On December 1, 1930, the Kellogg Company in Battle Creek, Michigan, cut its workday from eight hours to six. W.K. Kellogg split three daily shifts into four and handed his employees back two hours a day. It was an instant success. The newspapers wrote it up as the shape of things to come.
Then, decade by decade, the workers voted it away.
In 1943 Roosevelt’s maximum-manpower order pushed Kellogg back to eight hours for war production. With overtime attached, it was hard to return to six. No one wanted to give up the money.
Because by then, money was the only benefit people cared about. Instead of the clubs, civic groups, gardens, and church life, television and consumer goods took precedence. More things to want meant more money needed, which meant more hours.
Postwar unions bargained for wages and benefits, not time. Management offered senior workers perks for advocating longer hours, offered the union higher hourly wages in exchange for dropping the short day, and in 1984 threatened to move the jobs out of state.
In 1985, the last department went back to eight hours.
Kellogg, who spent his later years funding parks and playgrounds so his employees would have somewhere to put those two hours, once complained that he had “never learned to play.”
I have spent most of my adult life certain that what I needed was more time to do things I wanted to do, but it hasn’t always worked out the way I thought it would.
When I did get some time, I meant to write an article, but instead I color-coordinated my closet, answered emails, made tea, forwarded bad jokes to friends, reached Genius level on the NY Times Spelling Bee, and made tea. The writing, well, it moved to another day.
Here’s the magic phrase behind this phenomenon: “compared to.” Cleaning the closet doesn’t feel like a chore compared to writing on a deadline. I can’t resist the old joke: What do you get when you cross a writer with a deadline? A really clean house. Creating a color-coded training plan is way more fun compared to lacing up my shoes and going for a run.
We say we want leisure so we can do the things we love. Then the shiny objects get us, and we can’t stay focused even then.
The good version of leisure is demanding. Scrolling and television are easy but not fulfilling in any meaningful way. The things that actually satisfy us cost physical and mental effort, which makes them feel like one more item on the list.
So, we take the cheap version, or we go find something random to be busy with.
The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment. Robert Benchley, “How to Get Things Done,” Chicago Tribune, February 2, 1930
Researchers Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl put it less charitably. Procrastination, they concluded, “has a great deal to do with short-term mood repair and emotion regulation.” We’re not being lazy. We’re managing a mood, and the closet happens to be within reach.
The sad part is, we’re not idle either (a better option than doomscrolling). At least, staying still would be helpful in the long run, allowing our brains to reconsider priorities and make better decisions.
In a 2010 study called “Idleness Aversion and the Need for Justifiable Busyness,” Christopher Hsee and his colleagues found that we dislike being idle, that almost any excuse will get us moving, and that we report being happier when busy even when the busyness is forced on us. They conclude that many of the goals we set may be nothing more than justifications for keeping ourselves occupied.
We would rather do almost anything than sit still. In 2014, Timothy Wilson’s team asked people to spend six to fifteen minutes alone in a room with nothing but their thoughts. Many of them chose to give themselves an electric shock instead.
Which brings me back to Diogenes, who saw all of this coming in the fourth century BC. When Corinth heard the Macedonians were coming and the whole town threw itself into fortifying the city, Diogenes rolled his tub up and down the hall, back and forth, sweating. Asked why, he said he was doing it “just to make myself look busy as the rest of you.”
Looking busy seems to be the operative word here.
Unfortunately, though, that takes us away from being present. Noticing.
Matt Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert sampled people’s minds at random moments and found we’re somewhere other than the present about 47 percent of the time, and that we’re less happy when we wander, whatever we happen to be doing.
We see but don’t notice. We hear but don’t listen. Noticing requires standing still, and standing still is the one thing we have trained ourselves out of.
Kellogg’s employees traded their two hours for overtime and a bigger house. Some of us trade ours for a spotless refrigerator, but maybe we should aim to trade ours to be more present.