Overwhelmed by your busy schedule? It's time for some chronotherapy

Do you use your busy schedule as a status symbol but let minutes tick by as you scroll between screens? You need the clock-watcher doctor, says Katie Law
24 February 2014

Until she got time therapy, Brigid Schulte, a journalist on the Washington Post and married mother-of-two, was suffering from a condition she calls Time Overwhelm. “I am always doing more than one thing at a time and feel I never do any one particularly well. I am always behind and always late, with one more thing and one more thing and one more thing to do before rushing out the door. Entire hours evaporate while I’m doing stuff that needs to be done,” she writes in the introduction to her startling new book, Overwhelmed, which may well do for time-poor workers what Lean In has done for guilt-ridden working mums.

Feeling her life was fragmented and exhausting, Schulte went to see a time therapist called John Robinson. In fact he’s a highly regarded sociologist at the University of Maryland, known as Father Time for his extensive research into how we use and abuse our allotted 1,440 minutes a day.

Schulte was asked to keep a detailed time diary and over the next 18 months, jotting it all down in a notebook — she was too busy to fill in his Excel spreadsheets with headings of paid work, sleep, housework, etc — she discovered that although she worked more than 50 hours a week, she also had 30 hours of leisure time. It was just a question, as Robinson pointed out, of how she chose to spend it. Here’s how to identify your time drains and give yourself some chronotherapy.

The strive to survivors

How much cooler to say you’re overworked than underworked. Busy-ness, says Schulte, is a status symbol; even among the super-rich, and most of us exaggerate our number of working hours. We also sleep more than we think we do. Robinson told her that exercise, reading, listening to the radio, talking to friends on the phone while, say, going to the bike repair shop all count as leisure.

Solution: Stop squandering time and don’t confuse leisure with being idle or unemployed.

The information addicts

People use on average up to 17 programs and visit at least 40 different websites a day. Check how many windows are open on your computer at any one time. Like channel-surfing, switching between programs reduces concentration and makes it harder to finish one task. “Multi-tasking makes you stupid” and less capable of giving others your undivided attention.

Solution: Close them down. Focus.

The face-time warriors

“Using smartphones and Skype keeps us tethered to work” rather than liberating us, since we’re expected to be on call all day, every day. This also creates a merciless “cycle of responsiveness”, where you worry constantly about if and when you’ll get an answer to your email. No matter how hard and devotedly you work, it’s never enough. You’re stuck, say Schulte.

Solution: Stop doing non-productive “butt-in-chair face-time”.

The brain shrinkers

Research shows that stress shrinks the brain. Production of cortisol is bad for your health beyond a certain point, and while we were designed to snap into fight-or-flight mode to fend off the woolly mammoth or the unfriendly neighbour, we weren’t intended to produce stress hormones all day long. Feeling overwhelmed makes you powerless.

Solution: Learn to time-chunk, take breaks and use all your annual holiday allowance.

The time confetti-throwers

You’re doing a million and one things already and then go home and spend an hour clearing up, while resenting the people you love. You end up switching on the TV because you’re too exhausted to do anything else.

Solution: Don’t be a martyr. Stop clearing up and let your family see how much you do. Get them to help. Making time for leisure is an act of will.

The time-shifters

Risk-taking millennials, members of the post-Y Generation and other visionaries who are making their workplaces more democratic and collaborative. They expect to change jobs often, won’t stay in work they hate or, if they are women, grind themselves to “the nether edges of their fertility,” says Schulte. They believe in being allowed to shift to performance-rather than hours-based work.

Solution: Flexible and forward- thinking companies such as Google and Facebook, which offer three good meals a day plus drinks and snacks for free, and Songkick, which has matched paternity with maternity leave, are, at least partly, the solution.

Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One has the Time by Brigid Schulte (Bloomsbury, £12.99) is published on March 13.

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