#11: Clobberin' Time

The last two Fridays we talked about time, prioritizing, and aligning the lists of the things we spend the most time on and the things we say are most important to us. The truth is that we live in a society that is just busy. We often become so busy with things that, while not inherently negative, force us to take time away from the things we say we value most. To borrow a phrase from The Thing (of the comic book quartet The Fantastic 4), these unnecessary activities are all too often "clobberin' time" in our daily lives—they are destroying our time and our supposed priorities using the mechanism of what I call "activity gluttony." To help illustrate this point, here are some interesting quotes and statistics on the topics of time and priorities.

First of all, think about the amount of time you spend each day in real, positive interaction with your children (particularly teenagers). Now consider this quote from adolescent development expert Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University and former President of the Society for Research on Adolescence:

"The average adolescent spends more than seven hours each day using one or more media, and this includes time spent using different media simultaneously ([i.e.,] one hour watching TV while surfing the Internet would be recorded as only one hour of media use) ... Half of all adolescents live in what might be called a 'constant television environment,' in which the television remains on throughout the day, regardless of whether anyone is watching it" (Steinberg, Adolescence, p. 253).

If, for example, you are allowing your kids to spend 7 hours a day with the media and X amount of time interacting with you (probably much less than 7 hours), what are you teaching them about your priorities when it comes to them?

Now consider the following case example given by Laura Berk, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Illinois State University:

"THE 'TIME BIND.' Like many parents, Angela ... complains of being 'torn in too many directions.' Often she leaves work in a hurry in the late afternoon to pick up [her children] Victor and Janine from child care, dashes to Victor's tumbling class and Janine's piano lesson, then stops at the grocery store to pick up something for dinner. When Angela and her husband, Tom, walk through their front door, they typically head to the phone or fax machine to take care of some unfinished work while trying to quell Victor and Janine's hunger and irritability with a frozen dinner popped into the microwave and unlimited access to the TV set. Caught in a ceaseless sprint to reconcile job, marriage, and parenting, Angela and Tom feel drained at the end of the day—too tired to grant their children more than 10 to 15 minutes of focused time" (Berk, Awakening Children's Minds, p. 6).

Does this sound something like your life, or can you at least see some similarities between this family and your own? Linda and Richard Eyre, New York Times bestselling authors of numerous books on parenting, have written the following:

"Most of us think we have our priorities straight and that our hearts are in the right place ... [N]early 90 percent of us say that commitments to family are 'very important,' and 82 percent say they admire someone who puts family ahead of work (while only 16 percent admire someone who will do whatever it takes to get a promotion at work). On the open-ended question 'What matters most?,' 63 percent of Americans say family--far ahead of health or finances, which come in second and third with 19 percent and 18 percent, respectively. And by a 63 percent to 29 percent margin, Americans believe that life with children is richer than life without them.

But compare the claims we make with how we actually live. Parents spend less time with children and more time with work than ever before ... Why is this? Could one credible explanation be as simple as the principle of dilution? When we try to do too much—to spread ourselves over so many activities, ambitions, interests, and demands—we dilute and divide ourselves, leaving lower concentrations of ourselves for each thing, including the most important thing, our families ... [T]he twenty-four hours in a day have not increased, while the number of things we try to stuff into them has—dramatically" (Eyre & Eyre, The Happy Family, p. 37).

In light of these statements, let us all do a better job of putting first things first. My hope is that we will not allow ourselves to get so caught up in activity gluttony (even if the activities we are involved in may not be evil in and of themselves) that we have no time left for the activities we really need to do. May we all spend more time not just on good things, but on the things we know in our hearts are the most important.