Gran parte de las dificultades por las que atraviesa el mundo se debe a que los ignorantes están completamente seguros, y los inteligentes llenos de dudas.
Más de 12 millones de espectadores en Francia hicieron de este filme la
cinta más taquillera del cine galo en 2014, y se puede entender el
interés de los franceses en encontrarse con este retrato ligero de la
nueva Francia en donde lo menos corriente es la “pura cepa”.
Los Verneuil son una pareja burguesa católica de provincia. Tienen
cuatro hijas adultas y cada una de ellas ha ido escogiendo pareja fuera
del círculo convencional de sus padres. Así al inicio de la película los
Vernuil tienen entre su familia política a un judío, a un musulmán y a
un chino. La hija menor es la esperanza de los padres de tener por fin
un yerno “como Dios manda”, pero ella tiene otros planes. Esa es la
premisa de esta cinta francesa que llega a salas nacionales luego de ser
el mayor éxito en taquilla de su país desde “Intocables” del 2011, y
que ha tenido críticas dispares.
La película es al mismo tiempo previsible y encantadora. La historia
no sorprende, pero se deja ver con una sonrisa en la cara –y si uno está
de ánimo- con más de alguna carcajada. Es un tipo de humor bien
intencionado, familiar y muy al estilo del clásico francés Luis de
Funès. Hay muchos chistes sobre el racismo y los prejuicios, pero no
desde un humor corrosivo, sino desde el espacio de la corrección
política lo que funciona a cierto nivel, pero le quita potencia y
agudeza crítica al tema que es hoy uno de los mayores desafíos de las
naciones globalizadas.
Difícil no acordarse de la memorable “Adivina quién viene a cenar”
(1967) en donde los estupendos Katherine Hepburn y Spencer Tracy
interpretan a los padres de una entusiasta joven a punto de casarse con
un doctor afroamericano (Sidney Poitier). Ante el anuncio, el discurso
progresista de los padres se pone a prueba ante el temor de las
dificultades que suponen tendrá la pareja en una sociedad que no está
preparada para los matrimonios mixtos. Aunque hay semejanzas, el tono de
ambos filmes es absolutamente distinto. La sociedad de los sesenta
quedó atrás, ante el desafío de hoy que son los prejuicios que aún
permanecen aunque vivamos unos junto a otros. Eso es lo que intenta
abordar, muy superficialmente, “Dios mío, ¿Pero qué te hemos hecho?” y
desde sus limitaciones diríamos que lo logra.
Entrar en la realidad de la Francia mestiza contemporánea es tema
complicado, y esta película lo hace con cierta inocencia sin complejos
que la hace muy fácil de ver, pero que puede frustrar al espectador que
busque una mirada más crítica, ya que el filme ni siquiera tiene en sus
objetivos adentrarse en las profundidades del problema. Lo que hay aquí
es un retrato luminoso y esperanzador en donde los problemas se
resuelven con una disculpa y una buena comida. Pedirle más a esta
comedia para todo espectador es pedirle mucho.
Think outside the box, shake things up, and think different: The metaphors we use for creativity suggest that it's different from many other pursuits.
As a result, it might seem that being creative requires a different approach than most other skills. If you want to be a great tennis player, you need to practice your swing. If you want to nail a presentation, you need to practice it several times. But, it turns out that creativity also requires practice.
In order to practice properly, there are two things you need to do:
1.- Know enough about creativity to practice the right things.
2.- Set aside the time to create rituals that lead to habits that support your creative practice.
The most creative people know a lot in their domain of expertise. In order for jazz musicians to improvise, they need to know a lot of music theory related to the song structures they play. The best scientists are deeply immersed in their fields. Inventors spend years understanding the way the world works.
In order to stoke your creativity, you need to continually develop your expertise. That means that you need to read, listen to lectures, and engage in conversations with others. These activities are often pushed into the background in our busy lives. So, you need to make time to learn.
When are the times that you engage in “fake work” where you sit at your desk and stare at the internet or shuffle papers? Instead of fake work, keep a book or stack of articles by your desk. When you feel a bout of fake work coming on, grab your book, find a quiet spot and read for 15 or 20 minutes. That time adds up and increases the knowledge you can use to generate new ideas.
Creative people also draw their inspiration from areas outside their domain of expertise. That means that you need to expose yourself to information that doesn’t seem relevant right now, but may end up being important later.
It is particularly difficult to find the time to do things that don’t have a clear benefit to you right now. After all, we are taught to be highly goal-directed. And that means clearing away distractions.
Set aside at least an hour a week to learn about something really new. The best way to do that is to pick a consistent time of the week and block an hour out of your calendar. Do it way in advance before that calendar fills up with things to do. And set that time aside to try something new.
Then, email friends and colleagues whose work you respect. Look for people who do things in a different domain than yours. Ask them for recommendations of things to read, see, or listen to. No matter how wacky their suggestions may seem, you will be surprised at how new things can shift your perspective.
Finally, lots of research suggests that people who have lots of good ideas also have lots of ideas. That means that if you want to succeed at doing things that are creative, you need to put in time in the act of trying to create.
To really develop a habit for creative practice, you need a regular ritual. For example, Stephen King (a prolific and creative writer) sits down each morning to write for a few hours. He compares the process of getting ready to write to the ritual of getting ready to go to sleep.
In order to create rituals for creativity, you need to think about what makes you feel creative. I find that having discussions with students and colleagues leads to great ideas for new experiments and projects, and so I schedule regular meetings of my lab and meetings with students with the express purpose of generating ideas. If you work best alone, then you need to put time into each day to engage in your creative pursuits. Whether you do it alone or in a group, you need to find ways to generate ideas, knowing that some of those ideas will be great ones.
Obviously, the key limitation for these creative pursuits is time. That is why rituals are so important. By making the pursuit of creative ideas a part of your daily life, you make the time you need to be creative. Though you never know which day will be the one where the light bulb goes off, a consistent practice will put you on the road to a breakthrough.
After Labor Day weekend last week, many of us are wishing four-day workweeks were the norm year round.
The 40-hour, five-day workweek has been the topic of much debate dating back to the last century. In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030 technological advances would allow people to work as few as 15 hours a week.
With nearly 15 years to go, Keynes prediction may seem light years away from reality, but in recent years a number of arguments have surfaced in favor of a shorter workweek. This past July, the president of the U.K.’s leading public health industry group argued Britain should switch to a four-day workweek, attributing stress and rising health concerns including high blood pressure and work-related mental health issues to the fact that most of us work five days a week.
Mexican telecom billionaire entrepreneur Carlos Slim recently argued in favor of a three-day workweek stating the shorter workweek would improve the quality of life of employees, making them healthier and more productive. His three-day workweek proposal comes with a couple of caveats, however: employees would work 10 or 11 hours a day in those three days, and would continue to work into their seventies.
Some countries are already experimenting with a shorter workweek. The Netherlands has had four-day workweeks for years, and some North American companies are toying with the concept. In 2012, 37Signals cofounder Jason Fried wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times citing his company’s 32-hour work week from May through October helps improve workers’ focus. “When you have a compressed workweek, you tend to focus on what’s important,” he wrote. In a post earlier this year, I cited a tech company, Treehouse, who has implemented a year-round four-day workweek, noting higher employee morale, greater focus, and a greater ability to attract and retain top talent among the benefits.
The five-day workweek was the focus of a recent article in the Atlantic. Author Philip Sopher says we can thank the Great Depression for our two-day weekend as prior to that time American workers were obligated to work half days on Saturdays and only received Sundays off. The shorter hours were considered a remedy to the country’s unemployment problem. Yet despite economic stability and advances in technology, the five-day workweek remains the dominant concept in workplace organization.
Sopher says there’s reason to believe the two-day weekend is inefficient. He cites a growing body of research pointing to evidence that a shorter workweek would lead to increased productivity, improved health, and higher employee retention rates and says the five-day workweek may actually be hindering productivity.
He cites a study in the American Journal of Epidemiology that found individuals who worked 55 hours per week performed worse on some mental tests than those who only worked 40 hours per week.
The question is: Is the five day workweek so ingrained in our culture that it can’t be changed? Some companies already offer the option of Fridays off, but in many cases, employees still put in a 40-hour workweek; they simply work longer hours Monday through Thursday in order to reap the benefits of a three-day weekend.
Although the benefits of a shorter workweek are clear--improved morale and employee health not to mention attracting talent--Sopher says it’s unlikely companies will jump on the shorter workweek bandwagon simply because they would feel it would put their company at a competitive disadvantage against others who still operate on a five-day work schedule.
While it’s unlikely Keynes’s prediction will become reality by 2030, perhaps a different way of looking at how we organize our workweek is in order.
Every Monday, tune in to Fast Company Leadership for a quote to get your week started right.
While many of us are stuck inside fluorescent-lit offices, the weather outside is turning crisp, the days shorter, and the lure of new school supplies is calling. Even if you’ve outgrown back-to-school season by a few decades, the excitement of a fresh start doesn’t have to pass you by.
We asked 12 entrepreneurs to recall words of wisdom from childhood teachers. One of our favorites is short but gets a gold star for motivation:
“Go for it.”
Design by Robbie Jones for Fast Company, Photo by Jake Hills
Jess Lee’s high school English teacher Melody Wong pushed her to take an AP exam she didn’t feel ready for. Lee, now the CEO and co-founder of Polyvore, aced it. “Her encouragement taught me that sometimes you can do things even if you don’t have the right pre-qualifications,” she says. “Just go for it and you might surprise yourself.”
It seems like everywhere we turn we’re being told to “embrace failure.” From social media to countless business books and articles and the global failure conferenceFailCon, the importance of mistakes is lauded as a key stepping-stone for success.
Even advertisers are realizing the power of bragging about getting it wrong. For example, earlier this year Domino’s commercials touted that at their company “failure is an option” with a nod to its failed cookie pizza of 2007.
Despite all the failure-embracing saturation we’re seeing these days, this concept is nothing new. Iterations of “embrace failure” have existed long before the slogan was popular. Before the likes of Steve Jobs and Richard Branson told us to embrace failure, Michael Jordan told us that he fails over and over again. Before that Truman Capote said failure was “the condiment that gives success its flavor.” And before that James Joyce dubbed mistakes “portals of discovery.” Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Ford--the list of innovators that used failure to get at their success goes on and on and on.
So why the apparent resurgence? More importantly, what does embracing failure really mean, does it work, and at what point is it too much?
In an effort to find the answers, we consulted a few experts who know a thing or two about failure.
Global producer and FailCon cofounder Cass Phillipps remembers a time when there wasn’t even a whisper of “embrace failure.” In 2009 she and Diane Loviglio devised a one-day conference for startups to study their own and each others's failures. The conference was the first of its kind, but not surprising considering the economic climate at the time.
“We were all failing, we had all made mistakes, and we couldn't run from it anymore,” Phillipps says. “Everyone knew things had gotten harder, and so those rose-colored glasses were pretty cracked.”
Thought leaders began pushing for more open discussion of why we were failing, Phillipps says, to prevent it from happening again.
“I believe that (the embrace failure movement has) taken off because it taps into a widespread sense that we, as individuals, teams, organizations, and even societies, live in an era where we cannot always get things right the first time, no matter how smart we are or how carefully we plan,” says Anjali Sastry.
She believes that with the advent of social media, it became easier to share our own stories of defeat, and the complexity of our current social, economic, population, andenvironmental systems makes it impossible to predict and analyze the future.
“Mistakes will be made--in research labs, management consulting teams, C-suites, factory floors, farms, hospitals, school systems, government offices, supermarkets, and elsewhere,” she says. “So figuring out how to learn from failure is more important than ever before.”
Karissa Thacker, a business psychologist who has consulted with major brands like UPS, Ford Motor Company, and Best Buy, believes the embrace failure culture is popular now more than ever because business success in both large and small companies requires a higher level of risk than during the heart of the Industrial Age. “Whole markets can be captured overnight,” she says, citing Samsung’s quick rise to power within Apple’s realm of smartphone domination.
“Continual experimentation is the new normal,” she says. “With risk comes failure. You cannot elevate the level of risk taking without helping people make sense of failure, and to some extent, feel safe with failure.”
Michael A. Roberto, trustee professor of management atBryant University, sees the trend as a rebuttal to today’s work environment. “A backlash has emerged because so many corporate cultures have become so intolerant of experimentation, and people have become so afraid to fail that they have become reluctant to try new things.”
Sastry says the notion of failure in the pursuit of a career objective is something that first began to emerge with the advent of the scientific revolution. Some of our most admired innovators like Thomas Edison advocated going beyond acceptance of failure to embracing it, she says. But she wonders if Edison would be hailed a success in today’s corporate culture--during his career Edison lost a ton of money in his pursuit of ideas that never came to fruition.
Timothy J. Bono, an assistant dean in psychology at Washington University, says that those who publicly fail--and especially those who do so gracefully--are deemed more likable. He cites Jennifer Lawrence tripping at the Oscars and Hillary Clinton crying on the campaign trail during the 2008 presidential election as examples.
As part of what psychologists call the pratfall effect, when someone we perceive as competent makes a mistake, we often like that person more because it shows they are human, too, Bono says.
He also says failure works more for people who focus on the process rather than the outcome. These people, he says, tend to remain motivated in the face of challenging work and are more likely to persevere on future tasks.
Failing at a young age helps, too. Bono says that adults who had to overcome a moderate level of adversity while growing up have been found to have the greatest outcomes later in life. This is because they learned from a young age how to engage their social support networks and develop the coping mechanisms that are necessary to negotiate life's challenges. “Developing these skills early on comes in handy for bouncing back from later hardships,” he says.
How an individual responds to failure and other setbacks has significant implications, as well. “The happiest people are often those who have learned how to fail,” Bono says. “They've learned how to pick themselves back up after being knocked down, reflect on the experience, grow from it, and soldier on.”
The net result, according to Bono, is that people are paying more and more attention to the process instead of just the outcome. “When you take a systematic look at the process that has led many to their success, we see that one of the common elements among them is the resilience they exhibited when things weren't going their way,” he says.
The key question we must ask ourselves, according Roberto, is if we are learning from our failures and designing better tests to move forward.
Not all failures are the same, he argues. “Some experiments are well-designed and well-conceived . . . others are sloppy. We shouldn’t tolerate sloppy testing and experimentation failures. We should tolerate failures that come from a well-designed, iterative process of experimentation and prototyping.”
While there can be several benefits from taking risks, the potential consequences may be off-putting.
The challenge managers face is how to encourage risk taking and innovation without actually incentivizing the wrong outcomes, says Mel Fugate, associate professor of management and organizations in the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University.
Fugate says the successful embrace of failure in the workplace not only requires a change in how performance is defined and rewarded with policies and practices, but it also requires a radical mindset change for many.
“Frankly, relatively few of our organizations and leaders are willing, and that is assuming they are able,” he says. “But in the same vein, what this means is that the rewards will be greatest for those that are willing and able to embrace failure and innovate.”
It’s all about the calculation of risk, Thacker says. There are several zero-mistake environments where you would not want everyone to embrace of failure, like theairline industry, military, or nuclear power plants.
While Thacker believes we are far from saturation in terms of people really learning how to take risks, learn from failure, and take more intelligent action, she says she hopes the trend continues as long as it’s clear that embracing failure is about making intelligent decisions.
Sastry agrees:
In the end, failure by itself is not something anyone wants. It’s the success that follows failure that we all seek. So, failure should be embraced only if it enables even better success. We need to add some criteria to define the good failures that teach or reveal something important and discourage those that are simply dumb.
But does the overuse of embracing failure threaten to turn the idea into a cliché? Career and education coach Rebecca "Kiki" Weingarten believes it does. “We don't want to set ourselves up to be a failure society where it's all wonderful and everyone will now get a trophy or kudos for failing in the way they were getting them for trying or just showing up,” she says.
Roberto too thinks the phrase is overused without much meaning to back it up. He says he hears executives say that it is okay to fail in their organization, but when asked for an example of this actually happening, they fall silent.
“Yes, failure is part of entrepreneurship . . . but we still need to be careful about not just labeling all failures as equally ‘useful,’” he says. “Some are true learning opportunities born of a disciplined innovation and experimentation process; others are the outcomes of very poor decision making.”
By Ariel Schwartz It generated boatloads of cash, but did it change how we look at ALS? (Or even how many people know what ALS is?)
The Ice Bucket Challenge, a viral sensation challenging participants to dump a bucket of ice water on their head and invite others to do the same, is finally dying down. There were endless variations on the campaign, which raised money for the disease ALS: Bill Gatesbuilding out a contraption to dump the water on his head, Olivia Wilde dumping "breast milk" on her head, and so on. Even Anna Wintour took her turn with the bucket.
Throughout the whole thing, there was the distinct sense that many people were just taking the challenge as an opportunity to ham it up. Even so, proponents argued, they were still raising awareness for ALS, a woefully underfunded and often ignored disease. But how many people who took the challenge actually donated? And did they really raise awareness?
The business intelligence firm RJMetrics set to find out, selecting 1,500 random #icebucketchallenge videos from YouTube and uploading their raw data for analysis. Here are some of the highlights of what the company found.
Most videos mentioned ALS--score one for awareness.
Slightly less encouraging news: Only 20% of videos mentioned making donations in the name of ALS. Now, this doesn't mean that the people who neglected to mention a donation didn't donate. It just means they decided not to talk about it. Since people tend to enjoy talking about their good deeds, however, it's a safe bet that the majority of people who dumped water on their heads didn't donate.
Unsurprisingly, ice bucket challenge takers who mentioned ALS in their videos donated money 25% of the time, compared to just 5% of people who didn't mention ALS in their videos (some of the people in the latter group may not have even gotten the message that the challenge was related to ALS).
All told, the challenge helped the ALS Foundation raise nearly $100 million, compared to $2.8 million at the same time last year. That doesn't count the increased awareness of the disease, which could lead to future donations down the line. Regardless of whether it made you cringe or smile, the ice bucket challenge was a success.
Trailblazing comedian Joan Rivers never shied away from outrageous humor, fearlessly lampooning her friends, fellow celebrities, and, most of all, herself.
She passed away Thursday at age 81, so we’re remembering her with a collection of her best quotes and jokes, corralled from her interviews, memoirs, and even her Twitter feed. Thanks for the laughs, Joan.
(Photo: Getty Images)
1. “People say that money is not the key to happiness, but I always figured if you have enough money, you can have a key made.”
2. “I wish I had a twin, so I could know what I’d look like without plastic surgery.”
3. “The fun of working on the road means stealing from hotels. I’ve been doing it for so long, I have a set of towels from the Ark.”
4. “I don’t exercise. If God had wanted me to bend over, he would have put diamonds on the floor.”
5. “Thank God we’re living in a country where the sky’s the limit, the stores are open late and you can shop in bed thanks to television.”
(Photo: Getty Images)
6.”I was born in 1962 … and the room next to me was 1963.”
7. “I’m no cook. When I want lemon on chicken, I spray it with Pledge.”
8. “I am definitely going to watch the Emmys this year! My makeup team is nominated for “Best Special Effects.””
9. “At my age an affair of the heart is a bypass!”
10. “A child can be taught not to do certain things, such as touch a hot stove, pull lamps off of tables, and wake Mommy before noon.”
11. “My love life is like a piece of Swiss cheese; most of it’s missing, and what’s there stinks.”
12. “You know you’re getting old when you buy a sexy sheer nightgown and don’t know anyone who can see through it.”
(Photo: Getty Images)
13. “Looking fifty is great—if you’re sixty.”
14. “You know you’ve reached middle age when you’re cautioned to slow down by your doctor, instead of by the police.”
15. “The first time I see a jogger smiling, I’ll consider it.”
16. “There’s no one to call up and have the same memory bank. … Nobody wants to hear that you met Harry Truman. … I met Harry Truman. … But you know what I mean? Nobody’s interested. They want to know you met Rihanna.”
17. “I must admit I am nervous about getting Alzheimer’s. Once it hits, I might tell my best joke and never know it.”
18. “At my funeral, I want Meryl Streep crying in five different accents.”
19. “When a man has a birthday, he takes a day off. When a woman has a birthday, she takes at least three years off.”
20. “I hate housework. You make the beds, you do the dishes, and six months later, you have to start all over again.”
(Photo: Getty Images)
21. “Love may be a many-splendored thing, but hate makes the world go round. If you think I’m kidding, just watch the six o’clock news. The first twenty-nine minutes are all about dictators and murderers and terrorists and maniacs and, worst of all, real housewives.”
22. “Half of all marriages end in divorce—and then there are the really unhappy ones.”
23. “A study says owning a dog makes you 10 years younger. My first thought was to rescue two more, but I don’t want to go through menopause again.”
24. “There are many self-help books by Ph.D.s, but I hold a different degree: an I.B.T.I.A.—I’ve Been Through It All. This degree comes not on parchment but gauze, and it entitles me to tell you that there is a way to get through any misfortune.”
25. “You know you’re getting old when work is a lot less fun and fun is a lot more work.”
(Photo: Getty Images)
26. “The fashion magazines are suggesting that women wear clothes that are ‘age appropriate.’ For me that would be a shroud.”
27. “Had a friend who is going through menopause come by for lunch today. Her hot flash was so bad, it steam-cleaned my carpet
28. “The funniest [writer] in person but rather boring on the page is, hands down, Leo Tolstoy. If I hear one more time: ‘How many czars does it take to change a light bulb? None; they didn’t have them in those days,’ I think I’ll scream!”
29. “The book I wish I’d never written is Joan Rivers’s Pop-Up Guide to Gynecology.”
30. “We all mourn in our own way. I mourn with a great steak.”
If you can’t catch a breath during the frantic daily grind, don’t blame it on not having any free time.
Americans actually have more leisure time, are less rushed, less stressed, and sleep much more than we think we do. According to sociologist John Robinson, or better known as “Father Time” to his colleagues, most people have around 40 hours of free time per week.
Robinson, a professor at the University of Maryland and director of the Americans’ Use of Time Project, has been studying how people spend their time for more than 50 years. In 1972, he became one of the first social scientists to collect detailed time diaries of people all over the country. According to his massive studies and research, Robinson tells Fast Company that modern Americans only merely feel like we are working more hours and we also tend to exaggerate about our work hours since the actual hours on the job have been decreasing steadily for the past 40 years.
If this is the case, then why don’t we feel like we have more time and what exactly are we spending our time on? Below Robinson gives us the major findings from decades of time-use and social attitudes research:
Most of us may think that we’re working nonstop, but we’re actually not working as much as we think we are, according to data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), which collects time diaries from large national samples by the U.S. Census. Since 2003, the project has collected time diaries from more than 130,000 respondents.
In an article published in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Robinson, along with his coauthors, writes that people tend to overestimate their work hours by 5% to 10%. This gap was actually much smaller in 1965 when the first national diary was collected at 1.3 hours compared to 2.4 hours between 2003 to 2007. At its highest, the gap was at 6.2 hours in 1985. The article says:
"It is argued here that the movement of the labor force into more service occupations and other occupations in which work schedules are becoming more irregular (with not time clock to punch as a vivid reminder), workers have fewer benchmarks to use in estimating the number of hours in their workweek.”
In the latest ATUS released a few weeks ago, the findings showed the average American sleeps 8.75 hours per day--much more than we work, which is an average of 7.55 hours per day. The hours of sleep we get every night has been steadily going up in the past few years, but the average person is still claiming to be exhausted.
The findings say that employed people tend to sleep less because they have obligations they can’t ignore. Nonetheless, an increased number of sleep advocates such as Arianna Huffington, have been spreading the sleep gospel in recent years and it seems to be making a difference. However, when it comes to asking people how much they sleep on a given night, they’ll most likely estimate less since “it says you’re busy” and “if you’re busy, you’re important,” Robinson says in an interview with DBK.
In surveys conducted between 2009 to 2010, the number of employed and unemployed respondents who said they felt “always rushed” declined by six to nine points compared to surveys in 2004. However, women are more likely than men to feel rushed.
“They have more things going on,” says Robinson. “They are more concerned about a relative or other things that they may be thinking about, but may not show up in a time diary.”
Women also feel rushed because they typically don’t have as much leisure time as men do, but they have more leisure time now than they did in the 1960s. In fact, Robinson finds that women have at least 30 hours of free time every week.
Despite time surveys between 2009 to 2010 concluding that Americans, in general, are less rushed, the same surveys also reported a decline in respondents feeling “very happy.” Basically, women tend to feel more rushed than men, but Americans, in general, are feeling less rushed today compared to 2004. Nonetheless, we still aren’t happier.
In his research, Robinson finds that both men and women dislike doing housework about the same, but women still do more of it on any given day. Fortunately, split chores have become more of a reality in recent years.
Before 1965, women were doing about 85% of the housework. After 1965, there was a shift and gradually, women started doing less housework and now we’re closer to 60%.
“There’s greater equality in doing housework and childbearing now, but it probably won’t be 50% for awhile.” On an average day, women will spend more than two hours and 10 minutes doing housework while men spend one hour and 17 minutes, according to the 2012 ATUS.
Believe it or not, we’re watching a lot more television than we used to. Today, watching television takes up 50% of people’s free time, says Robinson, and it’s probably because “programs have been a lot more sophisticated.”
But this doesn’t mean that watching television makes people happier. Robinson says that those who watch more television also reported feeling less happy compared to those who spend their free time reading and socializing.
Surprisingly, new technology hasn’t played a major role in affecting our free time, says Robinson, and social media may, in fact, lead to more visits with friends.
Now that you know how most people spend their time, it’s important to consider improving your own productivity by knowing exactly how you spend your day. Think about keeping your own time diary, making quick notes throughout the day regarding what you’re doing, and keep a watch nearby to log your hours.
When looking back later, you may find, as Robinson has found with his collected diaries, what you think you’re doing and what you’re actually doing may be two very different scenarios.
