“Everybody knows” that the pace of daily life is speeding up, accelerated by the proliferation of mobile phones, tablets, WiFi and other communication technologies and by fallout from the 2007 economic crisis. As if anyone needed reminding of this trend, book titles echoing the faster-paced theme include The Overworked American and Busy Bodies in the early 1990s through to Faster, Fighting for Time, and Busier Than Ever.
However, despite this broad consensus, and its obvious health and quality-of-life implications, there seems little empirical survey evidence that daily life is truly speeding up. Some 15 years ago, in compiling our book Time for Life, my coauthor and I were only able to locate three short measures of subjective time pressure in the public: “stress” questions developed by the US National Institutes of Health (since discontinued); a “time crunch” scale of 10 yes-no questions (also abandoned); and two questions we had included in the initial time-use national survey conducted by the University of Michigan in 1965. These questions first asked respondents how often they felt “rushed,” and then how often they had time on their hands they didn’t know what to do with.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Happiness Means Being Just Rushed Enough: Scientific American
