![]() ![]() “They nibble away a minute of your time here, five minutes of your free time there, and the next thing you know, you’ve lost an hour of your day,” he told me. ![]() In his 2015 book, Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day, the writer Craig Lambert cataloged a startling number of now-common tasks that have been enabled by the technological advances of the past 30 or 40 years: Purging your email inbox, managing your online passwords, booking your own travel, researching health conditions online, scanning your own groceries, navigating online customer-service portals, answering customer surveys, checking your own bag at an airport kiosk, and so on.Īs we perform these tasks, Lambert’s stopwatch is running. Perhaps many to-do lists have lengthened simply because there is more to do. For many, the to-do list, whether written or mental, now suffers from a sort of infinite scroll: Reaching the end of it can be unimaginable. ![]() Americans have long felt that they had too much to do, but in the past few decades, this feeling seems to have become more common and intense, as new breeds of tasks have emerged and people’s finite mental energies have been depleted by changes to the modern economy. The mundane yet fraught place where these various obligations converge is the to-do list. Increases in busyness, she told me, are a matter of “both feeling like there’s more feeling that you have to ‘be the best you can be’ in all of the roles, or you’ve failed as a person.” But two developments that are making a substantial group of Americans busier, Sayer explained, are that a larger share of the country now takes on the combined “social roles” of worker, spouse, and parent, and that the expectations of each have risen. Overall, feelings of busyness do not appear to have increased population-wide, so this is hardly the case for everyone. Working mothers and shift workers feel particularly crunched. According to Liana Sayer, the director of the University of Maryland’s Time Use Laboratory, many Americans who are employed, married, a parent, or a college graduate feel shorter on time today than people in those situations did several decades ago. A common 21st-century complaint is that life didn’t used to be as busy as it is today, but some people are more likely to think so than others. ![]()
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