Wishing for an extra hour in the day is a common refrain throughout the industrialized world. And every fall, in places where the clocks fall back an hour, that wish reaches fruition. Yet many people still wind up feeling time-crunched. What gives?
People often view time and time poverty — the feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it — as objective and quantifiable. But while inadequate free time is linked with reduced well-being, bean-counting leisure hours “doesn’t get at the experience of time,” says sociologist Michael Flaherty of Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Recent research shows that time poverty depends more on perceived shortages than actual ones. Constant interruptions, long to-do lists and lack of control over one’s time all exacerbate time poverty.
Yet policies tend to focus on increasing real, rather than felt, time. For instance, employers and policymakers often regulate work hours, psychologist Xiaomin Sun and colleagues wrote recently in the Journal of Happiness Studies. Given the links between time poverty and issues like poor sleep, depression and difficulty forming and maintaining relationships, such policies are vital, the team notes. But without addressing people’s subjective sense of time, those efforts are likely to fall short.
To start, researchers need a baseline for how much time constitutes “enough.” So just as economists establish financial poverty thresholds, time researchers have sought to establish a time poverty threshold below which well-being suffers.
To that end, social scientists dug into two datasets of over 35,000 Americans to identify an optimal amount of free time for well-being. Two to five hours of time devoted each day to pleasurable activities correlates with the greatest levels of well-being, the team reported in 2021. Both too little and too much free time were linked to lower well-being.
But optimal free time was subjective, says Hal Hershfield, a psychologist at the Anderson School of Management, University of California, Los Angeles. If a person devoted their free time to hobbies or quality time with other people, the link between excessive free time and reduced well-being disappeared.
Conversely, the findings suggest that anyone with fewer than two hours of free time daily should struggle. Hershfield’s team is now investigating that question in the United States.
Meanwhile Sun, of Beijing Normal University, and her collaborators have been investigating the 2024 time-use survey of roughly 100,000 people run by China’s National Bureau of Statistics. The unpublished findings are counterintuitive. Over half of respondents who reported feelings of time scarcity had more than 1.8 hours of free time per day — the team’s threshold for time poverty — whereas more than a third who had less than that reported not feeling time poor.
The researchers have begun looking into why people still feel time starved despite having enough time, or vice versa. For their Journal of Happiness Studies paper, over 250 participants documented their activities for seven days and filled out questionnaires related to well-being and time use. Using a scale from 1 to 7, they rated agreement with statements such as “I never seem to have time to get everything done” to assess time pressure and “Today, I did things in a fast-paced manner” to measure time-use intensity. The researchers similarly measured time quality and fragmentation.
The findings revealed that high time pressure, intensity and fragmentation were all linked to higher feelings of time poverty. Conversely, feeling involved in activities — a measure of flow or immersion — was associated with a greater feeling of time wealth.
Reducing time poverty requires both individual and societal changes, researchers say. On an individual level, Hershfield encourages people to conduct a daily audit to track activities, durations and feelings afterward. This might reveal, for instance, that one is spending hours on social media and then feeling like they wasted their time. An audit, Hershfield says, makes people ask: “What things can I put into practice to limit that?”
Systemic changes are also needed, Sun says. Workplaces, for instance, could minimize interruptions and sanction power naps.
Ignoring the subjective side of time poverty is inadequate, Sun says. “Even if a day were extended by one hour, if the quality and intensity of people’s time use do not change, people’s subjective feeling of time poverty would not improve.”
