More leisure time?

I saw this story on Craig’s site, and it intrigued me. We’re all constantly hearing about how Americans work more and give up vacation time. So when someone comes out with a study that seems to indicate the opposite, it warrants some attention.

So I decided to read the study, all sixty-some pages of it (PDF link). Well, ok, I skimmed through quite a bit of it. I really just wanted to get more of a jist of what exactly they determined as leisure. It turns out, I’m not really as surprised as I thought I’d be.

The report describes trends I’ve observed myself. It says men work less than they used to. True. My father still works 60 hour weeks, while my job is generally in the 40-45 hour range. It says that women (both employed and non) spend less time on cooking, cleaning, and housework. I don’t think Amanda would disagree with that. We skip over a lot of the household chores that our mothers regularly do, like completely stripping down a room to clean it or changing curtains four times a year. Hell, we don’t even have one set of curtains for some of our windows, much less four.

But what I think the report fails to capture is the increased intermix of work and play. Technology for better and worse has made it harder to disconnect completely from work when you leave the office. Anywhere I can find an internet connection is an office away from office. When I had knee surgery a couple years ago and was out of the office for a month, the only day I didn’t actually work was the day of the surgery itself. Now that can be seen as a benefit as well. I have the flexibility of being able to work from home on occasion if I’m expecting a repairperson or delivery.

The survey’s results seem contrary to a salary.com poll that indicates that 39% of workers would forgo a $5000 raise for more time off. And is it because we have so much more leisure time that 53% of respondents to a monster.com poll say they don’t use all their given vacation time from their job? Well, that wasn’t one of the choices, but if it was I doubt people would have picked it.

So, we’re spending less time doing mundane chores, but people still feel overworked. Why? My guess is that it’s the combination of the increase of intermixed time and the decrease of the quality of “leisure time”. I know I often feel stressed when I’m running late to get to a leisure activity. That decreases the overall quality of the activity itself. It’s easy to plop down in front of the TV for an hour or two between tasks. I don’t think anyone would say that five days with 2-hour blocks of TV watching has the same mental benefit as taking a day off work. Like too many studies, the real truth lies in reading between the lines, not by looking at the numbers.

With more people multitasking these days, often doing work and what the study counts as leisure at the same time, studies like this are going to become harder to conduct and difficult to come to useful conclusions. But the conclusion I’ve come to is that freeing us from mundane tasks doesn’t necessarily make us happier or better people. It takes work to do that.