As an enthusiastic supporter of Patricia Vaccarino’s efforts to make PR accessible to ordinary people, I’m delighted to be a contributor to The Connector. I hope to add to the continued conversation some thoughts about the problem of overwork and time poverty in America and how we might better achieve work-life balance.
In a sense, I have been an entrepreneur my entire life, both as an independent documentary filmmaker and author, and as the co-founder and leader of Take Back Your Time, a nonprofit organization. I have chosen that path because I wanted to make my own decisions, follow my own calling, and make a difference with my life rather than a killing.
Two decades ago, while I was working as a free-lance producer with KCTS, Seattle’s public television station, it first dawned on me how different America’s ideas and policies regarding work-time and leisure were in relation to the rest of the world.
In the early 1990s, scholars were beginning to understand that Americans were working longer hours each year than they had been in the 1960s. Juliet Schor’s "The Overworked American" and a cover article, “The Rat Race,” in TIME magazine, both warned that the trend was not a healthy one. And I was noticing that when I’d ask my Seattle friends how they were doing, they didn’t say, “Fine,” anymore; they said, “Busy.” And their appointment calendars were always full; we had to look six weeks ahead to plan lunch.
I knew it wasn’t supposed to be that way. Indeed, as a sociology student at the University of Wisconsin in 1968, I’d been told that a big problem that would face our country at the end of the 20th century would be “too much” leisure time. With automation and “cybernation,” we’d be so productive, we’d only be working 20 hours a week (if that) and we’d have seven weeks of vacation a year (or more). We’d have so much leisure, we wouldn’t know what to do with it.
I thought it was a problem I could deal with.
What happened? We got the technology, but not the time. We’re more than twice as productive as we were back then. But a couple of things had happened. We’d traded all of our productivity for more stuff instead of more time, and we’d also allowed the top tier of earners to grab almost all
Toward More Balanced Lives
By John de Graaf