How did we get so busy?

I don't understand how you can expect to work less hours in a capitalist economy. Basically the whole point is to make money and if you're freeing up time that means you're more productive for other work.

If my job is to do a, b, and c and using technology I make it so I only have to spend time doing a, then an employer is going to find something for me to do. Could be busy work, could be letting someone go and giving me their job to save money.

If I don't they'll find someone else who will.

Technological advances that were suppose to help the employee work less, has only helped business run at lower operating costs.

You should re-calibrate your winning condition to "spends the most time relaxing" instead of "makes the most money".

Really, you should do whatever you like, but part of the problem is that our collective winning condition is based on a number that has, after a certain point, little relation to happiness.

Personally, I try to optimize my happiness. I'm not doing that great a job though because I still spend more than 40 hours working a week. I think my ideal would be to spend 25-ish hours at work and the rest on "leisure"[1] activities.

The nobel economist who invented the GNP (predecessor to GDP) even warned that "the welfare of a nation can...scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income"[2]. Yet here we are 80 some odd years later and it seems the only thing that matters for a nation is GDP growth and the only thing that matters for a person is salary.

Those are nice things to track, but they don't tell you anything about the welfare and happiness of people. Trying to optimize GDP/earnings growth is almost entirely the reason the US doesn't have universal health care, or a higher minimum wage, or mandated child-care leave or vacation leave, etc. We're too scared that it might impact a number without any regard to the actual humans who have to slave away in misery* to attain it. We need to recalibrate our winning conditions to something more, well, humane.

* - misery is mostly hyperbole, fwiw

[1] - leisure activities for me would be a side business, cycling, hiking, gardening/farming, but they could really be anything. [2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Kuznets

Close. Yes, they keep the same date, but the common use of the date is the _last_ day it should be available for sale, so the day before the next issue is out. This lets bookstores and newsstands throw out everything with a date before today, no matter the frequency of publication. For weekly magazines, it is thus six days in the future. Monthly magazine need give only the month, and that does correspond to when it should be sold.

Gains in productivity don't help the working class much; they mostly help the owners of companies. Those owners have no financial incentive to reduce working hours to compensate for gains in productivity when they could rather cut half their workforce and tell the remaining workers they need to work harder/longer because there is more competition for their jobs now.

Those who predicted a "leisure society" back in the 1950s obviously didn't realize Marx predicted the opposite would happen a century earlier.