COMING: THE 168-HOUR WEEK 

Remember all that hype heard a few years ago about extra leisure time? Fooled you, didn't they? I've written before about "The Time Famine" -- well now more progress (?). New developments offer the 168-hour week!

Stock exchanges world-wide were the first to be hit by money moving 24-hours a day, unimpeded by the need for sleep. Observant investors quickly noticed that substantial profit could be made by moving money around the world electronically while most people in your time zone were in slumberland.

More and more organizations are putting in a full day -- not only such places as hospitals, airports and jails. Such transportation companies as Federal Express and railroads and shipping lines, familiar with the overnight shift for decades, now have full staffs for early morning hours. Stock markets and news organizations around the globe today keep some staff, including research librarians, on hand to catch and process news that breaks while they, in slower-moving times, would have still been asleep.

In the past farmers went to bed early and got up earlier. Staff in new 24-hour-a-day indoor "food factories" are on hand around the clock to monitor the automatic "feeding" equipment that looks after valuable biotechnological plant life.

In the alway-dark undersea oil drilling operations, the job continues regardless of the location of the sun. Most 24-hour oil and coal processing plants now have a full complement of personnel working steadily regardless of the sunshine available. In times past fewer personnel and less time were involved. When more sophisticated space stations appear in outer space, a totally new "time zone" will be established.

Other full-day locations are computer data banks, where information is constantly gathered, processed and diseminated, regardless of the blinking of a digital clock.

Other fields are being introduced to the 168-hour week through cellular (and in Britain the Forum and Zone) phones. If an important client has a large investment portfolio in a stock that just dived on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, to retain his valuable business, you better get in touch with him regardless of the time of day or night. Computers can now be adjusted to set off sirens and flashing lights, if and when this occurs.

Both via satellite dish and computer modems, some people are, tapping into new and available learning facilities that never sleep. Because of night phone-line charges, about one-third daytime prices, a growing number of people are taking educational training and retraining during periods which in a sleepier age would never have been considered. With knowledge doubling every 18 months, those who want to cash in on new opportunities know new methods are required.

Although the human staff day or night is minimal, workerless factories in Japan and the U.S. and elsewhere keep a few humans around 24 hours a day for monitoring. The Fanuc plant, on the slopes of Mount Fuji in Japan, the night-time monitoring staff -- in this plant where robots build robots -- are robots!

Writers, long familiar with "burning the midnight oil", now can access research data banks 24 hours a day, making it easier to finish that manuscript before a morning deadline. Example: This column was written while you, quite likely, were asleep.

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