Time use surveys show New Zealanders spend much more time on unpaid work, than in paid work, both inside and outside the home
Opinion: Like 241,200 of you, we headed offshore on holiday in August.
On the flight home, trying to keep the spirit of travel alive, we made a list of our ‘must-see’ places.
Even if we are lucky enough to knock off one a year, it was sobering to realise we might not live long enough to make it through our substantial travel wish-list.
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It was made even more stark by my holiday re-reading of 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. The 4000 weeks refers to how many weeks an average life is.
Post-holiday blues got me thinking about my relationship with time. That, and that I have a major wine exam coming up and need to squeeze every second for swotting.
Burkeman writes that most of think about time as a conveyor belt where we put more tasks on the belt as soon as we complete one. He argues we focus on finding ways to be more efficient, to put more things on that belt. Daily we go to battle with our to-do list.
This struck me as true, as someone infected by the busyness epidemic. But also, that this was the sort of privileged view one could expect from a self-help book in which only a small percentage of the population have the time and means to buy and read it. Many others are just busy trying to make ends meet.
These surveys mapped the sheer volume of childcare, caring for other family members, housework, and volunteering that was otherwise invisible to the policy makers, regional and local planners, calculators of GDP and the like
I’ve often heard the saying time is a great leveller. It’s one thing we have in common. We all get 24 hours in a day.
But I don’t agree with that either. If you have the means for someone to clean your house, mow your lawns, iron your shirts, or someone who does this for you, your experience of time is different from someone who doesn’t have access to such support.
Time is also gendered. Must I reference the vast volume of studies that show even when both partners have a full-time job, women in heterosexual relationships do far more house and caring work? Maybe just one: the recent New Zealand research report that found 90 percent of women do nine hours more housework a week than their male partners.
With only 4000 weeks on average on the planet, how we spend our time is something we should be interested in.
Statistics New Zealand was onto it when it undertook national Time Use Surveys in 1998/99 and 2009/10. They found that New Zealanders spend much more time on unpaid work, than in paid work, both inside and outside the home.
These surveys mapped the sheer volume of childcare, caring for other family members, housework, and volunteering that was otherwise invisible to the policy makers, regional and local planners, calculators of GDP and the like.
It's time to do the survey again. We will likely be surprised by how much time is something we experience differently and the implications of that for so many things from childcare policies to transport timetables to funding for community organisations.
A repeat of the time-use survey is well overdue, and summed up perfectly by the wise words of Dr Seuss: “How did it get so late so soon?”
