How to get your time back

Welcome back to Techno Sapiens! I’m Jacqueline Nesi, a psychologist and professor at Brown University and mom of two young kids, one of whom has insisted on a “purple recycling truck cake” for his 4th birthday.

If you like Techno Sapiens, please consider sharing it with a friend today!

5 min read

Last week, after a few blissful weeks away, my family and I came home. It will be nice to get back into a routine, my husband and I kept saying—like a rosary prayer we silently hoped would be fulfilled by sheer repetition.

The “routine,” it turns out, was chaos.

My Google calendar was a rainbow of time blocks, written with caps lock, tangled and overlapping.

There were errands (GET CAR SERVICED!) and urgent reminders (ORDER RECYCLING TRUCK BIRTHDAY CAKE!).1 There were swim lessons (my kids), meetings (me), and so many doctors appointments (kids and me).2 There was a forgotten camp form, a frantic printer installation to print it, and a race to the doctor’s office to beg for a 24-hour turnaround on signatures.

I’m told there was also a full-time job squeezed in there.

It was one of those weeks where the 24-hour day feels oppressively short. Where everything is hurried, and with each completed task, the to-do list only gets longer. Where there’s just not enough time.

Ti-i-ime why you punish me?

I was recently reminded that, as with all things in psychology, this experience has a name.3 Time poverty is “the chronic feeling of having too many things to do and not enough time to do them.”

Many people—as many as 80% of American adults—feel it, and it’s associated with worse well-being and poorer overall health.

There are, of course, many external factors that contribute to feelings of time poverty: changes in the nature of work, the accelerated speed of our daily lives due to the Internet, bureaucratic time burdens (e.g., for healthcare, childcare, and other essential services). There are also important differences by income: higher earners actually report greater feelings of time scarcity,4 but, importantly, more access to the resources needed to remedy it.

As I read about these societal and institutional drivers of time poverty, I found myself nodding along. Work productivity expectations *are* too high! And I *did* spend a double-digit number of hours trying to navigate the bureaucratic labyrinth of parental leave!

But ...