Time vs. Money
We’re starting the section on Time this week. My anticipated outline is: Time vs. Money (this one), The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, Control of Your Time, and Screens.
Nearly a decade ago, I read Wayne Muller’s book Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives. One story in the book affected me more than the rest of the content combined. I remember it clearly today, and expect I always will. It starts like this:
On December 1, 1930, at the start of the Great Depression, W. K. Kellogg replaced the traditional three daily eight-hour shifts in his Battle Creek, Michigan, cereal plant with four six-hour shifts. By adding one entire shift, he reasoned, thirty percent more jobs would be added to the plant -- jobs desperately needed by the unemployed in the city.1
Yes, that Kellogg -- Corn Flakes, Frosted Flakes, Rice Krispies, Froot Loops.
Kellogg’s six-hour day was an instant success, attracting national media coverage and the attention of Herbert Hoover’s administration. Observers throughout the world speculated that Kellogg’s experiment offered a practical way out of the depression and, in light of the fact that hours of labor had been steadily declining for over a century, was almost certainly a foretaste of things to come.
According to Muller, in 1932 the US Department of Labor sent researchers to Battle Creek to interview workers in the plant.
They found that nearly eighty-five percent preferred the six-hour shift, primarily because it provided “more time for family activities and home duties and leisure” and because it helped some of the unemployed find work.
Apparently, the plant returned to eight-hour shifts during WWII in compliance with an executive order from FDR intended to raise industrial production. When the war ended, workers chose to return to six-hour shifts. They voted in favor of shorter shifts several times after 1945.
Finally, in the 1960’s and 1970’s mass amusements -- notably television -- began their domination of leisure time. Passive culture consumption began to replace traditional activities. Time for family, loved ones, and community activities was no longer perceived as being as valuable as what one could buy with money. On December 11, 1984, workers voted to return to the longer, eight-hour shift. W. K. Kellogg’s bold and creative experiment had come to an end.
My first reading of this bit of history made me deeply sad, and it’s making me sad again as I type this. The Kellogg story raises a few questions that feel important.
If you could trade your full-time job for a three-quarter time job, and your full pay for three-quarters pay, would you?
How much is enough?
Once your basic needs are met, which is more important, more time or more money?
A few places in these nuggets, I mention some strategies I’ve used to get more time. When I take a new job, I negotiate for more vacation time rather than for more money. I ask my employer for permission to take unpaid time off. My dad was a college professor, and enjoyed an academic calendar with summers off. I stayed in school and got a PhD so that I could teach at the college level “someday”. Sadly that someday never came, but I sure like the idea.
It’s also worth talking about the two income family and the cost of day care. Early in our marriage, Sheila and I decided to plan our economic lives so that she could stay home with our children. And she did, for about 16 years. To support that choice, we opted to live in a small house, and to drive modest cars, and I’m quite happy with the trade.
Think about those questions above. In your life, what’s the right balance of money and time? What strategies can you adopt to have a good amount of free time? If you had more free time, what would you do with it? The world is quite happy for you to spend all your time working for money, and to spend all your money buying stuff. What is the balance that will make YOU happy?
All italicized quotes from Wayne Muller, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives (New York: Bantam Books, 1999), p 103 - 106. Muller credits Benjamin Hunnicutt’s Work Without End as the original source for the material on Kellog’s shift changes.