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The Book of Times: From Seconds to Centuries, a Compendium of Measures
The Book of Times: From Seconds to Centuries, a Compendium of Measures
The Book of Times: From Seconds to Centuries, a Compendium of Measures
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The Book of Times: From Seconds to Centuries, a Compendium of Measures

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An endlessly fascinating, beautifully designed survey of time—how long things take, how long things last, and how we spend our days

Our relationship to time is complex and paradoxical: Time stands still. Time also flies. Tomorrow is another day. Yet there's no time like the present. We want to do more in less time, but wish we could slow the clock. And despite all our time-saving devices—iPhones, DVRs, high-speed trains—Americans feel that they have less leisure time than ever.

In an era when our time feels fractured and imperiled, The Book of Times encourages readers to ponder time used and time spent. How long does it take to find a new mate, digest a hamburger, or compose a symphony? How much time do we spend daydreaming, texting, and getting ready for work? The book challenges our beliefs and urges us to consider how, and why, some things get faster, some things slow down, and some things never change (the need for seven to eight hours of sleep).

Packed with compelling charts, lists, and quizzes, as well as new and intriguing research, The Book of Times is an addictive, browsable, and provocative look at the idea of time from every direction.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 12, 2013
ISBN9780062074195
The Book of Times: From Seconds to Centuries, a Compendium of Measures

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Rating: 3.2083333541666668 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Mildly entertaining collection of miscellany around time, uses of, wastes of, blah blah blah. Not really worth the (however much) you'd spend at a bookstore. It felt to me like something I've stumbled across on the internet countless times in the past, but bundled into paper form and bound with a cheap cover. Since I got this free from the LT ER group, I can't/won't complain. It was, as I said, mildly interesting. -KA
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I was very disappointed with this book. I love trivia and lists, but the individual entries aren't very interesting on their own, and the larger sections aren't cohesive enough to be worth reading as a group.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    As one might expect, this is a collection of assorted factoids about time - more specifically, how people spend their time. It's not nearly as interesting as I'd hoped. For one thing, almost all the data is from surveys, and many of those are from internet surveys, and we all know how accurate those are. The results are often contradictory as well: for example, on one page we learn that smoking takes nine years off your life, but just two pages later we learn it's only four. This general lack of continuity isn't helped any by the large number of typos, some quite prominent. How long do rock banks last? I didn't understand until I read the list and realized it was supposed to be rock bands. In short, unless you are desperate for a book of trivia about how people may or may not actually spend their time, I'd suggest giving this one a miss.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I have spent my working life dealing with time and its measurement. Scheduling buses is perhaps more complicated than it seems on the surface. One has to deal with how much running time to give a bus by time of day, one needs to konw how many people are being carried, as that affects trip length besides customer satisfaction. One has to create 8-houur workdays for the the drivers, perhaps even workweeks that are close to 40 hours. The one must try to keep overtime vs. extra time given to make-up an 8 hour day at a minimum. One must detrmine how earlyor late a bus route runs, if it is not going to operate 24 hours. One must try to work in express or limited stop trips, and figure out how much branching of routes you want to do.So, I always like looking at books that deal with time and ones experience with it. Alderman looks at all kinds of expreience with time, like emergency room waits (shortest is in Iowa, longest in Utah); how long food may last (I couldn't find yoghurt, but sour cream can be kept 10-14 days after sell-by date). Looking at travel times, the fastest land trip between Chicago and Milwaukee is by train at 1:29 hours, the longest is 29 hours for walking. The book doesn't mention it, by my Official Railway Guide from 1958 shows trains abe to do this trip in 80 minutes.This is a fun book to look through. There are interactive questions, and you'll be surprsied at some of the answers.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a really interesting book, compiled by someone I suspect has a lot of time on his hands. The factoids are kinda fun and intriguing, quick to go through when you need to fill a few minutes (not a sit and read it through type of book)
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a fun book. It's very like a bag of chocolate covered pretzels - enticing, hard to stop consuming, and best not too many at one sitting.The author is honest from the very beginning about the potential dubiousness of the data, so each bit of information should be taken with appropriate skepticism, but it's thoroughly entertaining. Some of the information made me want to delve deeper into the original research to find out how the studies were designed, others were so consistent with my own experience that I felt vindicated.A great book to carry for waiting in line, or to put in other places you want a little snack of reading.Worth reading more than once in little bits.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Trivia on how long things take. Probably one or two short sections here of mild interest to most trivia buffs. Perhaps best consumed as a "bathroom reader". Book design and layout good use some polishing. Not recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Book of TimesLeslie AldermanI’m an engineer, retired now, but I spent most of my life measuring television signals, baseband NTSC video. A system fairly well centered on relationships of time. So time, both in its measurement and in its use, is of interest to me.I enjoyed the book, but as I have an entire shelf of books of odd facts, or similar, this is not surprising. I started with this genre in about 8th grade, titled something like ‘Useless Information’. I don’t remember how long a line a standard pencil can draw, but it was in there.Many of the charts and facts do have source foot notes, those few I checked were accurate, which means this can be used as a source, or better a directory to primary sources. It would be better if it had an index, but the chapters are not that long, and fairly well separated in topics. So finding something would not be hard.I would fault the book designer, Diahann Sturge on multi-page charts, without column headings on any but the first page. And some of the charts could have been gotten on a single page, but moving side bars. So I give Ms Alderman a four not a five, she should have argued with the editor and the designer a bit harder on at least one of those points.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The author Lesley Alderman has compiled a fascinating set of facts about how we spend our time and other associations that we make on a daily basis concerning the division of time. Although time is real, it is still an eluding concept of which to make sense. It is a shadow that we chase and attempt to bottle up, but never able to fully grasp. However, the author gives some notable insights of how average people view temporal relationships as well as how science measures its passage in daily affairs. The book is a full-course compendium of statistics and other quotable facts, which can be great conversational pieces. In some respects, the book does have numerous trivia, and yet things such as "what is the average hospital stay" can tell much sociologically with respect to the places set in time. Also many references to worker and student productivity are implied in the stats. (Certainly I would hope the U.S. president would log more hours than a municipal worker.) An added feature of the book includes little exercises to calculate the reader's personal use of time, which compels me to hold onto the book for some time.

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The Book of Times - Lesley Alderman

Introduction

My mother was always late. I vividly remember being the last kid picked up from birthday parties and waiting anxiously at airports for her yellow station wagon to appear around the corner. Running late with her was no less stressful. Speeding through traffic in a futile effort to make up for her late start, my father would be fuming behind the wheel, and my mother would be doing some last-minute task like mending the hem on her dress. Those minutes seemed like hours.

Time is subjective. Minutes spent waiting multiply; mundane tasks drag on. I recently timed how long it takes me to empty the dishwasher: 5 minutes. I had predicted it would take 15. Yet, blissful experiences, when we’re in the flow, seem to speed by. As Einstein observed: When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.

My mother liked to fill time to the brim. It made her chronically late, but also incredibly industrious. It wasn’t until I was an adult and met people from other countries and cultures that I realized not everyone operated on the edge of time. Some people think that less is more and allow ample time to get everywhere.

Time is confounding: It stands still. It flies. And it goes in cycles. There is no time like the present but tomorrow is another day. Ever since Einstein, we know that time (along with everything else) is relative. Poets wrestle with it, scientists measure it, and businesspeople try to lasso it into submission. And we all want to be reassured—don’t we?—that we are not wasting the finite hours we have before us.

Americans generally feel time pressed. More than 1 out of 4 working adults say they don’t have enough time to get done what they need to do, which makes them feel less satisfied with their lives and more stressed out. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans who believe that science is making life change too quickly has been rising for the past five years.

The faster life becomes, the more we try to catch up with it. We want smarter phones, higher-performing computers, and faster food. We pride ourselves on multitasking and productivity. But then we flock to yoga and meditation classes, spin records the old-fashioned way, and cook slow food in an attempt to connect with the present moment. It’s a constant struggle between our desire for instant gratification and our need for peace and reflection.

What to Expect?

This is a book about how long things take, how long things last, and how much time we devote to a variety of activities. Why? Because objectively measured time is so surprising. How long does it take to build a bridge, write a symphony, or make a million dollars? What’s the optimal amount of time for making love? What’s the real time? And how are we spending the hours of each day?

The Book of Times is meant to amuse, inform, and provoke—think of it as a quirky collection of facts with a slightly political edge. You may find yourself saying, Wow, who knew? or No way, this can’t be possible! You may feel angered or even annoyed by facts or trends (that’s the political part), and I hope you will find yourself questioning the way in which you spend your precious time each day.

Why a Book on Measured Time?

Perhaps because of my mother’s peculiar attitude toward time, I have always been acutely aware of it. As a child I would write my schedule for the evening on a black chalkboard in my room: 6:00 P.M. homework, 7:00 P.M. call Karen, 7:30 P.M. Gilligan’s Island. You get the idea.

As I got older, I used time in an attempt to make order out of chaos. I timed how long it took me to get to the nearest subway stop, to read a page of a book, and to fold a pile of laundry. I even timed my romances: after three months of dating, if I was not in love, then it was time to move on.

The Book of Times sprang from my personal fascination with measured time and then morphed into something broader—a collection of measurements of all sorts of things, from love affairs to school days, from the time we spend waiting to the time we spend learning. How many things can time measure? How many measures of time can be found? And what can those measures reveal?

Lucky for me, Americans love to gather data. The government measures the time we spend on all sorts of activities, as do polls, surveys, scientific studies, and academic research.

But just like time, data are relative. This book is chock-full of measurements, but not all measurements are created equal and not all measurements will stand the test of time. So I invite you to read on with an open, incisive, and questioning mind. And if you have gripes, suggestions, or corrections, please send me an e-mail: Lesley.Alderman@gmail.com.

Helpful Hints

The Book of Times is laid out in twelve chapters, like the twelve hours on the clock. Each chapter covers a single subject—love, family, energy, and so on—and contains dozens of timings. You’ll also find suggestions on how to become more mindful of time through Time Exercises, quotes from great thinkers, and quizzes.

Before you begin reading, here’s a quick refresher on some basic statistical terms and strategies that appear throughout the book. (If you have a math mind, skip ahead.)

When statisticians want to find the center of a set of data (commonly known as the average), they may measure the mean, median, or mode—and sometimes all three.

•  Mean is interchangeable with the term average. To find the mean or the average of a data set, researchers tally up all the data and then divide by the total number of data points.

•  Median is the middle value of a list of numbers that are in a sequential order. Mean scores can be affected by outlier numbers at the edge of the data set, so when there is a set of numbers with extreme values, it’s often better to use the median to find the center of the set.

•  The mode is the value that occurs most often.

When researchers measure how people spend their time, they employ a few different strategies to get precise data. Let’s say statisticians want to find out how much time Americans spend reading books: they could tally up the minutes every American admits to reading each day and provide a straight average, or they could tally up just the subset of Americans who actually read each day. The first average would include readers and nonreaders and be on the low side, while the second average would include just readers and provide a higher number. See the difference?

Statistics are tricky, and researchers often present the data in a light that supports their specific agenda or point of view. When I use data that might be skewed—say by the size of the sample, the date, or the authors’ point of view—I’ll say so. We are all mediators, translators, wrote the philosopher Jacques Derrida.¹ I’ve tried to get past perceptions and represent the best reality possible. Here, then, is my particular and carefully curated collection of timings.

Daily Life

Schedules, Happiest Times & Waiting

How we spend our days, is, of course, how we spend our lives, the writer Annie Dillard observed. Broadly speaking, a day in the life of a typical American looks something like this: one-third spent sleeping, one-third spent working, and the remaining one-third spent on doing chores, making meals, eating meals, caring for kids and parents and pets, watching TV (a lot), socializing, and shopping. How people choose to spend those 8 hours of discretionary time varies tremendously depending on their age, gender, marital status, and more. The good news: leisure time has increased over the past four decades. The bad news: Americans don’t feel like it has.

As you read this chapter, consider this: Is the way in which you spend your time the way you actually want to spend your time?

Time Spent . . . The Big Picture

Let’s start with a look at how adult Americans spend their days. The following table shows the number of hours that people who actually participate in a specific activity spend doing the activity. The category Volunteering, for example, only includes those people who do volunteer work, which makes the numbers more robust than a straight average of everyone in the population.

The numbers, collected by the government’s American Time Use Survey¹, reflect time spent on one activity exclusively. If you are watching TV and texting your friends, the time gets allocated to watching TV and not to e-mail as well. This way of collecting data is not very twenty-first century!

Leisure Time

How much do we really have?

How many minutes do Americans have that are free of chores, work, and other responsibilities, such as child care? Not enough! is the resounding response of most Americans. And yet one notable study published in 2006 by economists Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst concluded that leisure time has increased by 6 to 8 hours a week for men, and 4 to 8 hours for women over the past five decades.² Why the increase? The authors found that men now put in fewer hours of paid work, and women spend less time on housework.

Ironically, over approximately that same five-decade time span, satisfaction with leisure time fell. In 1963, 76 percent of Americans were satisfied with the amount of leisure time they had; in 2010, just 65 percent were, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll.³ Why such dissatisfaction? While we might have more hours of leisure, we have less hours of pure leisure—that is time spent doing one enjoyable activity without interruptions (such as text messages) or an added activity (like watching your child). What’s more our leisure time is more fragmented, which makes it feel less satisfying.⁴

Favorite leisure activities

Americans’ favorite pastimes are watching TV, spending time with the family and kids, and exercise (in that order), according to a 2008 Harris poll.⁵ If the poll were conducted in 2013, I suspect using the iPad might be on this list.

Not all leisure time is equally pleasurable

Leisure time is the hours left after all obligations are taken care of. You can do something passive, like watch TV, or something active, like take a walk or read a book. Both types of leisure are rewarding, but one may make you happier than the other, according to research conducted at Princeton University. Americans rate active leisure activities (e.g., exercise, bird watching) as more enjoyable than passive ones (e.g., watching TV), and yet they spend more time on passive activities. Let’s face it: it’s simpler to sit down in front of a screen than to lace up your boots and go for a walk. Active leisure may be more rewarding, but passive leisure is more accessible—and after a long day of responsibility, accessibility may trump all else. But over the long term, making the effort to indulge your hobbies or passions may be more satisfying than watching American Idol.

Time Trivia: Which country spends the most time relaxing and doing nothing?

Italy and Spain tie for first place! A survey by the Centre for Time Use Research looked at time usage in 22 countries and found that Italians and Spaniards spend 1 hour and 17 minutes a day relaxing and doing nothing (let’s call it R&DN), followed by Turkey (1 hour, 14 minutes), Slovenia (1 hour, 7 minutes), and the United States (1 hour, 6 minutes). At the other end of the spectrum were the Belgians, who spend 34 minutes a day R&DN, followed by France (39 minutes) and Norway (46 minutes). Before you rush to judgment, bear in mind that socie-ties define leisure differently. For instance, though the French appear to spend relatively little time R&DN, they spend comparatively more time in restaurants. Perhaps the French feel so relaxed during mealtime that they don’t require downtime. And while the Turks take a lot of time to chill, they spend very little time socializing with others outside their homes.

Doing nothing can be a waste of time, or it can be an art form.

—Leo Babauta, creator of the website ZenHabits.net
Who spends the most time watching TV?

Americans love to watch TV, or maybe they don’t love it but they spend a lot of time doing it: about 3 hours a day, on average. (See the Media chapter for more details on Americans’ TV habits.)

Time Exercise 1: Track Your Computer Time

Wondering where your computer time goes? Try RescueTime .com, a free online productivity tool. You tell the site which activities you consider productive and which nonproductive and the program keeps track of how and where you allocate your time. The program will tell you how many hours you work each day, what percentage of those hours are spent in activities you deem productive, and which day of the week is your most prolific. If you upgrade to the fee service, the program will even block distracting sites for specific amounts of time. Of course, you could just watch the clock and police yourself—but what fun is that?

Shopping Time

Is shopping a leisure activity or a chore? The answer depends on who are you and why you shop. Whether you love it or hate it, most Americans clock a lot of time shopping. We spend 1 hour and 40 minutes each month shopping for clothes in stores and slightly more time, 1 hour and 43 minutes, shopping for new duds online, according to Cotton Incorporated’s Lifestyle Monitor Survey.

We also spend a lot of time at the mall. Over the past decade Americans have made the same number of monthly mall visits (3), but spend more time per visit, 89 minutes in 2010 versus 78 in 2000. Overall, shoppers spend nearly 4.5 hours at the mall each month, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers.

Primping Time

How much time do men and women spend getting themselves gussied up for the day ahead? One study compared the grooming habits of American workers and found that, on average, minority women spend 55 minutes a day on grooming, while white women spend just 47 minutes. Minority men spend 37 minutes on preparing themselves for work, while white men spend just 32 minutes, according to the research, which was conducted by two economists at Elon University in North Carolina.⁷ (Sneak preview: In Chapter 10, you’ll learn the answer to this question, How does grooming time relate to weekly earnings?)

Time Trivia: Chewing Time, Chimps vs. Humans

Because humans cook most of their food, they only spend 1 hour a day chewing it (lucky us). Chimpanzees, on the other hand, eat raw food from the wild and thus spend about 6 hours a day chewing, according to Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

Women’s Time

Here are some quirky findings about how women spend their time. You’ll find more serious (and less sexist) findings in Chapters 3 and 6.

How much time do women spend getting ready for work during the week?

According to a British survey, women in the United Kingdom devote, on average, 1 hour and 16 minutes to primping and dressing on Monday, and a mere 19 minutes on Friday. Women in the United Kingdom might be different from women in the United States, but the study has a universal ring of truth. On Monday, women may put effort into their looks to get their week off to a good start, but by Friday, they may be worn out and thinking, Eh, who cares; I’ll just wear jeans.

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