There Are Still 24 Hours in a Day. It Just Feels Like Less.

Summary

The author reflects on the modern phenomenon of feeling time-poor despite having the same number of hours in a day as previous generations, particularly noting the impact on women.

Abstract

The article discusses the author's realization that the current generation, especially women, lacks the 'spare time' that their mothers had. Despite working hard and managing multiple aspects of life, there never seems to be enough time for relaxation or hobbies. The author points out that while the clocks still measure 24 hours a day, the abundance of choices, distractions, and technology has led to a feeling of having less time. The piece concludes with the author's commitment to a new approach to time management, aiming to do less but better, and to reorganize life to reduce the overwhelming amount of tasks.

Opinions

The author believes that modern life, with its myriad of choices and distractions, has encroached upon the concept of 'spare time'.
There is a sense of nostalgia for the times when people seemed to have more time for leisure and hobbies.
The author suggests that the issue is not a shortage of time but an overload of everything else, echoing Matt Haig's sentiment from "Notes on a Nervous Planet".
The article implies that the problem of feeling time-starved is more acute for women, who often juggle work, family, and household management.
The author is embarking on a personal quest to manage time differently, focusing on quality over quantity of tasks, and plans to share insights on this journey.

Whatever happened to all the spare time?

A sweet elderly gentleman asked me recently what I do with my spare time. It was an innocent enough question, but it made me want to both laugh and cry, as I realised, suddenly and tragically, that my generation of women don’t really have spare time any more, at least not in the same way our mothers did.

My father worked very hard, building a successful business from the ground up, and my mother did everything else (including working part time once her three kids were grown), and they both seemed to have ‘spare time’. Time to relax, socialise, play sport, have hobbies. Now I find that I, and many others like me (and specifically women like me) seem to do our work, do everything else, then simply run out of daylight.

We work (probably too much) micro manage our families (definitely too much), run our lives and homes and businesses and finances, take care of our kids, do our chores, and try to carve out small chunks of time to socialise and have fun. It’s not like we don’t socialise and have fun. It’s just that we seem to always be trying to find the time to do it, rather than routinely using our ‘spare time’ to do it.

I honestly can’t remember the last time I had time to play with. Time that I had to decide what to do with. Time to ‘fill’. On the contrary, I tend to do a few things at once, plan ahead to find time to do the things I need to, and plan further ahead to do the things I want to. If I’m doing nothing, even momentarily, it means I’m exhausted and trying to find the energy to start the next task.

Even cancelled plans don’t seem to result in ‘spare time’. They simply result in an opportunity to catch up on all the stuff I’m behind on. So here is the question. Whatever happened to all the spare time? Where did it go? Does somebody else have it all? And if so, who are they? Because everyone I know seems to be in a similar boat. Is it a life stage thing? Will I have spare time again in the future? When my kids have left home? When my freelance business is running more smoothly? When my next book is written? When my home is clean? When I retire (which is something people of my generation might not actually get to do)?

Will I ever transition back into ‘having time’ rather than always ‘finding time’? Has, (as I’m pretty sure a character in Dr Who once claimed) something happened to time? Why does there seem to be less of it? Why is time, for most of us, our scarcest resource?

I’ve checked the clocks. There are still 24 hours in a day. And the calendars. Still 365 days (at least) in a year. So why does it seem like less, when we have so much more? Because we do have more (of almost everything) than previous generations did. So maybe ‘more’ is the problem. We have more choice, more distractions, more technology, more advertising, more entertainment, more media, more information, more sources of knowledge, more ways to achieve things, more things to do.

I don’t think ‘less time’ is the problem. I think it’s ‘more everything else’. Or as Matt Haig puts it in his excellent book, Notes on a Nervous Planet:

“We often find ourselves wishing for more hours in the day, but that wouldn’t help anything. The problem, clearly, isn’t that we have a shortage of time. It’s that we have an overload of everything else.”

I’m on a quest, right now, to do less, but better. I’m trying to turn my time management techniques around. After years of constantly, relentlessly, trying to get more stuff done, I’m aiming to reorganise my life so I have less stuff to do. I’m not entirely sure how to achieve that, but I’ve got some ideas, and some seeds of ideas. I’ll be publishing them as I formulate them into something coherent enough to share with the world, so feel free to follow along.