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In the beginning, there was time. Then the management types came in and tagged some of it “quality time” and things began to get complicated.
Quality has been a legitimate human concern for millions of years, but it was an idea largely restricted to things: food, habitation, crafts, arts, manufactured goods. A shift occurred in the latter half of the 20th century. This is when quality-management techniques, which had until this point been restricted to the world of business, began to seep into how we viewed, and conducted, our personal lives and relationships.
The osmosis deepened in the latter half of the 20th century, particularly during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s — a period that saw a growing interest in self-improvement, personal development, and the application of management techniques to various aspects of life beyond the workplace. This was, after all, the era of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, of Wayne Dyer’s Erroneous Zones and Tony Robbins’s Unlimited Power.
The commercial success of lifestyle coaching, personality development, wellness programmes and the broader wellness movement contributed to the deep integration of quality-management principles into personal life. “Self-help” — which is really the business of feeding the individual templated formulae as they struggle to navigate an increasingly complex life — began its boom (it has since metastasised into a $41.2 billion industry as of 2023, according to estimates by the research firm Custom Market Insights).
People started setting goals and measuring progress in line with metrics that had evolved in and for the boardroom. In keeping with the hyper-capitalist idea of infinite growth, we began, in our personal lives, to talk of “continuous improvement”.
In some areas, such as health and personal finances, this made a lot of sense. It is when we brought those formulae to bear on our relationships that things began to get more complicated.
One of the earliest instances of the use of the term “quality time” occurred at the height of the women’s liberation movement. In January 1973, the Maryland newspaper The Capital published a story headlined How To Be Liberated. In response to that pivotal question, one respondent was quoted as saying: “A woman’s right and responsibility is to be self-fulfilling”, and the respondent advised women to allocate “quality time” instead of “quantity time” to each task, whether it was writing, parenting or household work.
Around this time, the distinguished developmental psychologist K Alison Clarke-Stewart published a landmark study on the cognitive and social development of babies. When mothers spent more time making eye contact and talking to them, her study reported, babies reported better levels of cognitive and social development. Clarke-Stewart called this time spent with the infant “high-quality time” The study made its way into popular consciousness, but soon lost all nuance, and the idea of “quality time” caught on: defined as time spent giving all of one’s attention to a loved one.
But attention is easier to give to an activity than to a person, isn’t it? One can be completely absorbed in a book, a film, or a TV show, and one can ignore the world while involved in a hobby or in work, but it is not so easy to do that while engaging with people, even the ones we love.
What the idea of “quality time” became, then, was a way to offer less quantity, on the promise of higher value that could not be delivered.
The idea remains convenient and seductive in a world where people are expected to work 60 hours a week (or 70, if we heed some advice), compels people to be on call for work 24×7, and frowns if they are on call for loved ones during the expanding and intensifying “work day”.
In such a world, it has become convenient to peddle the notion that one can cram all the day’s (or days’) care, love and affection into a couple of hours; offer some concentrated parenting and care-giving, as it were. How else would husband and wife, daughter and son, sibling and friend, “do it all”?
To misquote the author Terry Pratchett, as soon as you see human interaction as something to be measured, it will not measure up. One can earmark an hour every day to give undivided attention to a child or friend or partner, but what are the odds that they will be in a position to receive it?
Human beings are waveforms that are almost always out of phase with each other. What we tend to remember as the best moments of our lives, arise more from serendipity than design. A baby’s grin at a sudden downpour; an afternoon of nothing at the beach; the companionable silence of a Sunday morning with a partner over coffee and the newspaper, the casual conversation of a group of friends at a college canteen; even the sudden moments of exaltation while listening to a piece of music or taking in the view from a mountaintop after an exhausting climb. These are not moments that can be engineered. They happen when they happen, and not because one scheduled them.
In the end, quality time happens as an outcome of quantity time. It is not a substitute. As Clarke-Stewart noted, “…to be able to have that high-quality time, you have to invest a certain amount of pure time.”
We tend to forget that part.
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