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"Quality time" (QT) is an informal reference to time spent with loved ones (e.g., close family, partners or friends) that is in some way important, special, productive or profitable. It is time that is set aside for paying full and undivided attention to the person or matter at hand. It may also refer to time spent performing some favorite activity.
"Quality time" (noun phrase) is a relatively new expression, in use since the 1970s. One of the earliest records of this phrase in print was in the Maryland (USA) newspaper The Capital, January 1973, in the article "How To Be Liberated":
The major goal of each of these role changes is to give a woman time to herself, Ms. Burton explained. "A woman's right and responsibility is to be self fulfilling," she said. She gives "quality time" rather than "quantity time" to each task, whether it be writing, cleaning the house or tending the children.Famous quotes containing the words quality and/or time:
“I am not naturally ... “A bag of wind”; yet ... I mean deliberately and decidedly “to cut” in future all my old ideas on this head. I don’t think modesty “pays.” It is a good quality in a family, it is a domestic virtue, it makes a home happy after you have got a home, but it is not potent in getting homes. It is not a money-maker, neither is it lucky in gaining a reputation. I am of the impression that gaseous bodies do better.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“So we may never
Again feel fully confident of the stratagem that bore us
And lived on a certain time after that. And it went away
Little by little, as most things do. To profit
By this mainstream is today’s chore and adventure.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)