Play It Again Hop Off Career Treadmill And Make The Most Of Your Quality Time

You get home early. No one else is there. You’ve got half an hour all to yourself. What do you do with it?

A.) Take advantage of the extra time to make a few more business calls.

B.) Get cracking on some of those household chores.

C.) Turn on the tube.

D.) All of the above. There is no correct answer to this quiz, but there is a better one:

E.) Get out your harmonica, sit yourself down on your back steps and play “Turkey in the Straw.”

The fact is, an awful lot of Americans these days would answer D. And the second fact is, an awful lot of Americans whine an awful lot about how they just don’t have enough time to kick back and enjoy life.

In a poll conducted in January by Yankelovich Partners Inc., people were asked whether they felt they had too much, not enough or the right amount of leisure time.

A full 39 percent said they did not have enough. Only 53 percent felt they had the right amount, and 8 percent (who are these people?) said they had too much. These numbers ride on a great irony: While we may have about as much leisure time as humans ever have had, we don’t seem to know what to do with it. We either try to stuff too much stuff into it or squander it in a drooling stupor before the tube. In other words, we’ve forgotten how to play.

As Martin Kimeldorf puts it, “We’ve become consumed by the Protestant work ethic, or the workaholic syndrome, which is the 20th century version of that, and the ‘80s certainly gave full expression to it. When people work that hard, they can’t even unwind enough to enjoy their leisure. You have to consciously make an effort.”

Kimeldorf should know. He is the author of two books on the subject of leisure, the most recent titled “Serious Play” (Ten Speed Press, $11.95), and he’s working on a third.

His goal? To teach grown-ups how to recapture the wisdom of childhood.

There is a lot of disagreement about how much leisure time we actually have. Kimeldorf cites studies indicating that we have anywhere from 17 to 39 hours a week, but he is also quick to point out that “the distribution of leisure opportunities in any society is about as unequal as the distribution of wealth and power.”

But it isn’t so much how much you have, Kimeldorf says, as how you use it.

John Robinson, a sociologist at the University of Maryland and head of the Americans’ Use of Time Project who has been studying how people use their leisure time for 30 years, says that the amount of free time most people have has actually increased (by some six hours, on average) since 1965.

But “for every extra hour of free time Americans have gained since 1965, they spend an extra hour watching the tube.” Robinson says. This, friends, is not meaningful leisure, Kimeldorf says.

And, in fact, bathing in an endless wash of “information” from television and other media may be enough to make your life seem nasty and short.

So what can you do if you feel like life is rushing by insanely fast? Here are 10 ways to at least slow it down a little bit and help you keep your sanity:

1. Stop multitasking. That’s computer talk for doing several things at once - talking on a cellular phone while driving, for example. When people try to multitask, they don’t do any task well.

2. Try going for a full week without turning the stupid thing on. If you’re a typical American, you’re likely to discover that you suddenly have a lot more leisure time.

3. Don’t get hung up on your telephone. Why should you jump whenever it rings? What are you, Pavlov’s dog? If the phone interrupts you in the midst of doing something, let the answering machine pick it up.

4. Sit. Do it for a while, say half an hour, and don’t do anything else. Just relax and let your mind drift. If you start obsessing about your job, slap yourself across the face and say, “That’s quite enough of that!”

5. Listen to some music. How often do you sit down and actually listen to a piece of music without doing something else? If your answer is never, then you’ve never really listened to music.

6. Keep a journal. Take a few minutes each day to write down your thoughts or to describe something that happened to you that day. You will develop a better understanding of yourself.

7. Rediscover a childhood pleasure. When you were a kid, did you like to paint? To collect bugs? To wade in the creek and catch frogs? Why not do it now? If you have children, they can help you in this. Do what they do.

8. Have some quality time with your dog. Or cat. Or bird. Take the time to grow close.

9. Have a conversation. Take the time to really listen to someone else.

10. Be. This is sort of like No. 4, except you’re not sitting now; you’re doing whatever you happen to be doing.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Going polling Question: Do you have too much, not enough or the right amount of leisure time? Right amount: 53 percent Not enough: 39 percent Too much: 8 percent Conducted by Yankelovich Partners Inc.