Are Time-Saving Devices Eating Up Our Time?

Do you realize that people who don’t live in high-tech societies rarely say “I don’t have time for that.” In the June issue of “The Costco Connection” there was a great article discussing both sides of the issue of whether timesaving devices (e.g. computers, emails, text messaging, DVR) actually save us time.

On the side of they do, the expert, Jennifer DeLeo of PC Magazine shared her thoughts. She thought email was much better than snail mail because messages get sent instantly and are received moments later. There are programs that automatically ding you for appointments. You can record television programs and then fast forward through the commercials when you watch them. GPS systems make sure that you don’t get lost and spend extra time trying to find where you’re going. These are all very good points.

But listen to the other side of the story provided by Lowell Monke who teaches at Ohio’s Wittenberg University. There is a lot of time overhead in learning new software to become more productive. Often times there are software glitches that end up costing you more time than if you did something the old-fashion way. The gadgets themselves are so expensive, requiring you to work more hours to pay for them. Email sounds like a boon but there is a lot of time used up in going through all of the garbage, that which you don’t want to read. We may have junk mail in our snail mail mailboxes, but I don’t think we ever get as much as what ends up in our email boxes. I think Lowell’s greatest point was “who benefits from all this supposed time-saving we’re doing?” It may be your boss or it may be the grocery store where now you’re scanning your own items at the cash register and bagging them to boot.

The reason this article caught my eye was in my profession, nutrition, people are constantly talking about how they don’t have the time to cook a decent meal. Food manufacturers have an answer for that problem – prepackaged salads, foods you just pop into the microwave oven, grocery-store takeout. Why are people resorting to fast food for dinner when they could be having a perfectly healthy meal that can be eaten at the kitchen table rather than at your car’s dashboard?

Become “assemblers” where you don’t have to cook anything. You basically take prepackaged foods and put them together in various ways. Go to the freezer section and get a package of grilled chicken strips. Then go to the produce department and pick out a package of lettuce that can even contain the salad dressing. While you’re there, get a package of sunflower seeds or roasted soy nuts. If your lettuce doesn’t have salad dressing, go down the salad dressing aisle and pick out your favorite flavor. Now go down the baking aisle and get a package of dried cranberries or raisins. You now have all the makings of a grilled chicken salad with the trimmings.

Since that bag of chicken strips is going to be more than you need for that dinner, also pick up a package of fresh pasta in the deli section so you can make a chicken pasta meal the next night. If you have leftover lettuce, you can accompany it with a salad. If not, get some broccoli in the produce section and some Parmesan cheese in the cheese department and now you’ve got a chicken broccoli pasta dinner.

You don’t even have to plan ahead for these dinners. Instead of waiting in a line at a fast food drive-up window, pop into your local grocery store and pick up the fixings for dinner.