The business writer Erin Meyer places the United States among the peach cultures described by Fons Trompenaars. In them people “share information about themselves, and ask personal questions of those they hardly know.” Further in, “you may suddenly get to the hard pit protecting someone’s real, or at least more private, self.”
MIT’s office for international students quotes the same image. Americans are “soft on the outside, easy to approach, but the pit is harder.”
Let’s do lunch. Let’s get coffee sometime. By 1985 a Los Angeles Times columnist was already joking about the first: “Let’s do lunch sometime, have your girl call my girl.”
MIT’s office for international students explains such invitations to new arrivals. An American writer on the page says that when people say “Let’s get lunch!” it “seems like they don’t really mean it.” If an American is serious, “they will propose a time and place.”
In August 2015 The New York Times published a long report on working life at Amazon. The Times reported that “emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered.”
Jeff Bezos responded in a memo to staff: “The article doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day.”
In 2012 Leslie Perlow of Harvard Business School published Sleeping with Your Smartphone. In her survey of about 1,600 managers and professionals, 70 percent checked their smartphone within an hour of getting up. “26 percent confessed to sleeping with their smartphones.”
“Our respondents were caught in what we have come to call the cycle of responsiveness.” Those who do not keep up “risk being branded as less committed to their work.”
At the Boston Consulting Group, Perlow tested planned, predictable time off for consultants. After four years more than nine hundred teams in thirty countries had taken part.
In 2021 four researchers from Ohio State, Rutgers and Harvard published studies on people who agree with statements like “Time spent on leisure activities is often wasted time.” Such people enjoyed leisure less. They also reported lower happiness and more depression, anxiety and stress.
Their advice was practical. “If leisure can be framed as having some kind of productive goal, that helps people who think leisure is wasteful,” said Rebecca Reczek of Ohio State.
On July 21, 1748, Benjamin Franklin wrote “Advice to a Young Tradesman,” addressed to “my Friend A. B.” Early in the piece he writes: “Remember that Time is Money.” A man who can earn ten shillings a day and “sits idle one half of that Day” has lost more than the sixpence he spent on amusement. “He has really spent or rather thrown away Five Shillings besides.”
The phrase itself is older. It was in print by 1719.
In October 2021 Google added a new kind of event to Google Calendar, called Focus time. Google’s announcement said it lets users of some paid Google Workspace plans “block out and protect your time for heads-down individual work.” A Focus time block can “automatically decline conflicting events.”
An additional purpose of follow up in the American context is to signal to the other parties that the agreement is still of high priority. No or late follow up can be interpreted as a signal that the agreement is no longer important to the other party.
Americans place a very high value on flexibility, on the ability to respond to the needs of the market, of customers, of changing situations. Big decisions are broken down into smaller ones. Isolating individual decisions allows for rapid reaction as well as rapid revision. Up to the minute overview of agreements is essential.
Follow-up is omnipresent in American life. The preference setting of email programs, social network accounts, as well as information sources can be set so that information is pushed immediately to the user.
Most doctors offices send out reminders to patients of their upcoming appointments via traditional mail, email and even voicemail. When one turns on the television five minutes prior to the show they want to watch, one sees a reminder indicating that the program they are want to watch is about to be shown. Banks offer depositors the option of immediate notification via email or text message of any changes to their balance.
Follow-up is in many cases simply a reminder.
On December 19, 1732 Benjamin Franklin first published Poor Richard’s Almanack. This book was filled with proverbs and advice, and was so popular that it was continuously published for 25 years, selling an average of 10,000 copies per year.
Many of the proverbs and pieces of advice dealt with time, particularly time management. Some of the best known time proverbs from this book include:
Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Lost Time is never found again.
He that wastes idly a Groat’s worth of his Time per Day, one day with another, wastes the Privilege of using each Day.
If you have time, don’t wait for time.
Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure.
Ah, simple Man! When a boy two precious jewels were given thee, Time, and good Advice; one thou hast lost, and the other thrown away.
Dost thou love Life? Then do not squander Time; for that’s the Stuff Life is made of.