On average, women spend almost 12 minutes showering--I found this fascinating statistic in a recent Parenting article that goes on to suggest that the average woman could add precious minutes to her day by streamlining her morning ablutions. Suggestions include limiting the number of cleansing solutions applied, the number of body parts to which those solutions are applied, and the number of minutes spent rinsing said solutions off said parts. In other words: shower smarter, not harder.

Does anyone else find it ironic that, at the end of the century that brought us air travel, dishwashers, and fax machines, we are so pressed for time there is an audience for articles on how to bathe more efficiently?

The pressure to do more and better with less and fewer, which began in earnest with the corporate layoffs and downsizings of the 80s, seems only to have broadened its scope in the strong economy and full employment of the 90s. First we became One Minute Managers, then we became One Minute Parents. Steven Covey, whose book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People spent several years on national best seller lists, recently brought his methods home with The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families.

But before we all start timing our showers, perhaps we should contemplate what it means to "work smarter" in the age of information and two-earner families.

80 PERCENT OF A SAMPLE OF MORE THAN 1,300 MANAGERS EXPERIENCED AN INCREASED WORKLOAD IN THE PAST TWO YEARS AND MORE THAN HALF ALWAYS WORKED IN EXCESS OF THEIR OFFICIAL HOURS.

Smarter or dumber, many of us are working longer than we used to. Corporate restructurings over the past decade contributed significantly to increased workloads. A University of Michigan professor who studied downsizings at 30 industrial companies found that nearly half of the surviving managers in those organizations reported working "a great deal more" after the layoffs than before. After restructuring, says a consultant who helps organizations trim their management ranks, "'work smarter' is usually a euphemism for 'work harder next week.'"

For many who work in corporations concerned about takeovers or foreign competition, the post-reorg pressure never let up. Long hours that were once reserved for crises have become standard, and there may be an entire generation of young managers that has never known a 40-hour work week. A Fortune readers survey conducted in 1995 found respondents spent, on average, 57 hours a week working and commuting.

IN 1969, LABOR FORCE PARTICIPANTS SPENT 889 HOURS DOING HOUSEHOLD WORK. IN 1987, LABOR FORCE PARTICIPANTS SPENT AN AVERAGE OF 888 HOURS DOING HOUSEHOLD WORK.

Of course, paid work is only half the story. At home, the time spent in domestic labor--cooking, cleaning, laundry, home maintenance, child care--has remained fairly constant, at right around 50 hours per week, since the beginning of the century. Many of the "labor-saving" devices we have acquired in the intervening years have apparently served only to increase the amount of time given over to household work, either by creating new tasks (cleaning the refrigerator, driving to the supermarket) or by raising standards (laundering clothes after one wearing) and expectations (gourmet meals).

As sociologist Stephanie Koontz says in her book The Way We Really Are, "There's no nonstressful way to divide three full-time jobs between two individuals."

Because most families can no longer afford to have one adult at home in the form of a housewife, these "second-shift" hours--so named by sociologist Arlie Hochschild--must be added on top of our already overextended work week. In her most recent book, The Time Bind, Hochschild describes the vicious circle this overload has created. The longer our hours at work, the more stressful our lives at home; the more stressful our lives at home, the more hours we spend at work.

BETWEEN 1960 AND 1986 PARENTAL TIME AVAILABLE TO CHILDREN IN AN AVERAGE WEEK DECREASED TEN HOURS.

"Kids are highly stressed," according to a psychologist quoted in a recent Fortune article titled "Is Your Family Wrecking Your Career?" So are parents, says another therapist who heads a family assistance program for a large corporation: "I keep hearing that employees are being asked to work smarter, work harder. Their supervisors keep thinking it is an issue of time management."

But is it? Effectiveness guru Steven Covey recommends techniques like "multitasking"--reading business articles while waiting in the airport or filling out expense reports on the flight home--for overcoming "time crunch frustrations." Personally, though, I don't know anyone who isn't already doing this kind of thing. My friend Karen, mother of two and full-time reference librarian at Mary Washington College, works out Internet search strategies in her head while waiting for traffic lights. I myself am writing this sentence while spelling "h-e-l-i-c-o-p-t-e-r" for my four-year-old son.

With our Franklin Planners and Claris Organizers, we're all scheduled and prioritized within an inch of our lives, but it doesn't seem to be helping. Last night at the school board meeting I sat next to a fellow parent and board member who surveyed her leather-bound to-do list with dismay. "Something's wrong here," she said. "I've got 14 tasks and they're all "A"s. My own electronic organizer lets me color-code my tasks: red is for work, blue is for personal, green is for "friends/family." But it gives me no help whatsoever in deciding whether the red "finish Juggle article" should take precedence over the green "Eliot's Book Day costume" (he wants to go as The Little Engine That Could). I don't even bother listing blue ones.

ACCORDING TO A REPORT IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, THE COST OF THE TIME LOST WHILE 60 MILLION PC USERS BOOT THEIR COMPUTERS EACH DAY MAY BE CLOSE TO $25 BILLION A YEAR.

The manufacturers of "personal productivity tools" like cellular phones, beepers, and palm-sized computers, assure us that technology can help us work smarter. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that this isn't necessarily so. Even discounting all those hours lost to booting up (which PC World's Stephen Manes suggests could be profitably put to use by simultaneously waiting on hold for tech support), office technology, like home appliances, seems only to have increased the frenzied pace.

Now instead of leaving our letters for the typing pool at the end of the day, we type and e-mail our own correspondence--and often have replies that require action before we've had a chance to shut down the computer and head home for dinner. When we finally do, instead of putting something in the oven and letting it simmer while we read the paper or help the kids with their homework, we microwave something in a span of time that barely allows for setting the table so that we can hurry off to soccer practice and a little multitasking with the laptop and cell phone.

49 PERCENT OF EMPLOYEES AND MANAGERS BELIEVE SOCIETY PUTS TOO MUCH EMPHASIS ON WORK AND NOT ENOUGH ON LEISURE. TEN YEARS AGO, ONLY 28 PERCENT FELT THAT WAY.

Although more companies are offering programs like flextime and onsite childcare, such "family-friendly" policies seem to provide little relief for the time-impoverished. Arlie Hochschild, in her three-year study of a Fortune 500 company that wondered why more employees weren't taking advantage of its seemingly generous family-center benefit programs, found an unspoken but well understood long-hour work culture hiding beneath the friendly policies. As long as "face time" remains a primary measure of productivity and commitment, she concludes, there is little appeal to shorter or more flexible hours for employees who are afraid that the long hours they are now working may disappear entirely.

There are hopeful signs, however, that face-time, and indeed hours, days, and months, are on their way out as the natural measure of work. In an information economy, the raw material is ideas, and the value of an idea is qualitative, not quantitative.

Companies that have experimented with shorter work schedules--cutting the work week to 30 hours while paying employees for 40--have found that productivity actually increases with the condensed week. They are able to attract more highly qualified workers who see the extra time as a major benefit. And they find that workers who are less harried and better able to balance work and family life simply do better work.

Recent advances in behavioral and cognitive science are beginning to explain what certain Eastern religions and non-industrial cultures have always known: that our experience of time is not something that can be measured in uniform units like minutes or hours. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who studies states of optimal experience, finds that people experiencing "flow"--a state of deep concentration and productivity--invariably report losing track of time during the experience. And we don't need studies to tell us how states of non-optimal experience--boredom or stress--make minutes seem like hours.

As we learn more about where creative ideas come from and how generative thinking is stimulated--and businesses begin to incorporate that knowledge into the structure and design of work--we may once again approach the seamless quality of the pre-industrial age, when "work" was not something separate from "life."

We may discover that working smarter doesn't look--or feel--like working at all. Sometimes it looks like staring out the window, talking to a child, baking bread--or taking a very long shower.

DEBRA WIERENGA is a time-starved writer and mother of three.