When we say we wish we had more hours in the day, what we often mean is that we wish knew how to spend them more wisely.

When was the last time you deliberately included time in your schedule to do nothing? For most people, time is treated as a resource to be maximised – filled with back-to-back meetings, family responsibilities and professional obligations. But in the pursuit of productivity, we often sideline the activities that truly matter: rest, reflection and strategic thought.

This is the reality of the time famine we find ourselves in. It’s not a personal failing, but a structural consequence of operating in an always-on, performance-driven culture. Left unaddressed, it diminishes wellbeing, decision quality and long-term outcomes – all of which are core leadership responsibilities.

Reclaiming our time

Many people wish for more hours in the day. If granted an extra hour, most imagine using it well – quality time with family, a reflective walk, or a moment of calm before the day begins. But in reality, that hour will likely disappear, consumed by the relentless pace of work and competing demands.

Consider how often a day slips by unnoticed. You glance at the clock for the first time in hours, realising half the day has passed in a blur of meetings, emails and urgent tasks. The issue isn’t time scarcity – it’s how we allow time to be spent without intention.

Ashley Whillans, Professor at Harvard Business School and author of Time Smart: how to reclaim your time and live a happier life, has conducted extensive research into the concepts of time affluence and time famine.

“Instead of looking at whether we have objectively enough hours in a day, we’re looking at subjectively whether people feel like they have enough time,” she said in an episode of the podcast The Happiness Lab, produced and hosted by Yale professor Dr Laurie Santos.

“What’s interesting is that there’s data suggesting that we objectively have more time than we used. So subjective feelings of time stress are going up and the objective amount of time that we have is going up too.” 

The problem is that we tend to prioritise money over time, she says. If we did the opposite, her research suggests we’d be far happier. In fact, separate research suggests our happiness and our income are only aligned up to around $75,000 USD. Even earning triple this salary would be unlikely to improve overall happiness, as people tend to continue chasing more and falling into ‘I’ll be happy when…’ syndrome.

“We think that prioritising money and working a lot is a status symbol – we think if we seem really busy, that’s going to confer us higher status,” says Whillans.

“The general prioritisation of money over time means we spend 18 per cent less time interacting [with peers]. And we know that these small, social moments can be some of the happiest in our day.”

“We are essentially taking a chunk of time and shredding it into small, useless pieces that we don’t particularly enjoy.” – Dr Sara Quinn, President, Australian Psychological Society

Time confetti

One of the reasons we don’t notice the free time at our disposal – or fail to feel replenished by the windows of free time we are afforded – is because of what’s called ‘time confetti’.

“Time confetti is the tendency to split up our productive time into tiny fragments of seconds and minutes in which we’re multitasking and jumping from task to task,” says Dr Sara Quinn, President of the Australian Psychological Society. “This can ultimately make us less productive and more exhausted.

“We are essentially taking a chunk of time and shredding it into small, useless pieces that we don’t particularly enjoy.”

Think of the 15 minutes between a meeting or the half an hour in the evenings after the kids are asleep before you fall into bed yourself – what are you actually doing with those moments?

“[Our] leisure time is sporadic. It’s scattered because we’re constantly connected to our phones. We’re trying to do many, many tasks and our attention is being pulled in many directions, ” says Whilans. “These feelings of time stress… come at a cost to our happiness.”

Quinn says time confetti can also have long-lasting impacts on our wellbeing.

“Without effective regulation of our attention, and therefore our time, we can have difficulty pursuing important goals, having time for rest and maintaining good relationships with others – and ourselves.

“Time confetti is related to other concepts, such as ‘task switching’ and ‘task demand’. These concepts can become complex when considering cognitive load, particularly for people with executive dysfunction who can experience difficulties performing multiple tasks at once.”

Read HRM’s article the 7 different types of rest.

Remote and hybrid work arrangements may make time confetti more of an issue, Quinn adds, as people may find it difficult to separate their work and personal time and implement appropriate boundaries.

“We can also time confetti our free time by trying to do everything at the same time and undermining the joy and relaxation that we could otherwise achieve.”

The behavioural impacts of being time-poor

Feeling constantly busy impact doesn’t just our mental health – Santos also refers to fascinating research from the 1970s which suggests it can also impact our social behaviour.

The research was conducted by John Darley and Daniel Batson, formerly of Princeton University, and looked into whether kindness was an innate quality held by certain individuals or if it was situational.

To test this, they studied a group of people who most would assume to be particularly kind – students studying to be priests at the Princeton Theological Seminary. The test was simple: they were asked to deliver a sermon about Jesus’s story of the Good Samaritan – the story of a man who is beaten up and left unconscious on the side of the road. Passers by ignore him and only one person stops to help.

In the experiment, the priests were told they had to deliver the sermon on the other side of campus. Some were given ample time to get there, while others were told they’d have to hurry to make it in time. The last group was told they were already late. 

Darley and Batson then recreated the very parable that the priests were about to deliver by hiring a “shabbily dressed” actor to pretend to be hurt. The actor had his head down, eyes closed and wasn’t moving. He was slumped in the doorway blocking the path the priests needed to take.

“The priests would literally have to step over the actor’s body to make it past,” Santos said in the podcast.

When the subjects approached, the actor was told to cough twice. Only 63 per cent of subjects who weren’t in a rush stopped to assist the “injured stranger”. But the results get even more concerning – of those who were flat out hurrying to make it to their sermon, only 10 per cent stopped to help.

“Ninety per cent of the subjects completely ignored an obviously injured person on the street because they were rushing to give a sermon about how Jesus said you should stop to help injured people on the street,” says Santos.

Whillans adds: “When people are thinking of the economic value of their time, when they’re thinking about being hyper-efficient with every second, this comes at a cost of our willingness to take time out of our day to help others.”

Buy back your time and create windfalls

So how do you overcome time scarcity? Whillans suggests buying back some of your time by outsourcing tasks where you can. Her research suggests this is a good predictor of happiness. And it’s not something only the uber-rich can do – Whillans found something as simple as paying your neighbour’s child to mow your lawn or wash your car can have substantial positive impacts on your wellbeing. 

“It buys us out of some of this dread or the anticipation of having to come back from a nice social event on the weekend and have a million chores to do before the work week starts,” she says.

Next, she suggests rethinking what we’re doing with our ‘time confetti’. We’re not trying to change the objective amount of hours in a day, but rather how we perceive those hours. So next time you have a spare moment in your day – if, say, a meeting is cancelled or you arrive early to an event – try and be deliberate about how you choose to spend that free time. 

Whillans has created a time windfall list for herself to make the most of those pockets of time. Rather than getting lost in a 15-minute scroll through the ether, she has a go-to resource that determines how she’ll make the most of that unexpected piece of time confetti. That might be calling a friend, reading a chapter of a book or doing a five-minute mindfulness practice.

“It’s all about not squandering the small moments of the day,” she says.

Quinn echoes this sentiment.

“Allow yourself guilt-free rest to recharge and see that recharging as an investment in yourself, your work and your relationships with those around you,” she says.

“It can also be helpful to review your habits. Reflect on where time gets lost – maybe scrolling social media or checking unnecessary apps. Once you identify these areas, you can put systems in place to limit them.”

A version of this article was first published in August 2020.

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