The rapid rise of family time over the last decades indicates that being together is of increasing importance for the contemporary family. However, less temporal complementarity between parents is negatively correlated with partners’ time together and with children. The prevalence of of scheduling therefore adversely impacts on family solidarity. It points to the dificulties parents face as they seek to balance market work and family. As Lesnard notes, the UK’s flexible working time law (in place since 2003) was one of the first that obliges employers to consider employees’ requests for more family-friendly work schedules. Such policies, and those that limit long working hours, might begin to address the problem of time pressure. I will be exploring the wider politics of working time in my last chapter.
Temporal Density
Let us finally turn to the third mechanism that generates feelings of time scarcity, temporal density. This notion accounts for experiences of time that can be described as juggling or multitasking, that is, the allocation of certain practices within a given period of time. Allocation refers to certain practices being located within temporal rhythms that create a sense of intensity in the conduct of those practices. It is directly related to temporal disorganization, but here the emphasis is not so much on sequencing, but rather highlights the simultaneity of diferent activities or multitasking. Allocation is also linked to a notion of boundaries that separate practices. The allocation of practices, which no longer have clearly defined boundaries, into particular parts of the day can generate senses of being harried, irrespective of whether the bulk of that day is experienced as being “pressed for time.”
Southerton and Tomlinson illustrate this point by drawing on qualitative interviews with twenty British suburban households. For example, although Chloe said she did not feel “generally pressed for time” in the survey, she said she felt busy “some of the time but not others”:
Chapter three
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