Are You Addicted to Busyness?
Ray Williams
9-Time Author / Retired Executive Coach / Helping Others Live Better Lives
We’ve got career ladders to climb, businesses to keep afloat, children to raise, classes to attend, appointments to keep, emails to answer, meetings to go to, errands to run, housework to do, etc. We’re swamped. We’re pressed for time. We frantically rush from one activity to another. So many things need and take our attention, and we don’t even stop to think about what our overloaded lifestyles are doing to us.?We are addicted to busyness.
What is Busyness?
Busyness can be defined as having much activity or not being idle.?You can be overloaded, overwhelmed, snowed, swamped, tied up and stressed. You feel there needs to be more time for all the activities you are committed to or want to do.
7 Reasons Why We Are So Busy Today
Busyness and Overwork
Gallup conducted an August 2017 survey that revealed that both professional/executive and white and blue-collar employees worked slightly under 50 hours a week between 47 and 49, respectively. Since the 40-hour work week has expanded and peak seasons, special projects, and unique workplace demands — the work week often requires more than 50 hours a week.
U.S.A. Today?people reported that they are busier than the year before, with 69% responding that they were either “busy,” or “very busy,” with only 8% responding that they were “not very busy.” Not surprisingly, women reported being busier than men, and those between ages 30 and 60 were the busiest. When the respondents were asked what they sacrificed to their busyness, 56% cited sleep, 52% recreation, 51% hobbies, 44% friends and 30% family. In l987, 50% said they ate at least one family meal every day; by 2008, that figure had declined to 20%.
Busyness is more than an annoying truth of modern life. It has emerged as a significant health concern, according to Joseph Bienvenu, a psychiatrist and director of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He sees patients suffering from so much overscheduling that they can’t sleep, think, or make time for important activities like exercise. “Emotional distress due to busyness manifests as difficulty focusing and concentrating, impatience and irritability, trouble getting adequate sleep, and mental and physical fatigue,” he says. “This is a vicious cycle, of course. Emotional distress leads to trouble with sleep and fatigue, and lack of sleep and exercise leads to more distress.”
A Harvard Business School survey of 1,000 professionals found that 94% worked at least 50 hours a week, and almost half worked more than 65 hours. Other research shows that the share of college-educated American men regularly working more than 50 hours a week rose from 24% in 1979 to 38% in 2016. According to another survey, 60% of those using smartphones are connected to work for 13.5 hours or more daily. European labor laws rein in overwork; in the U.S. 40% of managers say they put in more than 60 hours a week.
All this work has left less time for play.?Though leisure time has increased overall, a closer look shows that most gains occurred between the 1960s and the 1980s. Since then, economists have noticed a growing “leisure gap”, with the lion’s share of spare time going to people with less education.
In America, for example, men who did not finish high school gained nearly eight hours a week of leisure time between 1985 and 2005. Men with a college degree, however, saw their leisure time drop by six hours during the same period, which means they have even less leisure than they did in 1965, say Mark Aguiar of Princeton University and Erik Hurst of the University of Chicago. The same goes for well-educated American women, who not only have less leisure time than in 1965, but also nearly 11 hours less leisure time per week than women who did not graduate from high school. Americans are having a hard time finding?opportunity for vacations ?these days. 33% of Americans are living with?extreme stress daily . And nearly 50% of Americans say they regularly lie awake at night because of stress.
An analysis of holiday letters indicates that references to “crazy schedules” have?dramatically increased ?since the 1960s. Moreover, celebrities on Twitter publicly complain about “having no life” or “being in desperate need of a vacation.”
Busyness and lack of leisure are also being more celebrated in the media. Advertising, often a barometer of social norms, featured wealthy people relaxing by the pool or on a yacht. Today, those ads are being replaced with ads featuring busy individuals who work long hours and have very limited leisure time. For example, you may recall Cadillac’s?2014 Super Bowl commercial ?featuring a busy and leisure-deprived businessman lampooning those who enjoy long vacations.
Dr. Susan Koven practices internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. In a?2013 Boston Globe column , she wrote: “In the past few years, I’ve observed an epidemic of sorts: patient after patient suffering from the same condition. The symptoms of this condition include fatigue, irritability, insomnia, anxiety, headaches, heartburn, bowel disturbances, back pain, and weight gain. There are no blood tests or X-rays diagnostic of this condition, yet it’s easy to recognize. The condition is excessive busyness.”
In a?2015 study ?titled The Disease of ‘Busyness’ lead researcher Kim Richards states that “Busyness is anything but impressive.” Richards found that “Our collective busyness has?become an offensive disease.”?However, when we learn to step back from the habit of being busy, we will be able to experience a “sense of peace, purpose, health, mindful leadership, and a good dose of meaning and self-respect.”
Dr. Michael Marmot, a British epidemiologist, has studied?stress and its effects ,?and found the root causes to be two types of busyness. Though he doesn’t give them official names, he describes the most damaging as?busyness without control,?primarily affecting the poor. Their economic reality does not allow for downtime. They have to work two to three jobs to keep the family afloat. When you add kids to the mix, it becomes overwhelming, and the stress results in legitimate health problems. The other type is busyness with control, primarily affecting the middle and upper classes. Although their economic reality allows for downtime, they don’t take it, but rather fill their time with an increasing variety of activities and consumer products to take care of. This kind of busyness also results in stress and legitimate health problems.
Signs you have busyness addiction
Busyness as a Badge of Success and “Humblebrag”
“Humblebrag” can be defined as “An ostensibly modest or self-deprecating statement whose actual purpose is to draw attention to something of which one is proud: social media status updates are selfies, humblebrags, and rants.” humblebragging refers to “a specific type of boast that allows the offender to broadcast their achievements without the necessary shame and guilt that should normally accompany such claims.”
According to?a Harvard study, urbanites increasingly prefer to “show off” how busy they are to prove that they are “in-demand”.
In other words, instead of luxury being the status symbol, people are saying they are “too busy” or “need a holiday” to show off.
This is expanding to include using online shopping services instead of going to the supermarket, ordering takeout instead of eating at home and other behaviours to show you’re too important and busy for those things.
If you’ve no time to do leisurely things like sleeping, having a proper meal or walking your dog, it implies that your time is precious, putting you in the high status category.
Brigid Schulte, in her 2014 book?Overwhelmed , writes incisively about this trend, “So much do we value busyness, researchers have found a human ‘aversion’ to idleness and need for ‘justifiable busyness.’” Researchers can track the rise of busyness in holiday cards from the 1960s. In holiday cards, Americans used to share news about our lives (the joys and sorrows of the year), but now we’re more likely than ever to mention how busy we are as well.
How busy are you these days? According to new research from McDonough School of Business Assistant Professor of Marketing Neeru Paharia, the answer to that question says a lot about your social status.
“Long hours of work and lack of leisure time have now become a powerful status symbol,” wrote Paharia and her co-authors in their report, “Conspicuous Consumption of Time: When Busyness and Lack of Leisure Time Become a Status Symbol,” published in the?Journal of Consumer Research. ?According to the study, the busier people say they are or appear to be — whether or not they are — the more important others perceive them to be. In American culture particularly, complaining about being busy, or humblebragging, has become an increasingly widespread phenomenon, Paharia and her colleagues found.
Not only do we confer higher status on busy people, but we also see them as in demand, competent, and ambitious, their research shows. Over time, the U.S. system has allowed for “the commoditization of labor,” in which people — not just goods and services — are susceptible to the law of supply and demand. Think of a real estate agent you have trouble getting an appointment with. You start to see that person as more valuable. “Somebody busy is seen as being a scarce resource,” Paharia said. “You’re in demand, and therefore you become scarce.”
The research also examined busyness-signalling products by comparing people who shop at Whole Foods with those who use Peapod, a grocery delivery service. Peapod users were seen as busier and having as much status as Whole Foods shoppers, even though Peapod is significantly less expensive than Whole Foods. Participants assumed Peapod shoppers were busier at work and had less time to shop. “Rather than flattering consumers’ purchase ability and financial wealth, brands can flatter consumers’ busyness and lack of valuable time to waste,” the researchers found.
“If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing,” contends Tim Kreider, in his article, “The Busy Trap,” in the?New York Times .?He says this is often said as a boast, “disguised as a complaint,” but often, these people complain about being dead tired and exhausted.
We live in a culture that celebrates being crazy busy: “Western society puts a high value on being busy,”?wrote Dr. Christiane Northup ,?a women’s health expert and?New York Times?best-selling author. “We are conditioned to believe that being busy equates to being good, worthy, and successful.”
In?his article for? Harvard Business Review ,?renowned business leader Greg McKeown calls it “The More Bubble,” and argues that society has permitted us to be proud of being busy.
“This bubble is being enabled by an unholy alliance between three powerful trends: smart phones, social media, and extreme consumerism,” he explained. “The result is not just information overload, but opinion overload. We are more aware than ever of what everyone else is doing and, therefore, what we ‘should’ be doing.”
“In the process, we have been sold a bill of goods: that success means being supermen and superwomen who can get it all done. Of course, we back-door-brag about being busy: it’s code for being successful and important,” he suggested.
Where does the “supermen and superwomen” imperative come from? In the business world, it often comes from the cultural expectations of high achievement. As McKeown explains, it also comes from the impression we get that everyone is doing tons of cool stuff all the time. It’s an interesting take: Is our “addiction” to chaos and busyness driven more by habit and boredom — even shame?
Whatever it is, the busy humblebrag is just a coping mechanism. “Most of us aren’t genuinely proud of our chaotic lives … we just hide behind the reverence every time we fail to break the cycle,” McKeown says, “ And while being ambitious (to some degree) is a great thing, we mustn’t allow these cultural expectations to push us to the point of burnout.”
Even children today should be more scheduled. Today’s adolescents and teens are overtaxed and overburdened, and stressed to a degree that was once seen only in child psychiatric patients, according to an analysis of research spanning five decades by Jean Twenge, PhD, a psychology professor at San Diego State University. Statistics indicate 75% of parents are?too busy to read to their children at night. There is a?rising number of children ?being placed in day cares and after-school activities.
Alvin Rosenfeld, M.D., a child psychiatrist and author of?The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper-Parenting Trap, “Overscheduling our children is not only a widespread phenomenon, it’s how we parent today,” he says. “Parents feel remiss that they’re not being good parents if their kids aren’t in all kinds of activities. Children are under pressure to achieve to be competitive. I know some sixth-graders already working on their resume, so they’ll have an edge when they apply for college.”
Kreider argues that overly busy people are busy because “of their ambition or drive or anxiety because they’re addicted to busyness and read what they might have to face in its absence…They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work.” He says that busyness serves as a kind of “existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness.” For busy people’s lives cannot possibly be “silly or trivial or meaningless” if they are completely booked with activities, and “in demand every hour of the day.” Krieder contends that our culture has assumed a value position that idleness or doing nothing is a bad thing. But “idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice,” he says, “it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets.”
Busyness and Productivity
“Nowadays, we’re expected to accomplish much more with our time,” says David Levy, Ph.D., professor at the School of Information at the University of Washington. To get extra work done, we “multitask, always trying to do two or three things simultaneously. So, we may eat our fast-food lunch and conduct business calls while driving or checking our email. Rarely do we focus our attention on just one task anymore.” He adds that a big negative to all this multitasking is that it is far more intellectually draining than single-tasking.
David Meyer from the University of Michigan?published a study ?that showed that switching what you’re doing mid-task increases the time it takes to finish both tasks by 25%. “Multitasking will slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes,” Meyer said. “Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.”
Microsoft decided to study this phenomenon in their workers and found that it took people an average of 15 minutes to return to their important projects (such as writing reports or computer code) every time they were interrupted by emails, phone calls or other messages. They didn’t spend 15 minutes on the interrupting messages, either; the interruptions led them to stray to other activities, such as surfing the Web for pleasure.
There are other factors at play as well. Mobile devices allow employees to be reached anywhere, anytime. “We can’t get away from work anymore,” says Gabe Ignatow, Ph.D., a sociologist at the University of North Texas who studies social change. “Even when we’re relaxing on the weekends, we’re often bombarded with emails, text messages and calls from the office.”
Other digital distractions — social media — can make us feel even more inundated. “Many people feel like they have to keep up with the endless stream of Facebook, Twitter and other social media posts, so that consumes even more of our time,” Dr. Ignatow adds.
In terms of work, there’s the trend, particularly for managers and professionals, of staying late at the office and going in on weekends to get more done.
“Nowadays, there’s this pressure that if we don’t work 50 to 60 hours a week, we’ll get laid off if our company is downsized,” observes Susan Mackey, Ph.D., a psychologist with the Family Institute at Northwestern University.
In households with children, both parents are often employed outside the home. According to the U.S. Bureau for Labor Statistics, more than 70 percent of mothers with kids under 18 are in the labor force, meaning they either have a job or are looking for one. By contrast, in 1960 only 20 percent of mothers worked outside the home.
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With Mom employed, both parents have become busier. “Families are overworked nowadays in the sense that they’ve turned the woman’s contribution from an at-home contribution to a money contribution, but the work at home still needs to be done,” states University of Chicago sociologist Linda Waite, Ph.D. Today’s mothers and fathers have to divvy up the work of stay-at-home moms between them and do that on top of their regular, paid jobs, she says.
When housework and child-care hours are added to time spent on jobs and commutes, Dr. Waite estimates that many American fathers and mothers work 70-plus hours a week.
We have lost our belief in “dolce far niente,” how sweet to do nothing. Our incapacity exacerbates our inability to do this to unplug from the digital world. I argued in my article “Why it’s so hard to unplug from the digital world ,” we may be addicted to the digital virtual world, which can physically disconnect us from others and our inner selves.
In my article in?Psychology Today, I argued that a “contributing factor to the problem of workaholism is the prevailing belief in hard work as the route to success, particularly wealth. The middle class and poor people predominantly hold notions of hard work, which originate from the Industrial Revolution and Protestant religious tenants, who viewed hard work as a virtue and magic formula for success. Hard work has never been a belief embraced by the upper class and wealthy.”
We now equate busyness and overwork with productivity, but the two are different. In the same way, we’ve equated “seat time,” that is, time workers spend in their seats at their desks or in meetings, as equivalent to productive work. It may be the reverse.
In a?New York Times?article, “Let’s Be Less Productive,” author Tim Jackson defines productivity as “the amount of output delivered per hour of work in the economy.” Jackson’s perspective underscores the perception that productivity in all forms is measured economically and in time. Jackson goes on to say, “Time is money…We’ve become conditioned by the language of efficiency.”
Sara Robinson, writing an insightful article in Salon magazine on the issue of overwork, “Bring Back the 40-hour Work Week,” says, “150 years of research proves that long hours at work will kill profits, productivity and employees.” Yet, for most of the 20th century, the broad consensus among American business leaders was that working people more than 40 hours a week was “stupid, wasteful, dangerous and expensive — and the most telling sign of dangerously incompetent management,” Robinson argues.
Citing the work of Tom Walker of the?Work Less Institute’s Prosperity Covenant, “That output does not rise or fall in direct proportion to the number of hours worked is a lesson that seemingly has to be learned by each generation.”
Robinson also cites the work of Evan Robinson, a software engineer who published a paper for the International Developers’ Association in 2005 that argued that throughout the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, research studies conducted by businesses, universities, industry associations and the military supported the shorter (maximum 40 hours) work week. The research indicated productivity does not rise substantially in extended work days or weeks. Extensive data showed that longer work hours resulted in reduced efficiency and catastrophic accidents, which brought substantial liabilities to employers. The research showed that extended hours resulted in reduced brain functioning and physical fatigue, which resulted in a loss of productivity.
A?Business Roundtable?study found that after just eight 60-hour weeks, the fall-off in productivity is so marked that the average team would have gotten just as much done and been better off if they’d just stuck to a 40-hour week all along. And at 70- or 80-hour weeks, the fall-off happens even faster; at 80 hours, the break-even point is reached in just three weeks. Studies on this subject conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Proctor and Gamble Company, , the National Electrical Contractors Association, and the Mechanical Contractors Association of American produced similar results. All of them showed that continuing scheduled overtime has a strong negative effect on productivity, which increases proportionately to the amount and duration of overtime.
Critics of these studies cite that they focus on physical jobs and don’t apply to most employees who are “knowledge workers.” Robinson argues that research shows that knowledge workers have fewer good hours in a day than physical workers — about six. U.S. military research has shown that losing just one hour of sleep per night for a week will cause a level of cognitive degradation equivalent to a .10 blood alcohol level. And what’s worse, most of them “typically have no idea of just how impaired they are,” says Robinson. Robinson cites the follow-up investigations on the Exxon Valdez disaster and the Challenger explosion, where investigators determined that overworked, overtired decision-makers played a significant role in bringing about those disasters.
So what has accounted for our sudden loss of memory of knowledge about working hours and productivity that pervaded most of the 20th century? Robinson points to two factors. The first is technology development as a cornerstone of our economy and the culture at the center of that technology — Silicon Valley. The jobs there have attracted a unique breed of brilliant young men and women who fit a particular profile: “single-minded, socially awkward, emotionally detached and blessed (or cursed) with a singular, unique, laser-like focus on some particular area of obsessive interest. For these people, work wasn’t just work; it was their life’s passion, and they devoted every waking hour to it, usually excluding non-work relationships, exercise, sleep, food and sometimes even personal care,” argues Robinson. Overwork and overtime didn’t even appear in their vocabulary.
The new technological corporate ethics and slogans reflected these young, overworked employees. For example, Microsoft’s “churn’em and burn’em,” which translated meant hiring young programmers fresh out of university and working them 70 hours a week or more till they dropped, and then firing them and replacing them with new ones. Fortunately, Microsoft has abandoned this practice.
The second related development that strengthened the prevalence of overwork was management philosophy and leadership style. Management guru Tom Peters’ message of passion for work was translated into working more, which is the only answer to productivity. And so any aspiring manager or executive worth his salt, who worked 40 hours a week or less would not be considered promotable talent, or worse, laughed out of the office for appearing lazy.
The 2008 recession has entrenched the notion of overwork as a necessity now instead of an optional strategy. The recession has resulted in massive layoffs across all industries. Still, the expected work level of the remaining employees has not just remained the same; it has increased to compensate for lost employees. And even where businesses have shown some improvement now, managers are loath to rehire or hire new employees because the norm of fewer employees with the impression of equal productivity is an argument against doing so. As Robinson argues, “for every four Americans working a 50-hour week, every week, there’s one American who should have a full-time job but doesn’t. Our rampant unemployment problem would vanish overnight if we worked the way we’re supposed to by law.”
The Psychology of Busyness
If you’re reading this on your phone rushing to work while hunting for your headphones, then you need to stop. At least, that’s what S?ren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher who lived at the beginning of the 19th century, would advise. And indeed, as we race from the office to the gym to dinner, proudly showing off our jam-packed schedules, it’s worth remembering Kierkegaard’s warnings about busyness long ago. He wrote: “Of all ridiculous things, the most ridiculous seems, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and work… What, I wonder, do these busy folks get done?”
Stephen Evans, a philosophy professor at Baylor University, explains that Kierkegaard saw busyness as distracting oneself from important questions, such as who you are and what life is for. Busy people “fill up their time, always find things to do,” but no principle guides their lives. “Everything is important, but nothing is important,” he adds.
Kierkegaard believed that one could not develop a self without answering crucial and terrifying questions about life and without deciding on a unified purpose. He called those without one unified purpose “double-minded” and argued that this mindset causes busyness. And so busyness and lack of self are a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. “If you don’t have a self, you don’t want to be aware of that,” Evans says. “You always have to stay busy.”
Kierkegaard’s concerns about busyness are also connected with his view of time and the importance of living in the present. “The unhappy man is always absent from himself, never present to himself,” he wrote. In other words, obsessing over future goals and keeping frenetically busy with an eye to some far-off date distracts oneself from reality.
By refusing to address the important questions in our lives and instead living a “double-minded” and busy life, we can be afraid to commit to a single person and cause. This can lead to missing out on one’s calling or relationship. Comedian Aziz Ansari has?made a similar point ,?suggesting that our incessant FOMO (fear of missing out) prevents us from focusing and fully committing to one person or one thing.
The problem is that we need to set expectations for a busy life as a culture rather than as individuals. You can’t suddenly decide one morning to opt out of everything that’s demanded of you as a woman, man, parent or employee. Worse, the whole thing’s rigged: the expectations keep getting bigger. Get on top of your email, and people will send you more. Figure out how to spend sufficient time with your kids and at work, and you’ll suddenly feel some new social pressure — to spend more time exercising, cultivating a hobby or locating ethically sourced vegetables.
Most time management advice rests on the unspoken assumption that it’s possible to win the game: to find a slot for everything that matters. It’s just a matter of shuffling the busy pieces or shaving time off of the things that sustain us in life — sleep, rest, solitude, eating leisurely. But if the game’s designed to be unwinnable, As Brigid Schulte suggests in her book?Overwhelmed, you can stop trying. There’s only one viable time management approach left (and even that’s only really an option for the better-off). Step one: identify what seem to be, right now, the most meaningful ways to spend your life. Step two: schedule time for those things. There is no step three. Everything else has to fit around them — or not.
Approach life like this, and many unimportant things won’t get done, but many important things won’t. Certain friendships will be neglected; certain amazing experiences won’t be had; you won’t eat or exercise as well as you theoretically could. In an era of extreme busyness, the only conceivable way to live a meaningful life is not to do thousands of meaningful things.
And “Learn to say no”: It’s such a cliché, and it's easy to assume it means only saying no to tedious, unfulfilling stuff. But “the biggest, trickiest lesson,”?as the author Elizabeth Gilbert once put it , “is learning how to say no to things you do want to do” — stuff that matters — so that you can do a handful of things that matter. Our only hope of beating overwhelm may be to radically limit what we’re willing to get whelmed by in the first place.
Being busy is not a virtue, and it’s not a badge of honor. We are human beings, not human doings.
A study published in the?Frontiers of Psychology, ?that studied the relationship between a leader's busyness and followers’ behavior, authors Qiufeng Huang and Kaili Zhang concluded, “When leaders are busy, they tend to pay more attention to task completion rather than interpersonal relationships. From the perspective of leaders, a high frequency of expressing a busy status to subordinates may create a sense of distance between followers, and followers may reduce their interactions with leaders.”
Busyness and Our Concept of Time
Humans have always needed to tell time, but the clock, as we know it, wasn’t always the measure. For 10,000 years, humans lived in an agrarian culture and understood time through nature: the seasons, the rise and fall of the sun, and the sow-and-reap rhythm of crops. Eventually, humans invented simple devices to mark the hours within a day — sundials, hourglasses, and water clocks, which used the regulated water flow to measure time.
The first mechanical clock wasn’t introduced until the 13th century. Centuries later, with the Age of Enlightenment, a scientific desire for more precision led to clocks becoming a valuable tool for framing the world. In her book?A Sideways Look at Time, Jay Griffiths explains that during the 17th and 18th centuries, time moved from a fluid measure to more “absolute and deterministic.”
“The increasing precision of clockwork (coupled with the increasing number of clocks and watches) meant time was chiselled to fit snugly to the clock,” Griffiths writes. “Time must be predictable, knowable, and visible.”
With the Industrial Revolution, minutes and seconds became a pervasive measurement of time for the common person. The rise of manufacturing regimented time with worker output. Productivity was king, and time translated to money. As the Industrial Revolution cedes to the tech revolution, timekeeping is even more meticulous today. We know the exact time in every corner of the world. We leap between time zones and are experiencing for the first time in human history a thing called jet lag, where technology and speed outpace the body’s biological capacity to keep up.
When time became money, our relationship to relaxation also changed. It used to be that the mark of accumulated wealth was leisure — restorative moments away from the toils of labor to enjoy other pursuits. Today, productivity is our top priority. Even the wealthiest among us toil away, packing schedules and squeezing every ounce of value from every second. Bill Gates gave up his golf game in “retirement” to do humanitarian work worldwide because, as he told Fortune magazine, golf “takes up too much time to get any good at it.” (Golf courses worldwide are developing nine-hole fast-track courses because people have become too busy to play 18 holes.) As we compete to be productive, busyness is as much a status symbol as anything else.
Compared to other countries, American employers offer workers the least paid time off, according to statistics from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, with nearly one in four Americans receiving no paid time off. Even when a company does offer vacation time, Americans aren’t taking it. According to a study last year by Oxford Economics, the number of annual vacation days used by employees has steadily declined over the past 20 years, with Americans taking an average of just 16 days a year, less than half of what people take in many European countries.
“Imagine if a colleague at work asks how you’re doing, and you tell them you’re great because you’ve cut back on your workload to take more time. They might think you didn’t care,” says Erik Helzer, a social psychologist and assistant professor at the Carey Business School. Helzer researches what makes people feel satisfied and fulfilled at work and in their lives. “There is a norm toward being busy — and that busyness confers your value,” he says. “Your potential worth is somehow wrapped up in the perceived lack of time you have.”
Here’s a surprising truth: You are probably not as busy as you think you are. On average, Americans today have more free time than did previous generations. They spend more time with their children than their parents 40 years ago, despite a prevailing sense that they are not. So why doesn’t it feel that way? The answer is in how we experience time in our minds.
“There is a distinction between objective time, which you can measure, and subjective time, which is experiential,” explains philosopher Nils F. Schott, at Johns Hopkins University. Schott, who specializes in the philosophy of time, explains that humans enjoy being busy when a task is fulfilling but can feel weighted when a task feels obligatory or when they feel pulled in two directions. There’s a difference between?want?and?should.
This pull can lead to what researchers call toxic time. We worry about what we should be doing for our kids while at work, or we worry about work while out on a date. We may want to exercise or to stay late at work to complete a particularly fulfilling project, but we feel guilt over what else we should be doing. Time slips away in an unrelenting concern that we should be someplace else doing something more or that we’re just unable to get to all the things we hoped to. “We believe that we should be able to do and have everything,” Helzer says. “You’re going to be a great worker, partner, parent, child to your parents, and we’re forever trying to maximize our time.”
This is a big reason for our sense of overwhelm, according to Schulte. “We live under the crazy tyranny of our expectations — that we must be the ideal worker and put in endless hours at work and be the ideal parent and always be available to our children and always be busy and productive, yet doing enough cool stuff and working out and meditating so, we’ll look good on our Facebook profile. These over-the-top expectations are driving what we think we can and should do on any given day,” she says. “If you are trying to cram a ton of stuff in your day, that creates an atmosphere where you’re breathless and stressed out, and you feel powerless.”
Humans are also bad judges of how we spend our time. Helzer and colleague Shai Davidai, of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, have been studying people’s perceptions of their time use. One study asked participants how they would spend their weekend on a Friday. On Monday, they followed up to see how that time was spent. Participants who said they would do restorative activities — like reading a book or hiking in the woods — actually did things like plopping in front of the television. This leads to an interesting twist in our perception: We think we don’t have free time when we do. We’re simply frittering it away with mindless versions of passive leisure that don’t register as restorative. (According to the latest American Time Use Survey, the average adult spends nearly three hours daily watching TV.)
“People use rest in two different ways,” Helzer says. “One is in an intentional and rejuvenating way, such as sitting and reading, versus the mindless rest where we binge-watch TV shows and you get up and say, ‘I can’t believe I just wasted three hours.’ We found that people believed they would have the more mindful kind of rest over the weekend, but when we interviewed them on Monday, they reported spending more time than they anticipated vegging out on the couch. So even though we have the time, we don’t tend to use it mindfully.”
In another study, Helzer and Davidai asked about personal development goals. They found that people believed they would have more time to pursue things that matter — like vacations, hobbies, or learning something new. Their research shows, however, that this magic time never materializes because humans continue to fill their days with other obligations once existing ones are complete. “The guiding force behind our findings is that if you wait for the opportune moment, it simply never comes,” Helzer says. “There’s no strong argument for delaying.
“If you look at the ingredients of a satisfying life, our data show that people are shortchanging themselves in the areas that may be most important,” Helzer adds. “The lesson is that you have to be intentional in carving out the time you want for the things you want.”
Tim Kasser, a psychologist and professor at Knox College in Illinois, researches how Americans spend their time, and he’s been studying the inverse of our busyness epidemic: time affluence. In the 1990s, Kasser researched a correlation between financial pursuits and wellness. People who said that pursuing financial success was important to them also reported lower well-being.
Today, there have been many additional studies on this phenomenon, and the relationship between materialism and negative well-being is well-established, including studies that show the more people care about material things, the more they smoke and overconsume alcohol.
“When we’re time affluent, it allows us to pursue values and activities like personal connections and our relationship to our broader community. These values, in turn, do a good job of satisfying our psychological needs and promoting higher levels of well-being, ” he says,
“In our rush to make more money and to have the American Dream as it’s been defined to us, we ended up crowding out our opportunity to have more time.” Kasser says “Any social system wants to maintain itself — whether it’s a religion or an economic system — and under corporate capitalism, we’re required to maintain certain beliefs. It’s important to work hard, demonstrate success, and make money. Not only is there a lack of laws that support vacation and family leave, but there’s a continual message encouraging people to work hard and spend more. We internalize those messages, and busyness becomes a badge of honor.”
Kasser started considering the alternatives. “Time affluence means becoming affluent from a time perspective rather than from a money perspective,” he says. “When we’re time affluent, it allows us to pursue values and activities like personal growth, personal connections, and our relationship to our broader community. These values, in turn, do a good job of satisfying our psychological needs and promoting higher levels of well-being.”
An Action Plan for Busyness
So the question is, “what to do about busyness?” Here are some suggestions:
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