And there is more proof: A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows 21 percent of children 9 to 13 don't engage in any physical activity in their free time. A study by Steelcase showed 61 percent of Americans don't use all their allotted vacation days.

Day, who is director of the Family Studies Center at BYU, said social scientists haven't done much to help families figure out how to scale back. The topic of the Family Expo conference was Mosiah 4:27: "And see that all these things are done in wisdom and in order ... " But Day cited the rest of the passage: "For it is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength."

Day said during his speech at the conference that he didn't have any answers to the question, "How does my life get away from me?" He only knows that it's been several years since he took a vacation that didn't involve spending at least part of the week in meetings. He knows it is time to start a discussion about how to do things differently. To that end, he said, he throws out no solutions, but a few things to think about.

Day asked: Do we attempt to schedule our lives with little thought to our core life's mission? Do we allow others (including our children) to fill our every moment? Do we somehow fail to realize that free time is key to well-being? "Free time," he repeated. "True, pure leisure time."

When our time is fragmented and every second is spoken for, then we have nothing to fall back on, he said. We have no resiliency for the inevitable trials of life.

A family member gets sick. A child goes astray. Then what? Day said, "You don't have the ability to meet any more obligations. So how do you go about protecting your family?"

The parents in overcommitted families have a hard time choosing between activities that are essential, urgent, good and discretionary, Day said. He and his wife are currently working on making a family flag. It's an exercise he often assigns his students. The Days' flag will represent their core beliefs and will feature a motto, and it will remind them to shed themselves of the things in life that are good but not essential.

We struggle for a variety of reasons, Day believes. Sometimes we make activities more time-consuming than they need to be. "We are told to magnify our callings," Day concedes. "But people misinterpret what magnify is." How wise is it to magnify some aspect of your work that overloads your time with relatively meaningless tasks?

There is a very real pressure to do well, he added. "We worry about being judged." But he believes we put pressure on ourselves when we compare ourselves to others — by choosing each friend's outstanding attribute to judge ourselves against. In other words, we compare our cooking to the best cook we know and we compare our yard to the yard of the best gardener we know.