In contemporary life, many people claim to spend extreme lengths of time at the office, such assertions being a form of self-flattery. In her engaging 2010 book “168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think,” Laura Vanderkam reports that white-collar Americans dramatically overestimate how much they work: “Research shows that almost no one claiming to work a 70-hour week actually is doing so.” Work, she muses, “has become a competitive sport,” in which people boast of long hours in the way that fishermen boast of larger fish than they actually caught. Vanderkam’s book brings home an important point: Stop making excuses based on time. If there’s something you need to accomplish, there are enough hours in the day – get organized and use your time wisely.
Gregg Easterbrook, in one of the many observant asides that dot his NFL column. I’m way more interested in the asides than in the NFL.