The paradoxical habits of busyness and the complexity of intimate time-space

ABSTRACT

Talk of busyness is everywhere. Obsessions with being busy mediate the temporalities of working and family life. The assumption that busyness is universal suggests a unified experience of temporality in the 21^st century. This paper responds to this normative assertion through detailing the diversity of busyness detailed in three one-day diaries collated by the UK Mass Observation Archive on the theme of time pressure. The narrative analysis of the diaries responds to empirical and theoretical accounts of temporal variation to situate busyness in time-space. This analysis makes two contributions to scholarship on the geographies of temporality. First, it details how the negotiation of intimate time-space is framed within wider structural power relations. Second, it develops interpretations of habit though describing how everyday routines anticipate time pressure. Busy habits do more than respond to the demands of time pressure, they are also tactics to hold the body still while simultaneously moving it forward.

KEYWORDS:

• Busyness
• habit
• time-space
• temporality

Acknowledgments

This research is funded by a Leverhulme Trust Major Fellowship, MRF-2017-044, whose support is gratefully acknowledged. I would also like to thank the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex, for permission to access the archive. The editor and three anonymous reviewers’ comments really helped to sharpen the focus of this paper and I am very grateful for their insightful advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The names referred to in the analysis are pseudonyms that I have given to each diarist.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [MRF-2017-044].