No bandwidth to think is the cost of being time poor

We don’t have to go far to find compelling evidence many of us suffer time poverty today.

Type ‘time management’ into your search engine and a trove of satirical (albeit largely deflating) memes will return.

Stay online and search for advice on how to reduce time poverty, and a similarly endless list of articles, tips and hacks appear.

In plain terms, time poverty is the experience of lacking adequate time to meet social and economic responsibilities.

But some philosophers and social scientists go further, describing time poverty as a diminishing moral state that robs people of their valuable creative and ethical goods.

Health & Medicine

Your phone, your emotions and everyday life

What was once seen as a personal issue because it affects physical and mental health, ‘time poverty’ is now recognised as also being damaging to business due to its impact on productivity, higher stress and reduced creativity and innovation.

Considered via this rather bleak lens, it is easy to see why lack of time is worth fighting against.

Indeed, local workforces are fighting, recently winning a legally enshrined right to disconnect from work-related contact outside paid work hours, via the Fair Work Amendment (Right to Disconnect) Bill 2023.

A report from 2022 found that 79 per cent of Australian full-time workers have worked beyond scheduled paid time due to digital communications outside scheduled hours.

This national development follows the lead of 20 countries including France, which first passed legislation in 2016 permitting workers to turn off phones and other smart devices when not at paid work.

Enshrining these rights is the first important step, but given our global connections to technology, time poverty should now also be examined in concert with social norms related to online communications tools and channels.

My research supports this claim, and poses an updated framework for thinking about time, and time poverty called ‘cyber time poverty’.

Cyber time poverty is time poverty exacerbated by normative socioeconomic expectations that result in a person staying accessible and responsive beyond paid work hours via portable, smart devices.

It is a form of moral and professional suffering, found at elevated levels in workforces and industries reliant on near real-time communication.

Politics & Society

Reimagining age equality at work

Professional journalism is a case in point, according to my national research study.

This study of working journalists employed in the Australian print news media industry in 2019-2020 found almost 65 per cent of participants presented as being cyber time poor because of real and imagined expectations and responsibilities to remain active online in pursuit of quality journalism.

Such work-related mobile communication encompassed contact with members of the public, peers and news sources.

The project approached 1491 metropolitan, regional and rural journalists, with 18.5 per cent (or 276 individuals) returning usable surveys.

Additionally, 12 journalists – seven men and five women – were interviewed with open-ended questions to gather a deeper understanding of work-time relationships.

The mixed methods study found almost 97 per cent of participants had been or were presently suffering what they identified as time poverty.

Specifically, it found about one in two (46.4 per cent) block or ignore communications from potential or past news sources and about 17.8 per cent skip steps in ethical practice like running a correction, in order to save time.

These results are concerning at a time when trust in news remains low. About 60 per cent of study participants failed to give sources fair right to reply, and 54.5 per cent failed to punctually correct published errors, if at all, when cyber time poor.

Plagiarism to save time is an uncommon and reviled practice among studied working journalists.

However, self-plagiarism is more common, according to some.

Sciences & Technology

When it comes to jobs, AI does not like parents

One time-poor Queensland journalist copies his own published work – and trusted media sources – when struggling to meet his digital newsroom’s “juggle of demands”.

“We call it ‘cut and paste’ and I do (it to) my own stuff when under pressure because I can trust my own stuff,” he says.

Constant feeds from mobile social media channels beyond normal work hours means there is “no time to be present”, laments one survey respondent. Another adds there is “no time to think”.

These indicative findings reflect an industry recoiling from unprecedented job losses – 4,000-5,000 in the decade to 2020 after newspaper advertising revenue shifted en masse to online platforms.

Contemporary journalists unquestionably face steep private-public time challenges.

Yet, it is highly unlikely tales of cyber time suffering are exclusive to news journalists.

Research suggests other cohorts of workers heavily connected to online, portable technologies in pursuit of income and professional identity risk high levels of cyber time poverty. 

Educators, students, emergency service workers including police, sole traders and delivery drivers are groups potentially vulnerable to exposure to social time intrusion via mobile smartphones.

More academic research is needed to test this theory across more types of employment.

So what does this mean, and what can we do?

The first step is building digital time literacy to counter deleterious effects of cyber time poverty.

Politics & Society

‘Forcing’ workers into the office misses the point

Here are four things we can do to collectively counter time poverty:

1.    See time for what it is: a basic human resource

Time is not a luxury, but it can be when time poor. To live a fulfilling life, a person needs time for uninterrupted, private, creative thinking and doing.

It is an essential human resource. As such, it is time to revisit common social values.

2.     Speak out about time poverty, don’t shame others

Demand change and defend others’ right to disconnect. Blaming and shaming others struggling to find adequate time resources as ‘poor time managers’ is a form of workplace bullying.

It is true that we all get the same amount of hours each day. But not all humans have the same responsibilities, income or social status. It is these factors that impact individual time pressures, time poverty and time wealth because each discreet act of a human life needs time to fulfil it.

3.    Review how we use self-time, and the time of others

How do we use each other’s time, and is it fair use? The nature of global online communication with its multiple channels and instantaneous real-time orientation invites digital messages – SMSs, notifications, posts – at all hours.

But is it clear how immediately a person is expected to respond? If not, make it explicit with a simple tagline to state no response is expected during private times.

Review your mobile communication including social media habits and behaviours. Commit to changing those habits that exploit social media/smartphones’ built-in time-intruding designs.

4.    Model respectful, productive online discourse

Similarly, don’t be a time waster. If approaching a sole trader, or a journalist, do you have a genuine request or inquiry?

Equally, is your online communication respectful, thoughtful, and constructive?

Every time the receiver gets a message ping, it takes time to respond, including review and delete. This is time the other person cannot use again.

Think before the approach and treat your recipient’s time with appropriate care.

The cyber time genie is out of the bottle, bringing myriad opportunities to connect with a world of others in new and meaningful ways.

It also carries moral responsibility to be fair with each other’s precious time, and our own, by economically and ethically using online technologies to protect finite time resources.