I am starting the article with a very good example. While reading this article right now, you may be looking at the things waiting to be done, reading your mother's messages about how much she misses you, on the one hand, looking at the notifications of your caller to talk to you, and on the other hand, you may be trying to sort out the mails that fall into your mailbox. We do not even count your dentist appointment that you constantly postponed, what dinner you will cook for dinner, the accumulated clothes waiting to be ironed in the fridge...
Regardless of who we live with, what we do, all our responsibilities and who we are, we are all under the pressure of time. The results of a study conducted in the USA in 2011 indicate that more than half of the participants have no free time, and two-thirds feel like they have to do everything they do in a hurry. While the vast majority of the waking hours are consumed by our responsibilities related to our work, we have to spend the few hours after work on activities such as exercise, housework, socializing with our friends and family, divided into minutes.
When you look at this table, with a simple calculation, you may think that the time pressure on you is due to insufficient time and excessive responsibilities. But research suggests that the feeling that we don't have enough time for what we want to do may be just a subjective illusion.
A study conducted in 2005 with 7000 people actively working in Australia calculated how much time the basic habits (work, housework and self-care) required to sustain life took in total and compared this time with how much free time the participants spent during the day. The results are quite surprising: It turned out that those who think they work the most, that is, those who claim to have the least free time, have much more free time than the other participants.
The most important point that this research points out is that our perception of time is directly related to what we value in life and what we spend our time for. Working less and earning less money, working too hard to spare time for our loved ones and devoting the vast majority of our time to our responsibilities at work are actually our own choices and preferences, in direct proportion to the value we give them.
Therefore, in order to understand why time is not enough, it is extremely important to understand psychological factors based on our mentality and perception, as well as numerical data such as 24 hours a day or our responsibilities.
Enjoying what you do
According to the results of a study conducted in Ohio with a group of 800 participants in 2004, women participants felt more time pressure and more depressed when they did more than 10 hours of housework per week. However, no such result was found in male participants who did the same amount of housework. The researchers discovered a similar pattern in volunteer work among the tasks assigned to the participants: male participants who spent their time doing voluntary work felt less depressed, while female participants who worked voluntarily during the same period experienced more stress associated with time pressure. Researchers trying to understand the reason for this difference reached the following conclusion: Men spent their time with activities that could be considered more enjoyable such as mowing the lawn and playing games with children, and women were spending their time with daily, small and unpleasant tasks such as parents' meetings, washing the floor, and preparing food. In other words, even though both parties allocate the same amount of time to housework, they had a very determinant role in the time pressure they felt 'pleasure' from work.
Just like a day we spend on vacation flowing like water Just as it is an endless day under intense stress, when we are constantly trying to train work, what determines how long time is actually depends largely on our subjective perception, that is, how enjoyable the time period was for us.
Moreover, the same applies not only to our daily work, but also to our business responsibilities. According to the results of a comprehensive study conducted with 2500 employees from the technology and financial services sector, people who are more passionate about their work and work in the field they are interested in complain less about the timelessness and do not feel obliged to 'train' their jobs compared to other employees.
If you also complain about the lack of time, if you complain about not being able to train something no matter how hard you try, you can analyze in detail how much of your work and responsibilities you do with passion, how much you enjoy, how much of it overwhelms you. As you start to devote more of your time to the responsibilities you enjoy and passionate about, you will find your time management frustrations decrease significantly.
