The Social Life of Busyness

Clare Holdsworth

• Éditeur: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781787545113
• Sujet: Scienze sociali
• Sous-sujet: Sociologia

Clare Holdsworth develops an account of everyday busyness by identifying busyness with a relational interpretation of time. She analyses a variety of secondary data sources – one-day diaries, self-help books on busyness and time management, accounts of a writing day and interviews about family work and time – and combines these analyses with personal observations. By revealing busyness as the point at which we negotiate our own responsibilities and those of other people, and by showcasing how experiences of busyness are very varied, Holdsworth concludes that the tactics we use to deal with excessive busyness and the habits we develop in relation to it need to recognise the relational status of busyness. Rather than assuming that busyness is an issue that should be resolved by helping individuals manage their time better, she argues that busyness should be thought of as a collective challenge.

This book encourages us to understand that time-management solutions need to focus on the spatial and temporal distributions of responsibilities and how people manage these responsibilities. It represents a timely call for collective responses to busyness in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has intensified the unequal distribution of responsibilities.

Chapter 1

Being Busy

White Rabbits

This book is about the social life of busyness, the busyness that we experience and encounter in our everyday lives that makes us weary or elated and that pushes us towards and away from other people. Busyness can validate everyday life or be an excuse for not doing something. It is not an exact thing or practice; if we are busy, it is because of a sense of fulfilment or of being overwhelmed. As an excuse, it is simultaneously watertight and vague. If someone says they are too busy to do something, this is their final decision, though the precise details of busyness need not be revealed. Busyness can be a default position we assume about other people, especially if we require something from them. Acknowledging busyness is often interspersed within the requests of others: ‘I know you are busy, but could you….?’.

By framing this account of busyness through its social life, this book addresses how busyness organises the social and simultaneously is of the social.¹ I am interested in how busyness frames relationships but equally in how its prominence may be explained through the economic and social contexts of relational work. Busyness is manifest in ‘the effort of establishing, maintaining, negotiating, transforming, and terminating interpersonal relations’.² How this relational work is valued and who values it may also explain the popularity of busyness. Investment in relational work or collaboration can lead to tensions between doing stuff for other people and getting on with our own work or practices of self‐care. Busyness is, therefore, of the social because it condenses the tensions of interpersonal relations. These tensions can be found at different scales, from those of intimate and family relations to those of corporate organisations, and are shaped by the uneven politics of time.³ Busyness can be draining but it can also engender feelings of worthiness. These experiences depend on how it is valued by others as well as its relationship to feelings of self‐identification. However, while busyness might be experienced as relational, our attempts to nullify it are increasingly individual. It is up to us to maximise time independent of others, whether we use time management strategies or implement a work–life balance to do so.⁴

My own interest in busyness was initially sparked by overhearing colleagues’ declarations about busyness. As I was working in my office in a British university, halfway down a long corridor, I became aware of crescendoing complaints about the busyness of working life: colleagues running late for meetings, protesting that they had too much to do and complaining about the overwhelming stress of being busy. Details concerning what needed to be done and whether particular activities had been completed were more muted. In these overheard statements, there was little recognition of the virtue of keeping busy. The temporal quality of busyness that I especially overheard was not in the declarations of busy people saying they were getting things done; it was found in the anxiety concerning what needed to be done. Busyness did not mean synthesising the present with the past or the future; instead, it unsettled the flow of time. The intensity of disruption corresponds with the temporal condition that Ivor Southwood describes as ‘non‐stop inertia’.⁵ This is the overwhelming sense of being trapped by frenetic inactivity and, as a consequence, feeling that it is not possible to experience the satisfaction of getting things done.⁶ My initial curiosity about busyness did not align with the need to quantify busyness or peruse strategies for its amelioration. Instead, I was intrigued by why there was so much talk of busyness and what this chatter inferred about colleagues’ fulfilment or neglect of their responsibilities and their anxieties about time. Busyness puzzled me because it is paradoxical, and paradoxes are the imaginative fuel of social inquiry.⁷

These paradoxical qualities of busyness have often meant that my own attempts to explain this temporal phenomenon have ended up with me chasing my tail or being stuck in cul‐de‐sacs. My reaction to colleagues’ comments about their busyness initially took me in the wrong direction. Overhearing their complaints reminded me of the White Rabbit in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 fantasy novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; he is obsessed with time and cannot move beyond this obsession.⁸ So I started my study of busyness by revisiting Carroll’s White Rabbit to see what I could learn about busyness from his fixations with time. I was familiar with the White Rabbit’s comments about time, such as ‘The hurrier I go, the behinder I get’, and his reply to Alice’s question ‘How long is forever’ – ‘sometimes just one second’. These quotations are provided when ‘White Rabbit quotes’ is searched for online and adorn arty‐crafty home decorations. Even the physicist Carlos Rovelli quotes the White Rabbit’s explanation of forever in his 2017 book The Order of Time.⁹ I had assumed that the character of the White Rabbit was obsessed with time and was a pioneer of the twenty‐first century busyness. Curiously, when I sat down to reread Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, I did not find these quotations in the original text. Carroll’s White Rabbit is not a busy rabbit. He is obsessed with time and his pocket watch simply because he is late for a meeting with the Duchess. We do not learn why he is late or the purpose of the meeting he is rushing to get to. The White Rabbit is a plot device.¹⁰ Alice pursues him into and through Wonderland, but he has little to do or say until he reappears with the royal entourage as the King of Heart’s herald. At Alice’s trial, the White Rabbit is deferential and nervous, and is anxious that things should be done properly and corrects the King of Hearts about procedure. Carroll wrote that he intended the White Rabbit to be the opposite of Alice; the elderly, timid and feeble rabbit that wears spectacles contrasts with Alice’s youth.¹¹

Curious about where my interpretation of the busy White Rabbit came from and the source of the much‐quoted aphorisms, I turned to Walt Disney’s 1951 animated version of Carroll’s book. Disney’s White Rabbit is old and wears spectacles, as Carroll described him, but lacks the original’s fastidiousness. The cartoon White Rabbit is rotund with a matching outsize pocket watch that is always falling out of his pocket. His watch carries him along; he is literally moved by time. Disney develops the White Rabbit’s circular fascination with time. He joins the Mad Hatter and the March Hare at their tea party, where the Mad Hatter declares the rabbit’s watch to be ‘two days late’ and, encouraged by the March Hare, destroys this ‘mad watch’. Disney’s White Rabbit, like Carroll’s, is perpetually late and does nothing to resolve this. Disney exaggerates the White Rabbit’s character and his contribution to the storyline, but this rabbit is also not the source of the quotations found online and elsewhere allegedly by the White Rabbit.

My pursuit of these White Rabbits and their musings about time and busyness proved to be a plot device that led me in the wrong direction.¹² Neither of these White Rabbits are the source of the much‐quoted musings about time; the words are simply figurative expressions of the worry that surrounds not getting things done. While Disney’s White Rabbit comes closer to the popular image of the time‐obsessed leporid, the popularity of the quotes attributed falsely to the White Rabbit transcends both Carroll’s original characterisation and Disney’s interpretation. Falsely accrediting these aphorisms to Lewis Carroll is convincing because they appeal to popular obsessions with time‐related problems. The misquotes also update the White Rabbit’s fastidiousness about being ‘on time’ to more modern sensibilities concerning experiencing time. It is easy to turn the original White Rabbit’s obsession with being late into musings about the misuse of time.

The lesson I learnt from this initial wrong turn was how easy it is to make judgements and convince ourselves about the certainty of time, or at least what is written about it, even though the temporal frustratingly remains just beyond our conceptual grasp. By perpetually being busy, we segue between having some sense of certainty about what we have to do, and feeling being overwhelmed because we have too much to do. Writing about busyness is similarly frustrating; at the moment that a precise conceptual interpretation comes into view, it very quickly falls away. Busyness defies an exact definition, but this does not imply that it is immune to interpretation.

My starting point is to offer a definition of busyness as the intersection of what others expect or request us to do and what we need to or want to get done. This account of the social life of busyness does not seek to define, remedy or perfect busy uses of time. Instead, my purpose is to interrogate how being busy oscillates around intersections of multiple and tangled responsibilities. I am intrigued by busyness because of how it is essentially relational yet at the same time uniquely individual. I am interested in how busyness articulates the acceptance and rejection of interdependencies. If, as Rovelli writes, ‘the study of time does nothing but return us to ourselves’,¹³ studying busyness does more than reveal us to ourselves; it also exposes our relationships with and responsibilities to others.

By framing this account of busyness through its social life, I am deliberately opening up a consideration of busyness beyond the realm of work and time management. Although my curiosity about busyness originated at work, I do not intend to suggest that busyness is exclusive to organisational cultures. While contemporary critiques of busyness are aligned with the relationship between busyness and productivity, the problem with including busyness in the more defined constraints of time management is that doing so makes an assumption about who is busy and in what ways. Busyness becomes the specific condition of workers doing some form of managerial or bureaucratic work. These workers may be lured into having the status of busyness as a badge of honour, as the time use researcher Jay Gershuny suggests.¹⁴ Equating self‐worth with busyness also permeates other forms of employment, such as the ‘Bullshit’ jobs described by David Graeber that serve to maintain the status of middle management.¹⁵ This honour of being busy does not necessarily equate with being productive. If busyness is recognised as a fault, it is one to be put right through the application of productivity techniques.¹⁶ However, busyness is found beyond the closed world of professional time management. We cannot ignore the busyness of workers employed beyond a restrictive interpretation of professional work. Many such employees were classified as essential workers during the Covid‐19 pandemic, thus, revealing the necessity of their labour, such as health and social care workers, cleaners, retail assistants, delivery drivers and transport workers. Moreover, a relational approach does not prioritise the economic sphere over other domains of everyday life; instead, it interrogates the interrelationships between diverse responsibilities. The busyness of parents and carers, retirees, students, the unemployed and the under‐employed is also equally valid. Extending the reach of busyness to consider diverse forms of work, the temporal demands of care and the experiences of people not in work opens up a diverse interpretation of busyness beyond understanding it as a failure of time management or productivity.

A final introductory note acknowledges the spatial and temporal limitations of this book. The data that I have collated, which I introduce below, and the social theories that I discuss in the next chapter are located within an Anglo‐American economic, political and cultural location. However, cultural diversity is one of time’s most intriguing attributes, and this will be equally relevant to studies of busyness. How we speak about time and its linguistic variations (e.g. the construction of tenses and temporal vocabulary), temporal cultural and social norms (e.g. when shared activities happen, judgements about being ‘on time’ and customs concerning waiting) and differential interpretations of time over the life‐course (e.g. expectations of generational solidarity versus generational change) will have an impact on busyness. However, a consideration of the cultural variations in the concept of busyness is beyond the scope of this text because of the enormous amount of research data and various analytical techniques that this would require. My examination of busyness has, therefore, remained within a specific sociocultural location.

Busy Methodologies

Studying busyness can take the researcher in numerous directions. It can be examined as a symptom of sociocultural trends, quantified through detailed empirical examination or interrogated through philosophical inquiry. The almost infinite possibilities of busyness make it an equally irritating and intriguing topic for research, and it is necessary to define a framework to work within. This study of the social life of busyness prioritises the diversity of experiences wi...