Yours, mine and hours: K Narayanan on the fallacy of quality time

The concept has roots in management speak, and misunderstanding. One cannot cram all the day’s – or days’ – care into a couple of hours.

In the beginning, there was time. Then the management types came in and tagged some of it “quality time” and things began to get complicated.

Quality has been a legitimate human concern for millions of years, but it was an idea largely restricted to things: food, habitation, crafts, arts, manufactured goods. A shift occurred in the latter half of the 20th century. This is when quality-management techniques, which had until this point been restricted to the world of business, began