip around some. The cross cultural stuff is fascinating (eg., Japanese people work longer hours yet don't feel the time famine like Americans do.) It is well worth the careful reading this important topic warrants. I am indebted to Mr. Robinson and Godbey for this expression of their life's work. I am deeply grateful, in fact.

And it's not a pretty picture overall, but we didn't expect it to be, did we? We all seem to feel the pressures of not enough time, of "to-do" lists that never shrink, and of work-time creeping into our personal-time.

The book is best when laying out the data and the results of the time-diary studies measuring what folks really do spend their time on, as they spend it, rather than in retrospect. Some of the conclusions are not obvious, and are that much more interesting for it.

The solutions presented though are simplistic and often slip into pop psychology babble, in my opinion. But that isn't the point of the book, the "how we spend time" is. Moving on from there is for each of us individually and (probably) some other book.

Oh yeah, and remove the TV from your house. You don't need it. And you won't miss it as much as you think.