In the beginning, there was time.
And then the management types came in and made it “quality time”.
This may sound like one of the glib statements that pop up on social media from time to time, but there’s a certain amount of truth to it.
Quality has been a legitimate human concern for as long as humans have existed, but it was mostly restricted to made things – manufactured goods, crafts, art, music, literature – at least until the latter half of the 20th century. That was when quality management techniques that had been restricted to the world of business began seeping through to the way we handled our personal lives and relationships.
The idea of applying quality management principles from the business world to personal life began to gain traction in the latter half of the 20th century, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s. This period saw a growing interest in self-improvement, personal development, and the application of management techniques to various aspects of life beyond the workplace. The rise of lifestyle coaching, wellness programs, and the broader wellness movement further contributed to the integration of quality management principles into personal life. People started setting goals, measuring progress, and talking about continuous improvements in quality in various aspects of their personal lives. In some areas, like health and personal finances, this made a lot of sense. But when it came to relationships, it got complicated.
One of the earliest appearances of the term “Quality Time” came during the height of the Women’s Lib Movement. The US newspaper The Citadel published a story called How To Be Liberated in January 1973, where one respondent was quoted as saying “A woman's right and responsibility is to be self-fulfilling," and that she gave ‘quality time’ instead of ‘quantity time’ to each task -whether it was writing, parenting, or doing household work.
This was around the time the developmental psychologist Dr K Alison Clarke Stewart published a landmark study on the cognitive and social development of babies – she found that when mothers spent more time making eye contact and talked to them, babies did better. Clarke Stewart called this time spent ‘high quality time’ The study made its way into popular consciousness, but soon lost all nuance, becoming time spent giving all of one's attention to someone who is close.
But attention is something that is easier to give to an activity than to people, isn’t it? You can be completely absorbed in a book or a movie or a tb show, you can ignore the world while involved in a hobby or work, but its not so easy to do that with people, even the ones you love. But the idea of quality time is convenient and seductive in a world where people are expected to work 60 hours a week (or 70, if we listen to Mr Narayana Murthy), to be on call 24x7, to take conference calls late in to the night or early in the morning, where organizations barely even pay lip service to the concept of work-life balance. The idea that you can cram all the day's care and love and affection and attention to a couple of hours - especially when it comes to taking care of children (or aging parents) where both husband and wife work full time jobs, conjures up an illusion that we can do it all – if we just managed our time better.
To misquote the author Terry Pratchett, as soon as you see human interaction as something to be measured, it will not measure up. You can earmark an hour every day to give your undivided attention to a child or a friend or a partner, but what are the odds that they are in a position to receive it? Human beings are waveforms that are almost always out of phase with each other. And what we remember as the best moments of our lives, arise more from serendipity than design. A baby’s smile and a grip of a tiny hand on your finger; the sweetness of a lovers unexpected kiss; the companionable silence on 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 the view from a mountaintop after an exhausting climb – these are not moments that can be engineered, they happen when they happen, not because you desire them to happen.
In the end, quality time happens as an outcome of quantity time. Its 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.