DUMMY NY/La Ball

• 411

Cause and Effect 237

• 4. It can be helpful to make a diagram showing the connection between the causes and the effects.

• Reading Critically

• 1. Evaluate the evidence the writer gives for the relationship between cause and effect. How does he or she prove that the cause (s) have the effect(s) in question?

2. Try to determine if there could be other causes or effects that the writer hasn't mentioned.

3. 3. Writers often confuse "correlation" for causation. Just because something

•

happens before or around another event doesn't mean that it is the cause of the event. Just because George W. Bush was president when the terrorists attacked

•

the World Trade Centers does not mean that his presidency was in any way a cause of the attack. Does the writer confuse correlation and causation?

• Reading As a Writer

• 1. Note how the writer organizes the causes and effects to keep them clear and

distinct.

• 2. Observe what devices the writer uses to demonstrate the connection between the

causes and the effects.

410 3. Examine how the writer pulls his or her ideas together in the conclusion.

• •

• • a member of the editorial staff since 1983. He is currently based at the company's London

Richard Tomkins is consumer industries editor of the Financial Times, where he has been

RICHARD TOMKINS

Old Father Time Becomes a Terror

headquarters, where he leads a team of journalists covering the consumer goods sector and • writes about consumer trends. Previously, he was the FT 's marketing correspondent and,

III from 1993 to 1999, he was a correspondent in the newspaper's New York bureau, where he covered the consumer goods sector. Earlier positions in London included writing about the

II transport sector and corporate news. Tomkins was born in Walsall, England, in 1952. His formal education ended at the age of seventeen. Before becoming a journalist, he was a

1110 casual laborer, a factory worker, a truck driver, a restaurant cashier, a civil servant, and an assistant private secretary to a government minister. He left government service in 1978 to •

hitchhike around the world, and on returning to the U.K. in 1979, joined a local newspa- per as a trainee reporter. He joined the FT as a subeditor four years later. In this selection,

• Tomkins discusses the time squeeze that many people are experiencing and offers a way to combat the problem.

•

1 It's barely 6:30 A.M. and already your stress levels are rising. You're late for a •

breakfast meeting. Your cell-phone is ringing and your pager is beeping. You have 35 messages in your e-mail, 10 calls on your Voicemail and one question on

• your mind.

2 Why was it never like this for Dick Van Dyke?

• 3

Somehow, life seemed much simpler in the 1960s. In The Dick Van Dyke Show, the classic American sitcom of the era, Rob Petrie's job as a television scriptwriter •

Introduction: paragraphs 1-8; compares the leisurely 1960s (paragraphs 1-5) with the time-stressed present.

•

4

5

6

7

8

9

Body: paragraphs 10-31 10

First cause and specific 11 effects of time stress,

paragraphs 10-14: technological innovations 12

13

14

238 CHAPTER 12 The Essay Examination

was strictly nine-to-five. It was light when he left for work and light when he got home. There was no teleconferencing during his journey from the Westchester suburbs to the TV studio in Manhattan.

At work, deadlines loomed, but there was plenty of time for banter around the office typewriter. There was no Internet, no Voicemail, no fax machine, no CNN. The nearest Petrie came to information overload was listening to a stream of wisecracks from his colleague Buddy Sorrell about Mel, the bald producer.

Meanwhile, at home, Rob's wife Laura—Mary Tyler Moore—led a life of leisure. After packing little Richie , off to school, she had little to do but gossip with Millie, the next-door neighbour, and prepare the evening meal. When Rob came home, the family sat down to dinner: then it was television, and off to bed.

Today, this kind of life seems almost unimaginable. The demands on our time seem to grow ever heavier. Technology has made work portable, allowing it to merge with our personal lives. The nine-to-five job is extinct: in the U.S. peo- ple now talk about the 24-7 job, meaning one that requires your commitment 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Home life has changed, too. Laura and Millie no longer have time for a gos- sip: they are vice-presidents at a bank. Richie's after-school hours are spent at karate classes and Chinese lessons. The only person at home any more is Buddy, who went freelance six months ago after being de-layered by Mel.

New phrases have entered the language to express the sense that we are los- ing control of our lives. "Time famine" describes the mismatch between things to do and hours to do them in, and "multi-tasking" the attempt to reconcile the two. If multi-tasking works, we achieve "time deepening," making better use of the time available: but usually it proves inadequate, resulting in "hurry sickness" and an increasingly desperate search for "life balance" as the sufferer moves closer to break-down.

It was not supposed to be this way. Technology, we thought, would make our lives easier. Machines were expected to do our work for us, leaving us with ever- increasing quantities of time to fritter away on idleness and pleasure.

But instead of liberating us, technology has enslaved us. Innovations are occurring at a bewildering rate: as many now arrive in a year as once arrived in a millennium. And as each invention arrives, it eats further into our time.

The motor car, for example, promised unimaginable levels of personal mobility. But now, traffic in cities moves more slowly than it did in the days of the horse-drawn carriage, and we waste our lives immobilized by congestion.

The aircraft promised new horizons, too. The trouble is, it delivered them. Its very existence created a demand for time-consuming journeys that we would never previously have dreamed of undertaking—the transatlantic shopping expe- dition, for example, or the trip to a convention on the other side of the world.

In most cases, technology has not saved time, but enabled us to do more things. In the home, washing machines promised to free women from the drudg- ery of the laundry. In reality, they encouraged us to change our clothes daily instead of weekly, creating seven times as much washing and ironing. Similarly, the weekly bath has been replaced by the daily shower, multiplying the hours spent on personal grooming.

Meanwhile, technology has not only allowed work to spread into our leisure time—the laptop-on-the-beach syndrome—but added the new burden of deal- ing with faxes, e-mails and Voicemails. It has also provided us with the opportu- nity to spend hours fixing software glitches on our personal computers or filling our heads with useless information from the Internet.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

• •

Cause and Effect 239

• 15 Technology apart, the Internet points the way to a second reason why we

feel so time-pressed: the information explosion. Second cause and specific

effects, paragraphs 15 - 18:

• 16 A couple of centuries ago, nearly all the world's accumulated learning could the information explosion

be contained in the heads of a few philosophers. Today, those heads could not

• hope to accommodate more than a tiny fraction of the information generated in a single day.

III 17 News, facts and opinions pour in from every corner of the world. The televi- sion set offers 150 channels. There are millions of Internet sites. Magazines, •

books and CD-Roms proliferate.

18 "In the whole world of scholarship, there were only a handful of scientific

• journals in the 18th century, and the publication of a book was an event," says Edward Wilson, honorary curator in entymology at Harvard University's

• museum of comparative zoology. "Now, I find myself subscribing to 60 or 70 jour- nals or magazines just to keep me up with what amounts to a minute proportion

• 19

of the expanding frontiers of scholarship." There is another reason for our increased stress levels, too: rising prosperity. Third cause and specific

• As ever-larger quantities of goods and services are produced, they have to be con- effects: rising prosperity sumed. Driven on by advertising, we do our best to oblige: we buy more, travel

• more and play more, but we struggle to keep up. So we suffer from what Wilson calls discontent with super abundance—the confusion of endless choice.

• 20 Of course, not everyone is overstressed. "It's a convenient shorthand to say Distribution of time stress,

we're all time-starved, but we have to remember that it only applies to, say, half paragraphs 20 -26

• the population," says Michael Willmott, director of the Future Foundation, a London research company.

MI 21 "You've got people retiring early, you've got the unemployed, you've got other people maybe only peripherally involved in the economy who don't have • this situation at all. If you're unemployed, your problem is that you've got too

much time, not too little." • 22 Paul Edwards, chairman of the London-based Henley Centre forecasting

group, points out that the feeling of pressures can also be exaggerated, or self- imposed. "Everyone talks about it so much that about 50 percent of unemployed

4110 or retired people will tell you they never have enough time to get things done," he says. "It's almost got to the point where there's stress envy. If you're not

• stressed, you're not succeeding. Everyone wants to have a little bit of this stress to show they're an important person."

23 There is another aspect to all of this too. Hour-by-hour logs kept by thou- sands of volunteers over the decades have shown that, in the U.K., working hours

• have risen only slightly in the last 10 years, and in the U.S., they have actually fallen—even for those in professional and executive jobs, where the perceptions IIII of stress are highest.

24 In the U.S., John Robinson, professor of sociology at the University of

• Maryland, and Geoffrey Godbey, professor of leisure studies at Penn State University, both time-use experts, found that, since the mid-1960s, the average

411 American had gained five hours a week in free time—that is, time left after work- ing, sleeping, commuting, caring for children and doing the chores. •

25 The gains, however, were unevenly distributed. The people who benefited the most were singles and empty-nesters. Those who gained the least—less than

• an hour—were working couples with pre-school children, perhaps reflecting the trend for parents to spend more time nurturing their offspring. le 26 There is, of course, a gender issue here, too. Advances in household appli- ances may have encouraged women to take paying jobs: but as we have already

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

First general effect of time 27 stress, paragraphs 27-28:

maximizing pleasure in minimum time

28

Conclusion: paragraphs 32-36; sources of time

stress; author's solution to the problem

Second general effect: buying time

Third general effect: re-evaluating jobs, long

work hours

33

34

35

36

29

30

31

32

240 CHAPTER 12 The Essay Examination

noted, technology did not end household chores. As a result, we see appalling inequalities in the distribution of free time between the sexes. According to the Henley Centre, working fathers in the U.K. average 48 hours of free time a week. Working mothers get 14.

Inequalities apart, the perception of the time famine is widespread, and has provoked a variety of reactions. One is an attempt to gain the largest possible amount of satisfaction from the smallest possible investment of time. People today want fast food, sound bytes and instant gratification. And they become upset when time is wasted.

"People talk about quality time. They want perfect moments," says the Henley Centre's Edwards. "If you take your kids to a movie and McDonald's and it's not perfect, you've wasted an afternoon, and it's a sense that you've lost some- thing precious. If you lose some money you can earn some more, but if you waste time you can never get it back."

People are also trying to buy time. Anything that helps streamline our lives is a growth market. One example is what Americans call concierge services— domestic help, child care, gardening and decorating. And on-line retailers are seeing big increases in sales—though not, as yet, profits.

A third reaction to time famine has been the growth of the work-life debate. You hear more about people taking early retirement or giving up high pressure jobs in favour of occupations with shorter working hours. And bodies such as Britain's National Work-Life Forum have sprung up, urging employers to end the long-hours culture among managers—"presenteeism"—and to adopt family- friendly working policies.

The trouble with all these reactions is that liberating time—whether by mak- ing better use of it, buying it from others or reducing the amount spent at work—is futile if the hours gained are immediately diverted to other purposes.

As Godbey points out, the stress we feel arises not from a shortage of time, but from the surfeit of things we try to cram into it. "It's the kid in the candy store," he says. "There's just so many good things to do. The array of choices is stunning. Our free time is increasing, but not as fast as our sense of the necessary."

A more successful remedy may lie in understanding the problem rather than evading it.

Before the industrial revolution, people lived in small communities with limited communications. Within the confines of their village, they could reason- ably expect to know everything that was to be known, see everything that was to be seen, and do everything that was to be done.

Today, being curious by nature, we are still trying to do the same. But the global village is a world of limitless possibilities, and we can never achieve our aim.

It is not more time we need: it is fewer desires. We need to switch off the cell- phone and leave the children to play by themselves. We need to buy less, read less and travel less. We need to set boundaries for ourselves, or be doomed to mounting despair.

Discussion Questions

1. Identify the thesis statement of this essay and suggest why it is located at this spot. 2. The following sentence appears in paragraph 4: "There is no Internet, no

Voicemail, no fax machine, no CNN." What does the structure of this sentence accomplish?