So Much to Do, So Little Time: Living With Time Poverty

I WILL BEGIN WITH A BOLD STATEMENT: The people reading this article are some of the poorest in the world, and I can tell this without even looking at their bank accounts. What I’m referring to isn’t a scarcity of money, but rather a scarcity of time.

Over 80 per cent of working adults today report feeling ‘time-poor’. Put simply, they have too many things to do in a day and not enough time to do them. The problem is, these rising rates of ‘time poverty’ have crushing effects on our happiness, our social relationships, and our physical health. Time poverty silences our laughter, steals our joy and depletes our personal well-being.

So where do these feelings of time poverty come from and what can we do to overcome them?

The simplest explanation for the rising rates of time poverty is that we are spending more time working and completing household chores than in previous decades. Yet there is very little evidence for this. Men and women today actually have more time for leisure than they did in the 1950s — thanks in part to a few modern miracles.