i'm not time poor, you're time poor!

defensiveness. that's a good way to start one of these...

one my uber-nerdy hobbies is looking at charts (or making my own like i did today thanks to Claude Code - which is magic, btw). specifically, macro-economic trend charts. i'm interested in the decades-long story, not the recent trends. recent trends are helpful too, but i am interested in where we've been and where we're going, and i genuinely want to know if things are getting better or worse.

the chart i asked Claude Code to make this week (i asked for two actually, see below) was looking at the average annual hours worked between 1950 and 2025, looking at OECD countries and the United States.

Average annual hours worked from 1950 to 2025

the story didn't shock me, it's the one i've heard for the past 20 years during my undergrad and MBA - we were working less, and we have more leisure time then any generation in the past 75 years. the United States annual working hours dropped from 2,000 to 1,800 from 1950 to 2025 - that's an extra 5 weeks of free time every year! but what it really translates into is less weekends working and less late nights in the office then our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.

to get it out of the way - yes, a switch from farming and manufacturing to white collar jobs means less hours needed. yes, technology has made us more efficient even if it doesn't feel that way - excel is way better for accounting then the 3x5 cards, notebooks, and the hand crank calculators my grandfather used. and yes, white collar worker trends look different then blue collar workers, especially in tech hubs like silicon valley where i live.

but today i don't want to talk about why this number changed or pick apart the data (another nerdy hobby i have) - i want to talk about where the time went. and why i still feel time poor! and i'm not alone - Gallup found that 41% of Americans say they don't have enough time to do what they want. we work fewer hours than in 1950, but nearly half of us still feel time poor.

time poor is a great term i recently heard describing that angst i feel about how busy my schedule is - how much pressure i feel to "go" - how i often can't see an end in sight. so where the heck is my time going?

if you're a parent, you're spending more time parenting. specifically, if you're a dad like me, you're spending three times as much time with your kids as a dad in the 1960's. and you're spending twice as much time on housework. those are great changes; however, what's less great is what we did with that extra time. since 1981, kids' free time has dropped about seven and a half hours a week — and those hours went straight into travel soccer, Mandarin lessons, and robotics club. economists have studied this. they named it "the Rug Rat Race." that's a real academic paper. yep.

and then, there's social media... when i first started to use myspace and AOL instant messenger, i don't think it was possible to spend hours on there every day (though i tried - how many myspace redesigns does one man need to complete?). Fifteen years back, there was a theoretical end to the internet. now there are over 300 million content creators (45 million in the US), and we're spending over 2 hours a day on social media. some of that was a shift from time on other screens like TV (have you seen the new season of Reacher? oh my gosh, so good! and Ted Lasso is back!), but it is largely this newly found "free time" from work that is going towards social media.

and that brings us to our second chart - US employee productivity.

the stat: an hour of American work produces 4.6 times what it did in 1950. 4.6!! that means if your grandma could make 100 open-faced club sandwiches in an hour, you can make 460 open-faced club sandwiches in an hour! mmmmhhmmm....open faced club sandwich...

an hour of American work now produces 4.6 times what it did in 1950

so let me get this straight - we are nearly 5 times more productive at work, that is somehow only saving us 10% annual working hours, and almost half of us still feel time poor? this feels like a bum deal...

man....what did we get wrong...and what are our kids learning from watching us...

i want to figure this out, and see if how i spend my time needs some rebalancing (spoiler alert: of course it does. and yours does too). my idea for the week: take all your calendars -- work, personal, shared -- and download them. then, for this week, write down all your activities that weren't in your calendar in blocks of 30 minutes - commute time, getting ready in the morning, eating meals, watching tv, playing Royal Match, reading Dungeon Crawler Carl. pump all that into Claude and ask it - how do I spend my time? and based on my values, where am i wasting my time? or if you aren't cynical like me, where do i have opportunity to re-align my time to my values?

next week i'll share my results. fascinating to say the least...

this post edited with assistance from: n38 degree red blend