You’re busy. You’re very busy. You’re overbooked, overstressed, overburdened. You’re on a schedule that increasingly represent the baseline tempo of American life – a harried, Lucy Ricardo-in-the-candy-factory level of frenetic activity that’s impossible for anyone to sustain except in a state of mental and physical overload.
A series of recent studies purports to show exactly how bad it is: wage earners log an extra month on the job compared to 20 years ago (Harvard); half of all people would willingly receive less pay for more free time; working mothers juggle seven things at once, while men only juggle three.
Not everyone is convinced Americans are all THAT overloaded. Time expert Harry Balzer contends people just like to complain they’re overworked. His studies show people actually are working less and relaxing more. “The biggest difference is we THINK we’re working more and spending less time on leisure acclivities. But we’re not,” says Balzer, who works for the NPD Group, a consumer marketing research firm in Rosemont, Ill. “There’s only 24 hours to the day, and that hasn’t changed,” he says, though he notes that “once you reach working age, there are more things you HAVE to do that crowd out the things you WANT to do.” [used 8/25/96 ?]
One way the workload has increased: Men are spending more time cleaning the house – somehow without easing women’s load of chores. Apparently, says Balzer, “women have to clean up after men get done ‘cleaning up.’”
Free time
Another set of studies comparing the way Americans spend their time now to the way they spent it 30 years ago shows that, on average, people today have one more free hour a day. “The irony is that people say they have no time and then watch three to four hours of TV a day,” says Geoffrey Godbey, a Pennsylvania State University expert on leisure time. In other words, rushing home and putting dinner in the microwave while flipping the channel to “Friends” is not really an example of a frenetic lifestyle. [used 8/25/96]
Overload may in fact have as much to do with too many choices as with too little time. “We’re responding to the much richer set of challenges and options that are present now,” says Csikszentmihalyi. “We tend the think we have to read all the papers, watch all the news, take the kids to their games and fill up every moment. That’s not something you have to do. The mix of stimuli we’re exposed to is much broader and more insistent than before. If you let that run your life, you’re surely going to feel more pressed.” A more expensive lifestyle adds to our stress and anxiety by requiring long work hours to pay mortgages, etc.
Clutter
So does clutter, which is the most universally bemoaned side effect of modern life. Pam Young, a professional clutter-buster based in Vancouver, Wash., says, “If everywhere you look there’s a pile you have to sort through, it’s like having a red light go off in your head.” She has seen couples break up over conflicts about clutter. She has seen upstairs bedrooms stuffed as tight as rented storage units. “Think how you feel in a hotel room furnished only in the things you need, without any excess. You feel wonderfully stream-lined.”
How fast does clutter build? Young says the average person can clear out at least one large grocery sack of clutter weekly, in addition to what would normally be thrown out as garbage and recyclables. “If you haven’t removed any clutter from your house in a year, you’ve accumulated at least 52 grocery sacks per person.”
Many people have the mistaken notion that clutter overload is the result of too little storage space. Not true. Anyone who’s ever packed a suitcase knows that no matter how big the bag, you always end up struggling to close it. One unexpected benefit of living in a smaller house is that there’s less temptation to fill it with things you don’t need.
Information overload
Our problem is not seeking out information, but screening it out. Richard Saul Wurman says, “Pitch anything that doesn’t genuinely strike your interest. To wade through data you’re not interested in is a waste of time, because you aren’t going to remember it.”