1. Slow down, I want to get off!
Have you ever been irritated because your train left ten minutes late? Or because there was a queue at the supermarket till? Or because people in front of you were dawdling or driving slowly? Or even because someone took their time to get to the point? Then according to cardiologist Meyer Friedman (1999) you suffer from ‘hurry sickness’. The funny thing about hurry sickness is that sufferers often think they’re okay while those who are immune are portrayed as being sick.
- Do you regularly work thirty minutes a day longer than your contracted hours?
- Do you check work emails and phone messages at home?
- Has anyone ever said to you: ‘I didn’t want to trouble you because I know how busy you are’?
- Do your family or friends complain about not getting time with you?
- If tomorrow evening was unexpectedly freed up, would you use it to work or do a household chore?
- Do you often feel tired during the day or do you find your neck and shoulders aching?
- Do you often exceed the speed limit while driving?
- Do you make use of any flexible working arrangements offered by your employers?
- Do you pray with your children regularly?
- Do you have enough time to pray?
- Do you have a hobby in which you are actively involved?
- Do you eat together as a family or household at least once a day?
If you mainly answered ‘yes’ to questions 1–7 and ‘no’ to questions 8–12 then maybe you have a busyness problem.
Busy at work
The average British worker puts in an 8.7-hour day. If you enter the office at 8.30am and take an hour for lunch that means you leave at 6.12pm. The average German or Italian worker leaves one hour before you. They’re already at home enjoying a lager or glass of Chianti. That’s if your continental counterpart actually went to work. While UK workers get 28 days holiday a year including bank holidays, French workers get 47 days, Germans 41 days, Spaniards 46 days and Italians 44 days. Brits do, however, work less than the Americans, who work a 47-hour week – longer now than in the 1920s.
Contracted working hours have in fact changed little in the last fifty years, but they don’t reflect the hours people actually do. The average British worker does the equivalent of eight weeks unpaid overtime each year. It’s as if you worked each January and February without pay. Three-quarters of managers feel working late or at weekends is the only way to deal with the workload. It’s not just office workers. Machine operators and supermarket checkout staff commonly work five extra hours a week. Less than half of all workers use their full holiday entitlement, while the average lunch ‘hour’ actually lasts 27 minutes. Plus it takes an average of 38 minutes to get to work. UK managers have the longest commute in Europe – 53 minutes. And none of these statistics takes into account the time spent thinking about work issues while you’re sitting in the bath or dining with your family.
No wonder over a third of people agree that ‘in the evenings I am so tired I just fall asleep on the sofa’ (Jones, 2003). Moreover, the pensions crisis suggests most of us will be on this treadmill until we’re 70. ‘One of the greatest challenges facing Christians in the UK’, says Mark Greene (2004) of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, ‘is to live the abundant life of Christ in the face of the dehumanizing, relationally destructive and emotionally, physically and spiritually debilitating effects of the contemporary work-place.’
Busy at play
Even our time off can be hard work. Our secular age tends to give material answers to spiritual problems. So leisure has become a thing you ‘do’ or ‘buy’. We ‘relax’ by going to the gym, driving across town to a late night movie or spending an afternoon shopping – and nothing is more tiring than shopping! We no longer ‘stroll’ or ‘ramble’; now we ‘hike’ with walking poles to propel us along. Leisure is no longer rest; leisure is consumption. And so we must work hard to afford our new leisure lifestyles! As Ellen Goodman (2004) comments: ‘Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to the job you need so you can pay for the clothes, the car, and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.’ Labour saving devices have increased, but we also have larger homes and more possessions that need more maintenance.
‘The problem with television is that people must sit and keep their eyes glued to a screen; the average American family hasn’t time for it.’ So said the New York Times in 1939 (Ward, 2003). Looking back it seems a crazy statement. But is it? Maybe it was true then and maybe it’s true now. We have enough to do without watching television, and yet watch television we do for hours on end. And then we wonder why the rest of life seems so busy.
Too busy to be healthy
More than eight out of ten British workers feel their health has been harmed by work demands. One in five men has visited the doctor with work-related stress. Sixty percent of us feel our workloads are sometimes out of control. One in five feels this way most of the time. For many, a nervous breakdown is the only way out. One church leader told me: ‘I sometimes long to be hospitalized – nothing too painful, but I’d have no responsibilities and lots of attention.’
‘We’d like to be unhappy,’ sang Bing Crosby, ‘but we never do have the time.’ Once upon a time people ‘convalesced’ after illness. ‘Time will heal,’ we said. Not any more. Adverts for cold remedies used to portray a patient tucked up in bed sipping a hot drink. Now they show people turning up unexpectedly at work, high on medicine to beat off the competition. You don’t even have to stop to take your medicine. ‘We even have products which dissolve on the tongue,’ they boast, ‘so you can take them on the go!’ In the seventeenth century Samuel Pepys had a 40-day recovery period after a kidney stone operation. Today three-quarters of us go to work when we’re ill, even though a ten-year study by University College London showed that workers who don’t take time off when ill have double the rate of heart disease.
With so much going on in our lives, where can we steal some extra time from? These days eight or nine hours sleep seems positively feckless. And so on average we sleep one hour less than we need each night. Although the need for sleep can vary from six to ten hours between different individuals, adults require on average eight hours. In fact the average night’s sleep is 7.04 hours. That’s down two hours from the 1910 average! No wonder we’re all so tired.
Too busy to think
‘I get the impression that the biggest sacrifice for people engaging with anything is that they just don’t have the time and space to think about it!’ Jill works for a Christian anti-poverty campaign. She told me: ‘Plenty of people want quick actions, but the actual work of taking time to think seems unmanageable. People’s minds are full and the “no more room” light is flashing!’
‘Time will tell,’ people used to say, but today we can’t wait that long. We confuse information and wisdom. Access to data does not make you wise. Wisdom takes study and reflection. Indeed true wisdom is found through a relationship with God. ‘The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge’ (Proverbs 1:7). But this wisdom does not become out of date with the next bulletin. ‘All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field...The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands for ever’ (Isaiah 40:6,8).
Too busy for relationships
In Bill Forsyth’s film Local Hero (1983) Mac MacIntyre is an American oil executive sent to the Scottish village of Ferness to negotiate the building of an oil refinery. At first he is puzzled by the eccentricities of the inhabitants, but as the film progresses he is charmed by this community whose slow pace of life has weathered the centuries. Although somewhat romantic, the charm works on the viewer as well. Films of small, rural communities – films like Local Hero, Waking Ned and Amazing Grace – appeal to us because they portray the slower, more relational way of life for which we yearn. We want to live in the Shire rather than in Lord of the Rings’ Isengard. One survey found that 72% of managers had been criticized by family and friends for spending too much time working.
We are ‘bowling alone’, as Harvard Professor Robert Putnam puts it (Putnam, 2000). There used to be bowling leagues across the United States. But, he observes, people no longer commit to clubs and societies. They still go bowling, either alone or in ‘informal groups’ – we don’t have time for a regular activity. And what is true for sports clubs is true for social involvement. Seventy-two percent of managers claim overwork has restricted their ability to get involved in community affairs. Graduate women used to combine homemaking with community work; now they’re in the workplace. Plus ‘flexible’ working means your free time may not coincide with mine so it’s hard for us to work together on a local project.
Paul Tripp describes a married couple whom everyone thought were stalwarts of the local church. Then one day Paul got a call from the husband asking for an urgent meeting. It turned out they had been physically fighting for years. How was it, Paul asks, that this had been happening without any one in the church knowing? He concludes:
Perhaps the simplest reason for our lack of self-disclosing candour is that no one asks. The typical rhythms of our lives militate against going below the surface. In the busyness of life it seems intrusive to ask questions that cannot be answered without self-disclosure. Yet there is a way in which we all hunger for relationships of that quality. These are the relationships in which the Redeemer does his good work.
(Tripp, 2002)
Too busy for Jesus
Christians are susceptible to all the time pressures other people experience, but we add a few of our own. We make a virtue of hard work. We place a high premium on family time. And then we add in Christian meetings and responsibilities in church. As a result, suggests Robert Banks, ‘with respect to time, Christians are a good deal worse off than many’ (Banks, 1983). A friend told me his church had identified ‘time impoverishment’ as one of the major challenges it faces. Does your daily prayer time ever feel hurried? Do you even have a daily prayer time? Does church involvement ever feel like another unwelcome demand? In 2004 artist Michael Gough created an exhibition entitled ‘Iconography’. An actor dressed as an archetypal Jesus posed around London, blessing passers-by, while Gough discreetly photographed the results. ‘No-one engages him in conversation,’ Gough comments. ‘People in the City have appointments to honour, meetings to attend, deals to make, lunch to buy.’ We are too busy for Jesus.
Who hit the accelerator?
What’s the first thing you do when you wake in the morning? Chances are you check the time. In medieval times people lived by the sun and the seasons. But the factories of industrial revolution required a co-ordinated workforce. ‘The clock, not the steam engine,’ claims Lewis Mumford, ‘is the key machine of the industrial age’ (cited in Banks, 1983). The first factory floors were dominated by large clocks and workers were conditioned to accept clock time through a system of fines. Plus the new light bulbs turned night into day. Henry Ford realized he could run three eight-hour shifts every day instead of one nine-hour shift. Tonight seven million people in the UK are working. Historian Eric Hobsbawn (1969) comments: ‘Industry brings the tyranny of the clock...the measurement of life not in seasons or even weeks and days, but in minutes, and above all a mechanized regularity of work which conflicts not only with tradition, but with all the inclinations of a humanity as yet unconditioned into it.’ Today we live life under the shadow of the clock. Children are conditioned to live by ‘periods’ at school. Church life, too, is affected. We don’t take as long as it takes; instead meetings run to schedule. British Christians sometimes laugh at African churches where everyone arrives late and meetings can run on for hours. But that we find such habits strange reveals the extent to which we have become slaves to the clock.
Changing patterns of work and rest
Pre-Industrial Life | Industrial Life | Post-Industrial Life |
the workplace is in the home | the workplace is seperate from the home | the boundaries between work and home are blurred |
the whole family is involved in domestic and commercial activity | men go out to work while women work in the home | men and women are in the workplace, but women do most of the domestic chores |
work and home in the same location | walk to work | a long commute to work |
seasonal fluctuations in workload plus many holy days | long working hours and no holidays | constant pressure at work with two to four weeks' holiday |
people working enough to maintain their standard of living | people working enough to maintain their standard of living | people working to attain an ever higher standard of living |
high autonomy | low autonomy | high autonomy |
specialized manual skills | one or two skills honed by years of practice | constantly needing to update skills and knowledge |
a slow pace of life | a slow pace of life outside work | a fast pace of life in both work and leisure |
regulated by daylight and seasons | regulated by the clock | self-regulated |
dividing time into days | dividing time into hours | dividing time into minutes |
work itself is seen as fulfilling | work itself is seen as fulfilling | aspiring to jobs that are intrinsically fulfilling |
This table summarizes how patterns of work and rest have changed. You would be unwise to complain too loudly about your working hours in front of your Victorian ancestors. Today we work fewer hours than nineteenth century factory workers and domestic servants. The 1847 Ten Hours Act limited the working week in the textile industry to 60 hours – still a lot more than the contracted hours of most people today.
But the nature of work has changed. People speak of ‘work intensification’. Jobs in our information age typically involve complex tasks and lots of autonomy. Such high discretion jobs create more opportunities for self-fulfilment, but also more opportunities for stress. A hundred years ago people went home physically tired. No trip to the gym. Now most of us go home mentally worn out. We go to the gym to work out the frustrations of the day. A hundred years ago blue collar workers worked longer hours than white collar workers; now it’s the other way round. When people say we are busier than ever, ‘we’ means ‘we the middle-classes’. It could be that the issue of busyness has ‘our’ attention because it’s now a middle-class phenomenon.
In pre-industrial times families lived, worked and played together. The exhortation to ‘make time’ for family would have been meaningless. But with the industrial revolution men went out to work while women worked at home. In post-industrial societies women have again entered the workplace – 70% of them. The result is that many women find themselves working a ‘double shift’: out at work during the day, household chores at night. In the information age, work is intruding into leisure time. Sixty percent of us read work emails at home or on holiday. Government figures suggest that working parents spend twice as long dealing with emails as playing with...