Where Do People Find The Time?

Excellent talk by Clay Shirky, author and graduate professor at NYU. I just finished his latest book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

I love his concept of excess time or "cognitive surplus."

"Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time. And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV."

And how much cognitive surplus do we have? More than you might think!

"So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the accumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought."

"And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus."

So, how are you spending and investing your time? Are you learning and participating and conversing and sharing and collaborating and growing? What are your goals for personal and professional development this year? What are you contributing at work and to those who are closest to you? Are you leaving the world a better place by your presence?

Where do people find the time? I find that I always have time for what's important to me. The world is waiting for our contribution. We have one solitary life. Let's make the most of every day!