To an American, time is truly money. It is a precious commodity. Time flows fast, like a mountain river in the spring, and if you want to benefit from its passing, you have to move fast with it. We are people of action and we cannot bear to be idle. The past is over, but the present you can seize, parcel and package and make it work for you.
There is 168 hours in a week and the average person will spend almost a third of their life sleeping – 56 hours... What interesting is that this percentage (a third) hasn't changed much over the centuries.
What has changed is what we do with the remaining time: 150 years ago, we spent about 70 hours a week working.
But thanks to inventiveness, ingenuity and productivity enhancements, we have made over the past 150 years, the average workweek has dropped by about 30 hours.
This remarkable drop in working hours has freed up a lot of extra time: 56 hours a week go to sleeping, 40 hours towards a job, which leaves about 72 hours for everything else.
So what do we do with all the extra hours our advancement and efficiency have given us?
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, on an average day, nearly everyone ages 15 and over (96 percent) engaged in some sort of leisure activity such as watching TV, socializing, or exercising. Of those who engaged in leisure activities, men spent more time in these activities (5.8 hours a day ) than did women (5.1 hours).
But get this, according to the same report the average person spends about 3 hours a day watching TV, or 21 hours a week.
So if you want to summarize the net result of progress over the past 150 years, you can think about it this way: We figured out how to save ourselves about 30 hours of work a week, and then we use most of that to watch TV. [2]
What about all that other time, that’s about 50 hours? We spend that time, waking up (gotta have that coffee), getting ready for work, coming home from work, preparing a meal, eating it and then clean up (or going to dinner, then eating and travel back), driving the kids around to their activities. Plus, along with all that “other stuff,” a lot of our time is also spent on planning and preparing important things in our lives. The more important the event the more time we spend preparing for it.
Benjamin Franklin said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” So we prepare for things…
What about those folks that don’t have job – yet? They are preparing for when they do. Years are spent preparing for high school and then college graduation; which entails, hours of homework, hours of class, getting up early, talking to teachers, writing papers, doing math problems, extra-curricular activities, etc…
Then we prepare to be on our own and when are on our own:
Alan Armstrong said this: “Champions do not become champions when they win the event, but in the hours, weeks, months and years they spend preparing for it…”
All these life preparations are important but none of them are as important as preparing for one thing... Yet, how much TIME do we spend PREPARING, let alone contemplating, for when our time here is finished - what happens next???
[1] CDC Life Expectancy, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/life-expectancy.htm
[2] American Time Use Survey Summary, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm
There is 168 hours in a week and the average person will spend almost a third of their life sleeping – 56 hours... What interesting is that this percentage (a third) hasn't changed much over the centuries.
What has changed is what we do with the remaining time: 150 years ago, we spent about 70 hours a week working.
But thanks to inventiveness, ingenuity and productivity enhancements, we have made over the past 150 years, the average workweek has dropped by about 30 hours.
This remarkable drop in working hours has freed up a lot of extra time: 56 hours a week go to sleeping, 40 hours towards a job, which leaves about 72 hours for everything else.
So what do we do with all the extra hours our advancement and efficiency have given us?
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, on an average day, nearly everyone ages 15 and over (96 percent) engaged in some sort of leisure activity such as watching TV, socializing, or exercising. Of those who engaged in leisure activities, men spent more time in these activities (5.8 hours a day ) than did women (5.1 hours).
But get this, according to the same report the average person spends about 3 hours a day watching TV, or 21 hours a week.
So if you want to summarize the net result of progress over the past 150 years, you can think about it this way: We figured out how to save ourselves about 30 hours of work a week, and then we use most of that to watch TV. [2]
What about all that other time, that’s about 50 hours? We spend that time, waking up (gotta have that coffee), getting ready for work, coming home from work, preparing a meal, eating it and then clean up (or going to dinner, then eating and travel back), driving the kids around to their activities. Plus, along with all that “other stuff,” a lot of our time is also spent on planning and preparing important things in our lives. The more important the event the more time we spend preparing for it.
Benjamin Franklin said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” So we prepare for things…
What about those folks that don’t have job – yet? They are preparing for when they do. Years are spent preparing for high school and then college graduation; which entails, hours of homework, hours of class, getting up early, talking to teachers, writing papers, doing math problems, extra-curricular activities, etc…
Then we prepare to be on our own and when are on our own:
- And we prepare months and months for weddings
- We prepare months for the arrival of our first child
- We prepare for retirement
Alan Armstrong said this: “Champions do not become champions when they win the event, but in the hours, weeks, months and years they spend preparing for it…”
All these life preparations are important but none of them are as important as preparing for one thing... Yet, how much TIME do we spend PREPARING, let alone contemplating, for when our time here is finished - what happens next???
[1] CDC Life Expectancy, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/life-expectancy.htm
[2] American Time Use Survey Summary, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm
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