Book Review: The Time Bind

Usually, it begins with the clock. Or, more accurately, my noticing the clock—minute hand discomfitingly deep into the eight o’clock hour. And then the thought: I am going to be late.

“Let’s GO! Daddy’s going to be late! Let’s GO GO GO GO GO. Shoes on, everyone!”

It takes no more than those words (and, no doubt, the wild look in my eyes) to banish the calm rhythm of the morning. Lunches packed, children shoed, coffee grabbed—we hustle to the car. And I have wondered, as I buckle a sobbing, arching-back 18-month-old into his car seat: What is happening here?

And now, after reading The Time Bind by Arie Russell Hochschild, I know: my kids and I think about time differently. My toddler, along with most kids, lives on what Hochschild calls “child time.” Children have a less structured idea of time than us adults—time is flexible, activities bleed into one another, and urgency (save for when they are hungry or the potty calls!) is mostly absent.

That doesn’t really describe my days—especially my days at work. My work days are a frenetic blur of 30-minute meetings interspersed with pulses of focused, heads-down work. Sound familiar?

This tension between how parents and children think about time is a through-line in Hochschild’s book. In her telling, “child time” is similar to how time felt for people in most of human history. Clocks, schedules, multitasking—these are the fruits of an industrialized world. Ben Franklin’s quip that time is money, once mere folk wisdom, is more of an organizing philosophy for modern day work. (Reader, have you too filled out a timesheet this week?)

But The Time Bind covers far more than this parent-child conflict. The book offers a deep dive into the workplaces and home lives of employees at Amerco, an anonymized Fortune 500 company located somewhere in middle America. With internal surveys indicating dissatisfaction with their employees’ work-life balance, Amerco implemented a series of organizational changes and invited Hochschild to observe the employees as those changes were rolled out. New policies included flexible hours, part-time opportunities, and parental leave. But Amerco—and Hochschild—quickly saw there was a problem: as nice as these new policies were in theory, few employees were taking Amerco up on them. Why?

Over three years and hundreds of interviews, Hochschild formulates an answer—one expressed in the book’s subtitle—“When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work.”

I’ve no doubt that many working parents read this subtitle and feel a panicky bolt of recognition. Unpacking this premise—that people are more comfortable at work than at home—is the main work undertaken by Hochschild in her book. Here’s how she frames it:

In this new model of family and work life, a tired parent flees a world of unresolved quarrels and unwashed laundry for the reliable orderliness, harmony, and managed cheer of work. The emotional magnets beneath home and workplace are in the process of being reversed. […] Some people find in work a respite from the emotional tangles at home. Others virtually marry their work, investing it with an emotional significance once reserved for family, while hesitating to trust loved ones at home.

Why would this be? One reason identified by Hochschild is that companies have discovered a sneaky way to get us to spend more time at work: they have made the workplace a more attractive place to be…more attractive, to some employees, than their own homes.

We’re not talking about more than free lunches and wellness rooms—we’re talking about big-picture management strategies: allowing teams of employees to self-manage their work and growing office “culture” through communal ties. With these strategies in place, work becomes a place of self-determination and even friendship. Home life, by contrast, may feel littered with constraints.

When work feels so great, home life may be shortchanged. This is great for companies—and bad for families. Some employees interviewed by Hochschild were open about this dynamic: they admitted to maximizing time available for work and minimizing—through efficiency and multi-tasking—time spent at home. 

“Sometimes, Timmy’s dad forgot the clock at work; despite himself, he kept a close eye on the clock at home.”

“Even if they didn’t intend to, Gwen and John regularly applied principles of efficiency to their family life.”

“[Some parents] denied the needs of family members, as they themselves became emotional ascetics. They made do with less time, less attention, less fun, less relaxation, less understanding, and less support at home than they once imagined possible. They emotionally downsized life.”

Sure, The Time Bind isn’t exactly a beach read. Hochschild casts an unflattering light on how Amerco and its employees—and, by extension, many similar American companies and their employees—manage the time bind.

What can we do? Well, for starters, we can acknowledge that some things have changed since the original publication of this book back in 1997—even as much else has changed little. I may be a full generation older than the employees featured in The Time Bind, but my struggle with work-life balance doesn’t look entirely different. That said, we should still celebrate, very much silver-linings style, the impact of the pandemic on most white-collar workplaces, and look to protect the effective gains of flexible hours and part-time employment that some still have today.

But, most importantly, we can defend ourselves and our families against the idea that all time is money. Time spent with family is not time to be made more efficient or productive. Time spent on hobbies or with friends is not lesser than time spent at work. If your work life is anything like mine—deadlines! meetings! more deadlines!—then this understanding of time is easy to forget. Let’s do our best to remember.

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