T I M E M A N A G E M E N T
Reports of the “Death of Work” Premature
In an article in a 1959 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, highly
regarded historian and social commentator Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
warned Americans of “the onrush of a new age of leisure.” Warned?
In 1967 noted sociologists came before a U.S. Senate subcommit-
tee on labor to predict with great confidence that Americans would
soon be enjoying a twenty-two-hour work week or a twenty-two-
week work year. Many of us would be retiring at thirty-eight, these
experts said, and the big challenge, as Schlesinger indicated eight
years earlier, would be in handling all that free time.
These prognostications remind me of the executive at Decca
Records who turned down the chance to sign a garage rock band
from England because “guitar music is on the way out.”
The band was The Beatles, and they did okay with three gui-
tars and a set of drums. The only one on the way out was the
Decca exec.
How could the “experts” have been so wrong? What happened?
Why didn’t our marvelous technology usher in the Age of Leisure?
We took the money. We opted for a higher material standard of
living instead of time off.
You don’t remember making that choice? Perhaps it was never
offered to you, at least not in those terms. But by and large most of
us decided to work more rather than less, and more of us went to
work, so that instead of the Age of Leisure we created the Age of
Anxiety and the norm of the two-income household.
Women, in particular, got caught in the time crunch. You were
supposed to be able to have it all, a thriving family and a success-
ful career. But too many superwomen came home from a hard day
at the office only to find all the housework waiting for them. They
wound up working, in essence, a double shift, all day, every day.
And single mothers never had a choice. If they didn’t do it, it didn’t
get done.
Whether or not we made the choice consciously, there was
plenty of pressure on us to choose the money. And it paid off; our