Where do people find the time?

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Where do people find the time?

March 23rd, 2010

How many times have you heard yourself say that? Where do people find the time to spend 6 hours a day on Facebook? Or send 1,500 Tweets a day? Or watch 12 hours of television?

Conceivably, the only way you could spend this amount of time interacting with the media is to have a lot of time on your hands. In this video, Prof. Clay Shirky calls this a “Cognitive Surplus“.

According to Shirky, the reason we waste so much time with media is because we all have more time than we know what to do with. Say what? I mean, if you’re anything like me, that sounds like a total disconnect. How many times have I left a couple hours of stuff on my daily to-do list because of “lack of time”. And I’m not alone: studies show one of the top complaints people have these days is a “I don’t have enough time!”

Shirky, though, makes a very good point. We actually do have an enormous amount of discretionary time. Technology has afforded us that. Tasks that used to take minutes now take seconds. Activities that once required significant segments of our days now require very little effort. So why do we feel as if we’re being short-changed of time?

Here’s the rub, according to Shirky: if you were to keep a moment-by-moment log of how we spend our days, we’d realize that we pretty much suck as time managers.

It’s like we all have ADD, and are just waiting to be seduced by whatever reflecting ball of tin foil momentarily catches our attention. Our subconscious mind is not very discriminating. It is easily distracted. It wants immediate gratification. And it doesn’t want to work very hard.

In other words, it’s an easy mark for what passes as content in today’s media (especially, I would argue, today’s new media).

Our ability to be so easily distracted leads to all sorts of paradoxes. We decry not having enough time to spend with our families, yet we spend hours a day watching YouTube. We can’t seem to get around to fixing that leak in the bathroom, but we’re up to date on who’s-doing-what on Facebook. We can’t seem to finish that blog post, but no way we’re missing that “Law & Order” marathon.

Shirky also points out how the shift towards Social Media and the Internet is giving us the power to take back the control of our time. Instead of interacting with media on their terms, we now have the ability to interact with them on ours. As media once conspired to suck up our time, it now gives us unprecedented control over it.

The key, though, is to recognize that the choices we make on how we use our time are just that—choices. When we allow ourselves to get sucked into the latest Internet phenomenon or check in on Facebook ten times a day, those are choices. We need to plan our media use with the exacting detail we plan a family vacation to Disneyworld.

So now that we know how we have all this time, the question is, how are we going to use it?