TIME POOR OR TIME COMPLICATED?

There are 24 hours in a day. If I sleep for 8, as per average recommendations, and work for 8, and commute for 30 minutes each way, I then have 24-17=7 hours left in which to do everything else: cook, eat, clean, socialise, relax, shop, exercise… It seems doable. On paper it seems very practical, but the problem is that we cannot consolidate our schedules in practice the way we consolidate them when listing our activities for the day.

We’re used to this – life in the big city has been time-poor and cash rich for many years, according to the lifestyle articles in newspapers and magazines. And while I’ve always been time-poor, I wonder about the extent to which most of us are cash rich. Life in the big city is busy and expensive, and it seems there is nothing we can do about that – to save time, or rather, to free it up for other things, we can buy services from other people to clean, cook, shop, launder, plan – you name it, just about.  The rise of jobs like the VA (Virtual Assistant) was inconceivable even ten years ago – the technology that enables it wasn’t available. We try to cram everything into the 67 hours a week we have spare (this assumes 16 hours of sleep over the weekend and a 5 day/ 40 hour working week. Most of us have a lot less free time than this, which only makes it harder). And the sordid truth is that the less cash you have, the less time you have, because you can’t afford the services that would help free up your time. We’re so busy we’re constantly playing catch up with our own breath. So is there a simple way to free up more time (without cutting back working hours)?

We can cut back on wasted time by making our commute more useful (reading, studying, walking or cycling).

We can try to see friends over lunch – although most of us already use lunch to run errands and eat at our desks

The trouble with all of these options is that they require us to multi-task, and that seems to contradict simplifying. And I have to wonder about the quality of the time and attention each task then gets – after all, one of the things I love so much about biking is that concentration has to be absolute – you can’t split your attention because you will come off. And that hurts.

So multi-tasking aside, what can we do?We can restrict our digital lives to reasonable amounts. What did we do before smart phones and broadband, other than stick to plans and consolidate our correspondence to one chunk of time?

This is what I’m trying to do, and so far it seems to be working out. I’ll keep you posted.