theirhigherWhy is everyone so busy

Why is everyone so busy?

Time poverty is a problem partlyof perception and partlyof distribution

THE predictions sounded l ike promises: in the future,working hours would be short andvacations long. “Our grandchi ldren”, reckoned John Maynard Keynes in 1930,would workaround“three hours a day”—and probably only by choice.Economic progress andtechnological advances had already shrunk working hours considerably by his day,andthere was no reason to bel ieve this trend would not continue.Whizzy cars and ever moretime-saving tools and appl iances guaranteed more speed and less drudgery in al l parts ofl ife.Social psychologists began to fret:whatever would people do with al l their free time?This has not turned out to be one of the world’s more pressing problems.Everybody,everywhere seems to be busy. In the corporate world,a“perennial time-scarcity problem”affl icts executives al l over the globe,and the matter has only grown more acute in recentyears,say analysts at McKinsey,a consultancy firm.These feel ings are especial ly profoundamong working parents.As for al l those time-saving gizmos,many people grumble thatthese bits of wizardry chew up far too much of their days,whether they are mouldering intraffic,navigating robotic voice-messaging systems or scything away at e-mai l—sometimesal l at once.

Tick, tock

Why do people feel so rushed?Part of this is a perception problem.On average,people inrich countries have more leisure time than they used to.This is particularly true in Europe,but even in America leisure time has been inching up since 1965,when formal nationaltime-use surveys began.American men toi l for pay nearly 12 hours less per week,onaverage, than they did 40 years ago—a fal l that includes al l work-related activities,such ascommuting and water-cooler breaks.Women’s paid work has risen a lot over this period,buttheirtime in unpaid work, l ike cooking and cleaning,has fal len even more dramatical ly,thanks in part to dishwashers,washing machines,microwaves and other modernconveniences,and also to the fact that men shift themselves a l ittle more around the housethan they used to.

The problem, then, is less how much time people have than how they see it.Ever since aclockwas first used to synchronise labour in the 18th century, time has been understood inrelation to money.Once hours are financial ly quantified,people worry more about wasting,saving or using them profitably.When economies grow and incomes rise,everyone’s timebecomes more valuable.And the more valuable something becomes, the scarcer it seems.Individual istic cultures,which emphasise achievement over affi l iation, help cultivate thistime-is-money mindset.This creates an urgency to make every moment count,notes HarryTriandis,a social psychologist at the University of Il l inois.Larger,wealthy cities,with theirhigher wage rates and soaring costs of l iving, raise the value of people’s time further sti l l .New Yorkers are thriftier with their minutes—and more harried—than residents of Nairobi .London’s pedestrians are swifter than those in Lima.The tempo of l ife in rich countries isfaster than that of poor countries.Afast pace leaves most people feel ing rushed. “Our senseof time”,observed Wi l l iam James in his 1890 masterwork, “The Principles of Psychology”,“seems subject to the law of contrast.”

When people see their time in terms of money, they often grow stingywith the former tomaximise the latter.Workers who are paid by the hour volunteer less of their time and tend tofeel more antsy when they are not working. In an experiment carried out by Sanford DeVoe

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and Jul ian House at the University of Toronto, two different groups of people were asked tol isten to the same passage of music—the first 86 seconds of“The Flower Duet” from theopera“Lakmé”.Before the song,one group was asked to gauge their hourly wage.Theparticipants who made this calculation ended up feel ing less happy and more impatient whi lethe music was playing. “They wanted to get to the end of the experiment to do somethingthat was more profitable,”Mr DeVoe explains.

The relationship between time,money and anxiety is something Gary S.Becker noticed inAmerica’s post-war boom years.Though economic progress and higher wages had raisedeveryone’s standard of l iving, the hours of“free” time Americans had been promised hadcome to nought. “If anything, time is used more careful ly today than a century ago,”he notedin 1965.He found that when people are paid more to work, they tend to work longer hours,because working becomes a more profitable use of time.So the rising value of work timeputs pressure on al l time.Leisure time starts to seem more stressful ,as people feelcompel led to use it wisely or not at al l .

The harried leisure class

That economic prosperity would create feel ings of time poverty looked a l ittle odd in the1960s,given al l those new time-saving blenders and lawnmowers.But there is a distinctcorrelation between privi lege and pressure. In part, this is a conundrum of wealth: thoughpeople may be earning more money to spend, they are not simultaneously earning moretime to spend it in.This makes time—that frustratingly finite,unrenewable resource—feelmore precious.

The struggle to“have it al l”may be a fairly privi leged modern chal lenge.But it bears notingthat even in professional dual-income households,mothers sti l l handle the l ion’s share ofparenting—particularly the dai ly, routine jobs that never feel finished.Attentive fathershandle more of the enjoyable tasks,such as taking chi ldren to games and playing sports,whi le mothers are stuckwith most of the feeding,cleaning and nagging.Though women doless work around the house than they used to, thejobs they do tend to be the never-endingones, l ike tidying,cooking and laundry.Wel l-educated men chip in far more than theirfathersever did,and more than their less-educated peers,but sti l l put in only half as much time aswomen do.And men tend to do the discrete tasks that are more easi ly crossed off l ists,suchas mowing lawns orfixing things round the house.Al l of this helps explain whytime formothers,and especial ly working mothers,always feels scarce. “Working mothers with youngchi ldren are the most time-scarce segment of society,”says Geoffrey Godbey,a time-useexpert at Penn State University.

Parents also now have far more insight into how chi ldren learn and develop,so they havemore tools(and fears)as they groom their chi ldren for adulthood.This reinforces anotherreason whywel l-off people are investing so much time in parenthood:preparing chi ldren tosucceed is the best way to transfer privi lege from one generation to the next.Now thatpeople are l iving longer,parents are less l ikelyto pass on a big financial bundle when theydie.So the best way to ensure the prosperity of one’s chi ldren is to provide the educationand ski l ls needed to get ahead,particularly as this human capital grows ever more importantfor success.This helps explain why privi leged parents spend so much time worrying overschools and chauffeuring their chi ldren to résumé-enhancing activities. “Parents are nowafraid of doing less than their neighbours,”observes Phi l ip Cohen,a sociology professor atthe University of Maryland who studies contemporary fami l ies. “It can feel l ike an arms race.”No time to lose

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Leisure time is now the stuff of myth.Some are cursed with too much.Others find it toocostly to enjoy.Many spend their spare moments staring at a screen of some kind,eventhough doing other things(visiting friends,volunteering at a church) tends to make peoplehappier.Not a few presume theywi l l cash in on al l their stored leisure time when theyfinal lyretire,whenever that may be. In the meantime,being busy has its rewards.Otherwise whywould people go to such trouble?

Alas time,ultimately, is a strange and sl ippery resource,easi ly traded,visible onlywhen itpasses and often most highly valued when it is gone.No one has ever complained of havingtoo much of it. Instead,most people worry over how it fl ies,and wonder where it goes.Cruel ly, it runs away faster as people get older,as each accumulating year grows lesssignificant,proportional ly,but also less vivid.Experiences become less novel and morehabitual .The years soon bleed together and end up rushing past,with the most vibrantmemories tucked somewhere near the beginning.And of course the more one tries to holdon to something, the swifter it seems to go.

Writing in the first century,Seneca was startled by how l ittle people seemed to value theirl ives as they were l iving them—how busy, terribly busy,everyone seemed to be,mortal intheir fears, immortal in their desires and wasteful of their time.He noticed how even wealthypeople hustled their l ives along, ruing theirfortune,anticipating a time in the future whenthey would rest. “People are frugal in guarding their personal property;but as soon as itcomes to squandering time they are mostwasteful of the one thing in which it is right to bestingy,”he observed in“On the Shortness of Life”,perhaps the very first time-managementself-help book.Time on Earth may be uncertain and fleeting, but nearly everyone hasenough of it to take some deep breaths, think deep thoughts and smel l some roses,deeply.“Life is long if you know how to use it,”he counsel led.

Nearly 2,000 years later,de Grazia offered simi lar advice.Modern l ife, thatleisure-squandering,money-hoarding,grindstone-nosing, frippery-buying business, left himexasperated.He saw that everyone everywhere was running, running, running,but to where?For what?People were trading their time for al l sorts of things,but was the exchange worth it?He closed his 1962 tome, “Of Time,Work and Leisure”,with a prescription:

Lean back under a tree,put your arms behind your head,wonder at the pass we’ve come to,smile and remember that the beginnings and ends of man’s every great enterprise areun tidy.

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