This lack of congruence between the amount of free, discretionary time available to us and our contemporary feelings of harriedness has become known as the time-pressure paradox. In this book I will expose some of the underlying myths and misconceptions about our high-speed society.
An important starting point is to recognize that there is no single story about what is happening to the tempo of people’s lives. Talking in terms of statistical averages masks major shifts in diferent directions for diverse groups whose time use is being aggregated. For example, as income inequality increases and working hours polarize, discretionary time also becomes more unevenly distributed (although not necessarily in the way one would expect, as we shall see). How much time one has and how it is apportioned can only be understood as a function of underlying social and economic patterns. And, rather than time pressure being an individual phenomenon, I will show that it is related to transformations in household composition and gender relations over the last few decades.
A more fundamental limitation of discussions to date is the narrow concentration on the quantity of time available. This is the only aspect of time that time-use studies measure. In order to explain the gulf between so-called objective and subjective time, however, we need a more nuanced understanding of the quality or character of time. Time poverty cannot simply be understood in terms of the amount of (clock) time available. How people experience and practice time is the result of the meanings and values that they ascribe to various kinds of activities. The demand for “quality time” with children is a popular expression of this. Not all activities are performed at the same pace, nor would we want them to be. The result is conflicting temporal regimes that require coordination, which, in turn, leads to time pressure. Leisure time itself may be subject to intensification because of the increasing habit of multitasking with digital devices.
Harriedness is, thus, a multidimensional phenomenon. There are both diferent senses of feeling pressed for time and a range of mechanisms that trigger these feelings. I will explore the role that these multiple dynamics play in accounts of the time-pressure paradox.
Tools for Time
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