Do you have any perfume that smells like a desk? My husband is a workaholic" (a woman's question to a salesperson).-A Glasbergen Cartoon A s a society we Americans are obsessed with time. We have always been so; it's part of our national character. In this society time is money and we always try to spend it well. We fail to understand-and often scoff at-the tradition of siesta in Italy, Spain, and Mexico. We smirk at the French practice of closing down in August and Sweden's mandated five-week-minimum vacation policy. We have never been comfortable with the abstract notion of free time. It is not in our nature to just let time pass. Unstructured time, dead time, down time, wasted time-it makes us ill at ease. We see time as our most precious commodity. We try to make the most of our time. We fill time, use time, invest and manage time. We strive to be productive with our time. We live by schedules and lists. We micromanage all our work time, much of our play time, and, increasingly, more and more of our family/private time. We have embraced Thomas Alva Edison's admonition that success is dependent upon "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." We pursue success by pouring our sweat and energy into time. We believe that successful people always have time to do something more, and unsuccessful people never have enough time to do what must be done. We have equated time with productivity and success. We desire time and covet time and our greatest fear is the loss of time. We are in a constant race with and against time.Historically Americans have always viewed the active life as morally superior. The tradition of "busyness" is part of our moral fabric; we accord kudos to those individuals who make every moment count and whose every movement is regulated by the clock. In a quintessential American way, being busy, being overworked, conveys status and self-worth. In this society, we measure meaning by productivity. And our obsession with time has always been directly connected to our addiction work. 1 Like it or not, we are "fettered to the process of work" and captives of our jobs. 2 According to Workaholics Anonymous, given the raw number of hours we put into our jobs, most of us are either active workaholics or potential workaholics. In The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850America, -1920America, (1978, historian Daniel Rogers argues that we are a nation predisposed to hard work and that the "elevation of work over leisure" is an ethos that has long permeated our lives. 3 When you add to this inherited infatuation (if not obsession) with work, time, and efficiency the particular problems of the last third of the twentieth century-the voracious demands of our jobs, the restructuring of corporate work life, stagnant salaries, the ever-increasing cost of living-an argument can be made that we are preordained to be addicted to work. Need, greed, necessity, habit, and