Who enjoys being busy? On busyness as a gendered norm and technology of the self

Abstract

Busyness is a complex, ambiguous and seemingly ubiquitous aspect of modern temporal experiences. Although some revel in the feelings of achievement and satisfaction that busyness provides them, others experience busyness as fatiguing and stressful. In this article, I make two arguments to help unravel this complexity. First, I argue that busyness can be understood in Foucauldian terms as both a ‘norm’ (a standard for ideal time-use) and a ‘technology of the self’ (a way of working with time to master, care for and know the self). Second, I argue that our ability to effectively utilise this self-technology largely depends on our socially determined relationship with time. Here, I focus on the gendered dimension of busyness, arguing that working mothers have their use of busyness complicated by their relational experience of time. In developing these arguments, I draw on semi-structured interview data from a sample of Australian gig workers.

Felicity: [T]o give you a bit of context, I’ve gone from being super, super busy and being main caregiver of my children to being somewhat busy. So I’m not as busy as I was. There were times when I was sleeping two hours and then going to another job, because I didn’t sort of have support in my life … So I had to work a lot and also, you know, juggle the kids, take them to school. So do I feel busy? I don’t, because I know I’m capable of more. I like being really busy, if I’m not busy, I hate it and I feel unproductive and I can’t stand it actually. So do I feel busy? I feel capable and competent that I can manage things. All I need to do is just give myself a 10-minute buffer each way of where I need to be and what I’m doing and my life will be a lot less stressful.

The above is a response to the question ‘Do you feel like you’re usually busy?’ from Felicity, a 49-year-old gig worker and single mother of two teenagers. Felicity's discussion aptly encapsulates the ambiguity that surrounds the concept of ‘busyness’. On one hand, Felicity constructs busyness as ethically positive: this dense, protracted activity is associated with productivity and getting things done. This can be linked to social science research arguing that contemporary busyness is often ‘conspicuous’: a conscious choice made by neoliberal actors to signal high social status and human capital development (e.g. Darier, 1998; Shir-Wise, 2019). On the other hand, Felicity constructs her busyness as psychologically negative: too much busyness is associated with sleeplessness and stress. This negative side of busyness has also been acknowledged in time studies research which details the negative psychological and emotional effects of busyness (centrally, stress), and links this to the modern experiences of ‘time pressure’ or ‘crunch’ (e.g. Brannen, 2005; Southerton, 2003). Here, then, busyness emerges as a paradox – something that ‘defies an exact definition’ despite being apparently central to modern experiences of time (Holdsworth, 2021, p. 4; 2022).

In this article, I make two arguments to help to unravel this paradox. First, I argue that busyness can be understood in Foucauldian terms as both a ‘norm’ and a ‘technology of the self’. That is, being busy is at once a standard or ideal for ‘good’ time-use within the modern/postmodern era (a norm), and a way of agentically working with time to master, care for and know the self (a self-technology). When people utilise busyness effectively, they (at least partially) ‘succeed’ in governing (or disciplining) the self in line with temporal norms, but in a way that feels distinctly positive, and engenders a sense of achievement and happiness (see Foucault, 2021). Second, I argue that our ability to effectively utilise busyness as a self-technology (and to benefit emotionally and physically from this form of time work) largely depends on our socially determined relationship with time and temporal politics. Here I focus on the gendered dimensions of busyness, arguing that working mothers often ‘fail’ to utilise busyness in ways that promote feelings of psychological and physical good health because of their positioning within relational frameworks of time. Note that working mothers are not the only group with a strained or complex relationship with busyness, simply the group I am analysing here.

To make these arguments, I draw on interview-based research on the temporal knowledges and experiences of a sample of Australian ‘home task’ gig workers (who use digital platforms to engage in irregular, in-person work like cleaning, babysitting and yard work). Home task gig workers formed the focus of this study because their engagement in ‘flexible’ and feminised work represents a critical case for understanding the culture and politics of neoliberal time (this being the focus of the larger study from which these findings are drawn). Most of these gig workers constructed busyness in unambiguously positive terms as a temporal tool that helped them to understand themselves, make better use of their time, and mentally and physically care for themselves. However, a smaller number of participants (including several mothers, on whom I focus here) complicated these positive portrayals of busyness – conversely constructing this practice as tiring, stressful, or simply unnecessary. Although these women could (and did) practise busyness as a technology of the self, this was experienced negatively as something that was taxing and unhealthy. I argue that this ambivalent engagement with busyness can be linked to gendered assumptions about the experience of labour and time. That is, we are all expected to be busy, but only some of us are expected (and encouraged) to enjoy being busy.

Busyness as a gendered social construct

Busyness – as a temporal practice/experience consisting of dense, protracted and varied activity – has become increasingly common-place over the last 30 years, despite a documented growth in leisure time cross-nationally (Gershuny, 2005; Holdsworth, 2020). The quantitative increase in documented experiences of busyness has been accompanied by a qualitative transformation in the meaning and value of being busy across class categories. In the late-19th to early-20th centuries, idle leisure was culturally esteemed among the wealthy, and ‘conspicuous consumption’ was used by working middle-class men to ‘disguise and distract from the shameful busyness of the master of the house’ (Gershuny, 2005, p. 290, original emphasis). Today, however, busyness is argued to have surpassed idleness as a marker of importance, even for the wealthy: ‘a busy, frenetic existence in which both work and leisure are crowded with multiple activities denotes high status’ (Holdsworth, 2022; Shir-Wise, 2019; Wajcman, 2014, p. 61).

Busyness as a virtue has been linked to the Protestant work ethic, in which time is conceptualised as a precious commodity to be wisely utilised – succinctly described by Benjamin Franklin's famous aphorism ‘time is money’ (Shir-Wise, 2019). According to Snyder (2013, p. 243), regularity and density (i.e. constant activity, or busyness) are the two forms of clock time discipline that ‘shape social action in modernity’. In his account, Protestant ‘lay elites’ in the early modern era built upon Benedictine norms of regularity, but combined this with an emphasis on variety. That is, Protestants felt that a good use of time involved not just a high volume of organised activity, but also a high volume of different types of tasks – leading to the modern usage of the term ‘busy’ to mean ‘constantly occupied with many things’ (Snyder, 2013, p. 258). Via its close association with Protestantism, busyness may be thought of as central to the culture of capitalist clock time – that is, the regular, coordinated, disciplined and culturally hegemonic form of time that developed during the transition to industrial capitalism (Thompson, 1967). As Thompson (1967, pp. 90–91, original emphasis) describes in his famous essay on the subject: ‘In mature capitalist society all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use; it is offensive for the labour force merely to “pass the time”.’ If neoliberal time can be thought of as an extension and intensification of modern capitalist clock time (see Heyes, 2020, p. 85), then busyness also fits cleanly into neoliberal temporal politics. That is, there is a clear link between busyness and the direction towards action that lies at the heart of neoliberal entrepreneurialism (see Holdsworth, 2020). As Darier (1998, p. 193) argues, the ‘busy self’ is the ‘enterprising self’. Here Darier is referencing Foucault's (2008) concept of the ‘entrepreneur of the self’, the idealised neoliberal subject who is driven to the continual accumulation of human capital.

Further, busyness's centrality to the culture of capitalist clock time means that it arguably possesses an inherently strained relationship with (what may simplistically but evocatively be termed) ‘women's time’. Feminist scholars have long argued that the time that structures reproductive labour (for which women continue to carry the global burden in both paid and unpaid contexts) is fundamentally incompatible with the time produced by the clock (for a recent review of this literature, see Foeken, 2024). Whereas clock time is abstract, linear and ‘chunkable’ (i.e. easily manipulable), the times that rule reproductive labour (and particularly care work) are often embodied, non-linear or processual, and deeply embedded within social contexts (see e.g. Adam, 1995; Davies 1994, 1996; Erickson & Mazmanian, 2016, p. 156; Odih 2007). For example: ‘If a young infant or senile individual needs to be fed, it is hard to push this activity into a predetermined linear and clock time framework’ (Davies, 1996, p. 583). Thus, although the (masculine) clock creates an illusion of time that may be experienced and manipulated independently of other people, the realities of care work reveal time as fundamentally relational.

Gerstel and Clawson's (2018) concept of the ‘web of time’ is a particularly useful way of illustrating both the relationality of time, and the classed and gendered effects of this. Gerstel and Clawson (2018, p. 80) describe time as a web because ‘temporal processes and the individuals they touch do not exist in isolation but instead are linked’. Like the reverberations of a raindrop on a spiderweb, changes in one person's use of time ‘create a cascade across other people, organizations, and institutions’ (Gerstel & Clawson, 2018, p. 80). For example, the decision of a doctor to stay late at work impacts not only his family, but also his employees, his employees’ families and so on:

The doctor may have a low-wage nanny or a stay-at-home wife who gives the kids dinner at their regular time and, in the case of the wife, may wait to eat dinner until her husband gets home. As a result, for the doctor the web's reverberations stop (until the next day). By contrast, the nursing assistant's or the nanny's kids might be taken care of by an aunt who needs to get to her own evening-shift job, which means someone else needs to take over from the aunt. (Gerstel & Clawson, 2018: 81)

Consequently, contemporary temporal politics create conditions in which middle-class men are (typically) able to skate across the surface of the day whereas working-class women (among other groups) are more easily caught in time's web.

Within this context, busyness emerges as a fundamentally masculine pursuit – a characteristic that is made all but explicit in formal/professional self-help publishing. In analysing self-help books on time management (focusing on the management of busyness), Holdsworth (2020) finds that – in addition to being primarily authored by men – this literature reflects a largely androcentric worldview. The anecdotes presented in these books typically feature businessmen who manage their work and home time effortlessly by ‘prioritising email and having more effective meetings’, whereas women are almost nowhere to be seen (Holdsworth, 2020, p. 687). For the middle-class businessmen who write and feature in these books, time management is as simple as optimising one's time at work to spend more time at home; these men do not presume that their experiences at home will ever complicate their time at work (Holdsworth, 2020). In other words – and as I explore in more depth below – women's positioning within relational structures of time arguably make it difficult for them to ‘successfully’ manage busyness according to contemporary cultural standards. In this article, I argue that this phenomenon can be usefully conceptualised via Foucault's concepts of ‘norms’ and ‘technologies of the self’.

Foucault on norms and technologies of the self

Kelly (2019, p. 2) argues that Foucault understands ‘the norm as a model of perfection that operates as a guide to action in any particular sphere of human activity’. Consequently, ‘normalisation’ is ‘the movement by which people are brought under these norms’ (Kelly, 2019, p. 2). Foucault (1979, p. 138) views the project of normalisation as central to ‘discipline’ (Kelly, 2019), which is an early modern form of power that he argues creates productive and ‘docile’ bodies through regimes of training and surveillance. Kelly (2019, p. 2) argues that ‘no person is ever fully in accordance with any norm’; the norm is the state of perfection that we are encouraged to be constantly moving towards, even if this is something we rarely (if ever) achieve.

By contrast, Foucault views technologies of the self as active practices that allow subjects to manage their relationships with themselves. Technologies of the self

permit individuals to perform, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this is such a way that they transform themselves, modify themselves, and reach a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power, and so on. (Foucault, 2007, pp. 153–154)

Importantly, this does not mean that technologies of the self exist outside relations of power. Rather, Foucault (2007) argues that techniques of the self and techniques of domination (i.e. discipline) combine in complex and subtle ways to create ‘government’ (a term he uses to refer to power's general operation within a society; see Foucault, 1982). We are typically driven to engage with technologies that bring the self we are crafting in closer alignment with norms. We are therefore governed, in a complex and self-driven way, through ‘enabling acts of self-transformation’ (Heyes, 2006, p. 128). Practising this agentic self-transformation can feel empowering, fulfilling and joyful, and – at least in a theoretical sense – has the capacity to lead to real acts of resistance against power as we develop our mental, physical and spiritual capabilities (Heyes, 2006).

According to Rose (1996, p. 135), technologies of the self can be divided into three distinct categories; self-technologies can be used ‘epistemologically (know yourself), despotically (master yourself) or in other ways (care for yourself)’. Heyes (2006, p. 138) refers to the latter category, having to do with care of the self, as the ‘attentive’ category. Though these categories are analytically distinct, they can overlap in practice. For example, Heyes (2006) argues that commercial weight loss programmes – which are typically conceptualised in purely despotic terms by Foucauldian feminists (i.e. a form of self-discipline aimed towards the creation of petite, feminine ‘docile bodies’) – simultaneously appeal to women through promises of self-knowledge and self-care.

In this article, I argue that busyness can be understood as a norm and a self-technology that individuals utilise in epistemic, despotic and attentive ways. That is, being constantly and productively busy is a perfect ideal that individuals must attempt to measure up to, as contrasted against the ‘shameful’ outside of idleness (see Foucault, 1979, p. 183). Simultaneously, enacting busyness is a way of autonomously working with time (a temporal technique) by which individuals can transform their minds, bodies, identities, etc. Though being ‘perfectly’ busy in the way that the norm demands (i.e. constantly busy in an organised, productive way) is almost entirely unachievable, it is possible to work with busyness for periods of time. When this technology is practised effectively – with its epistemic, despotic and attentive elements working in concert – the subject is brought into closer alignment with the norm in a way that can feel gratifying and mentally and physically healthy. However, when the self-technology cannot be practised fully or ‘optimally’, it can lead to negative experiences of stress, fatigue and ill-health. As I argue here, women (and specifically working mothers) tend to be better acquainted with the negative side of this temporal technology because of their positioning within relational structures of time.

Methods

The findings presented in this article are drawn from a study on Australian home task gig workers’ gendered uses and experiences of time. ‘Gig work’ can be broadly defined as a form of contingent labour that is organised through digital platforms, such as Uber, Fiverr and TaskRabbit (Duggan et al., 2020). ‘Home task’ gig work is a subsection of the gig economy involving the performance of physical, in-person tasks – such as cleaning, care work, handiwork and other odd jobs. Though this work is arranged over digital platforms (including Airtasker, Gumtree and Mabel in Australia), the work is dissimilar to other forms of in-person gig work (such as food delivery and ride-sharing) in that it does not typically need to be completed instantaneously. As such, home task gig work might be thought of as a digitisation of ‘the old newspaper classifieds or community boards in supermarkets’ (Veen et al., 2020, p. 30).

Though home task gig work is diverse, it is a notably feminised subsection of the gig economy – particularly when compared to other forms of in-person gig work (Churchill & Craig, 2019). This feminisation is notable in the current study: of 18 participants, 14 were women and 4 were men (despite my attempts to generate a more gender-balanced sample). Participants were aged between 19 and 51 years. The majority (n = 15) of participants were either Australian citizens or permanent residents, though most (n = 10) were born outside Australia. Most participants relied on gig work as a significant source of supplemental income (combining this with income from ongoing work, casual work, welfare payments and/or scholarships to address basic costs of living); two participants relied on gig work as their main source of income; three participants used gig work to generate a kind of non-essential bonus income. All participants used Airtasker, Gumtree or Mable to earn income (often working across several of these apps). Some participants also used social networking sites like Facebook to find home task work analogous to their gig work (e.g. using community Facebook groups to advertise cleaning services). Recruitment involved advertising an expression of interest (EOI) form on gig apps and social networking sites. Respondents to the EOI who met the selection criteria (adults living in Australia who regularly engaged in home task gig work and had done so for at least six months) were then invited to an interview. Of 103 (complete, non-duplicate) responses to the EOI, only 22 respondents met all recruitment criteria – and several did not proceed to interview. Two participants were recruited through snowball sampling.

Data collection took the form of 60–90-minute semi-structured interviews, which were conducted over Zoom (during successive COVID-19 lockdowns) in 2021. The content of the interviews broadly focused on participants’ experiences, knowledge and use of time in work, life and home. In addition to being semi-structured, the interviews were participant-guided, allowing gig workers to discuss any of the (broadly temporal, labour-focused) issues they were most concerned with. Interview data was analysed with Braun and Clarke's (2006; 2021, p. 39) ‘reflexive thematic analysis’ (RTA), which they situate on the ‘critical qualitative’ end of the spectrum of thematic analysis approaches. RTA is divided into six key phases (which are ‘reflexive and recursive, rather than strictly linear’): (a) familiarisation; (b) generating codes; (c) constructing themes; (d) reviewing/revising themes; (e) defining themes; and (f) producing the report (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Braun et al., 2019, p. 852). The entire research project was conducted reflexively, as guided by my feminist post-structuralist understanding of epistemology, methodology and ethics. This meant that the processes of data collection, analysis and theoretical development overlapped with and informed one another, resulting in research findings that were simultaneously empirically and theoretically driven. Via this analysis, I seek to answer the following research questions:

1. How do home task gig workers utilise busyness as a form of temporal self-government?

2. How are these practices of temporal self-government gendered?

Using busyness to know, master and care for the self

Perceptions of busyness were split among my sample. In this section, I centre those participants who described busyness positively, as a self-technology that they utilised epistemically, despotically and attentively. Notably, each of these categories of self-technology seemed to reinforce each other, and to reinforce busyness’ position as a temporal norm.

First – and with regard to the epistemic category – participants described busyness as central to their personalities. That is, they understood themselves partly via their engagement with busyness. Several of these participants described their busy subjectivities as inherent or authentic – sometimes referencing concepts of constancy to reinforce this: ‘I’ve always been like that [busy] ever since I was little’ (Zora); ‘I’m just the type of person who can’t sit still … I hate sitting still. I get bored too easily’ (Carrie). One participant, Lou (a 19-year-old domestic student who juggled gig work with university studies, paid market research and part-time administrative work) felt that her orientation towards busyness was so inherent that she typically did not even notice that she was acting in a busy way, and her body sometimes had to tell her to ‘stop’:

Lou: As everybody around me tells me that I’m an exceedingly busy person, which I’ve always found to be not necessarily quite true, because I’ve always found that there's someone busier than I [am] … But I’ve never necessarily felt busy though, but I know that my body has, for instance, my migraines and things like that. Sometimes, apart from it's just the normal daily migraine, sometimes it is my body going, ‘you’re doing too much. Please stop.’

Second, participants discussed attempts to master or harness their latent busyness to make better use of their time. As a despotic technology, busyness was typically combined with/supported by time management methods like scheduling and multi-tasking (see also Leshed & Sengers, 2011; Shir-Wise, 2019; Wajcman, 2019). Scheduling was particularly productive as this generated an organised and directed busyness. For instance, Austin (a 25-year-old international student from China who used gig work to supplement financial support from his parents) described how his scheduling system prevented him from becoming a ‘lazy couch potato’:

Austin: I will usually, I mean for each week, I would say set up a general schedule … so I would firstly just list out, obviously by what type of upcoming task, like my due assignments or maybe also like my gig work … [Holds up paper schedule for interviewer to see] so yeah, this is just something I have set up, maybe not very clear [laughs] …

Elsie: Yeah, okay. So pretty organized then?

Austin: Yeah, exactly. Because yeah, I tend to just get things organized. As a person, I would not be like basically, say today, ‘okay, I just have to work the day after tomorrow and there's nothing new, so I just to choose to be a couch potato and be lazy’, you know? [Laughs].

By mastering his busy time, Austin simultaneously masters himself: he creates an image of himself as an organised, busy person who rejects the non-normative, ‘shameful’ practice of laziness. Similarly, Anisha (a 29-year-old immigrant from India who combined gig work with a full-time job in a childcare centre and part-time study) discussed using multi-tasking to better ‘invest’ or ‘utilise’ her time. Like Austin, Anisha contrasted her mastery of time (and of herself) against the undisciplined temporal practices of imagined others:

Anisha: I can study, like after coming back from [work], I can study. I have a lot of time, you know, if you see from evening six to 11, I have a lot of time, five hours, you can do things. Five hours every day is a lot of time for me. So yeah, you just need to invest them in a right way.

Elsie: So would you say that it's about being smart with your time?

Anisha: Yeah. Time management skills. It's about investing the time where you want. People might go for movie, watching TV, sitting with their friends. It's just, they love to do that. I don’t love to do that. I will have my Netflix on my TV, but I can’t watch the screen. I like to listen [to] the screen.

Elsie: … What are you doing when you have Netflix on in the background and you just have the sound on, what will you be doing instead of looking at the TV?

Anisha: I’ll be doing my assignments. If I’m doing the study or maybe finding work, applying on Seek and Indeed, weekend work or night shift, stuff like that, but I won’t be watching like one-to-one. No. I can’t concentrate that way.

Elsie: So would you say that you’re quite a multi-tasker then?

Anisha: Yeah, I would say that. Yes. Even I cook, I wash my clothes at the same time when I wash my dishes at the same time. So I make sure that I’m using time being in the kitchen, standing [in the] kitchen for two hours. If I’m doing that, I’m gonna utilize my time and [be] doing everything. So I don’t have to stay back and then do another task. No, no, no. Those two hours I’ll do a lot of things.

Finally, multiple participants argued that the practice of busyness directly contributes to increased mental and physical wellbeing. Specifically, busyness was constructed as an attentive practice that exercises (and tires out) the mind and body (particularly in ways that allow for sleep), staves off negative thoughts and depression, and is a general mood-booster. One participant, Sally (a 39-year-old immigrant from Malaysia who combined gig work with a full-time job as a medical representative), was particularly invested in the concept of busyness as an attentive self-technology for the prevention of mental health issues. In Sally's account, busy people simply do not have the time to engage with the negative thought processes that lead to depression:

Sally: I also think that if people are busy and if they spend their time wisely, this mental health issue will be less … if I don’t become busy or if I don’t find things to do, I probably will fall into a cycle, which is probably similar to other people where [they] start becoming depressed, depressed of things in life and start thinking about how this Covid has affected everyone. So I think if people [have] so much things to do where you have so many things in a day that you need to complete, you won’t have time to just do nothing or watch Netflix and start pondering about how others [have] treated you. So if they spend their time wisely, potentially the mental health aspect in the community nowadays can be reduced.

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic were a notable theme among accounts of busyness as an attentive self-technology. Here, the healthful benefits of busyness were directly contrasted against ill-health (e.g. poor sleep, negative thoughts) experienced during the enforced idleness of COVID-19 lockdowns. This was especially evident in Austin’s and Zora's (a 28-year-old domestic student studying for a master of education) accounts (both of whom lived in Melbourne at the time of their interviews, which went through particularly extreme and protracted lockdowns in 2020 and 2021):

Austin: I find like being busy just makes my time like pass faster than the usual. And also I found – even maybe it's concrete lockdown or when people [are] just getting bored or like frustrated or like having depression or another like negative mood or like – which impacts their mental health. [I] just like to make my schedule full, or like keep myself busy to get things done. So I feel my life is just quite fulfilled and actually [I] just get quite a lot of like sense of enjoyment from it. And so yeah, I think that's really good, it just improves my mental health somehow a bit.

Zora: … I enjoy the busyness. So like obviously sleep during [lockdown], like that was really difficult cause I wasn’t doing anything, you know, except for studying. So that was really tricky, but coming out of it, it's actually been a little bit trickier to get used to living the hyperactive life again. I do feel better overall and my days are, you know, much quicker and I feel much more productive and happy at the end of the day than I did during Covid.

Importantly, the epistemic, despotic and attentive uses of busyness overlapped with one another, and reinforced busyness’ position as a norm. For example, Anisha works to master her busyness (as above), both because she views this practice as mentally and physically healthy, and because she views it as an investment in her long-term financial future:

Elsie: [W]ould you say that you enjoy the feeling of being busy?

Anisha: Yes, actually it helps me sleep well in the night-time. Anything like, [if] I don’t go out, [I] won’t make my body get tired. I won’t sleep in my mind. Maybe it's because of doing the very hard work and pushing myself very hard for a couple of years, for [the] past couple of years, I guess...

Elsie: Would you say it's [the busyness] become like a lifestyle for you?

Anisha: Yes, yes. [My husband and I] have a plan to get retired after five years. So we wanna work hard now for five – we’re 29, I told you – five, seven years. We wanna work really hard. And then after, if we’re well-off, we might not work. That's our plan. You know, you have investments, you have income coming from your investments, you know? Coming from other sources. That's it.

Similarly, Sally does not value busyness only because it increases mental wellbeing, but also because it increases productivity and wealth, and safeguards one's future:

Sally: I view my time as very, very precious and I cannot stand it if – whether it's in the corporate world or anyone that tries to waste my time with ambiguity, because I think money, you can always earn. If you lose $10,000 in Bitcoin or the share market, you can always earn your money back. But time is something where, [if] it's gone it's gone, you cannot change things that happened five years ago. So I think that it just needs to be used very efficiently … I think from a time perspective things is – I think with people, when they get busier, they get very busy, they spend their time very wisely … If people don’t spend their time wisely, basically they’re just lazy. Unfortunately, that's the reality of life that people should know that time is a very precious commodity.

In these ways, most of the interviewees utilised busyness to know, master and care for themselves in ways that supported their identities in line with dominant discourses about the value of time. Busyness was therefore both achievable and enjoyable. Though these participants actively worked at achieving busyness, I argue that their ‘success’ in (at least partially) reaching this norm was supported by the temporal structure of their daily lives. That is, these participants experienced time as largely autonomous and regular. The importance of autonomy and regularity in supporting busy self-technologies becomes more obvious when compared against people who live in a more relational form of time – working mothers being an ideal example.

Relational time and unhealthy busyness

Unlike the participants quoted in the previous section, the mothers in my sample did not experience autonomous control over their quotidian schedules. Rather, caregiving responsibilities often dictated their time-use and detracted from their feelings of temporal autonomy. This was especially clear in Yeukai's case (a 32-year-old woman who combined gig work with work in disability support agencies), who lives with her husband and two children. Yeukai immigrated to Australia from Zimbabwe in 2016, and does not have many family members in the country. Additionally, her husband works long hours, meaning that she is responsible for most of the domestic labour in her household (though childcare is split slightly more evenly): ‘my partner is very lazy [laughs] oh, very lazy. I do everything.’ Because her youngest child was struggling at day care, Yeukai reduced her working hours to spend more time caring for him, resulting in feelings of a lack of temporal autonomy:

Elsie: I’m wondering if generally speaking, you feel that you are in control of your time? …

Yeukai: No, no. My kids control my time. Cause they determine how many hours I should work a day. I will try [to] work around their schedule, you know?

Similarly, Vanessa (a 31-year-old mother of two young children from Nigeria, who combined gig work with a part-time job as a manager at a disability support agency) explained that the only time she feels disorganised with regards to time is when trying to manage the emotions of her toddler:

Elsie: [I]t sounds like you’re quite organized. Is that how it feels?

Vanessa: Yeah, I feel yes. Most of the time. Yeah.

Elsie: When does it not feel like that?

Vanessa: When like, my head is full and I’m trying not to scream at my three-year-old [laughs] … like my three-year-old, the thing is that he wants to be outside all the time. And I can’t afford to be outside. That's the only different, that's the only challenge I have really. Otherwise I try to organize most things. Like I’m quite organized, but the only time that I cannot be organized is that if he won’t stop bothering me to go outside … Sometimes I just have to leave everything I’m doing, take him outside for half an hour. Just like recouping. Otherwise I’ll be cranky. He’ll be cranky. And then everyone's just unhappy, so.

Consequently, these women did not speak as positively about busyness as other participants. Centrally, their relational experience of time complicated their engagements with busyness an attentive technology of the self. In stark contrast with other participants’ descriptions of busyness as physically and mentally healthy, several of the mothers in my sample painted an image of busyness as something that could easily become overwhelming or difficult to manage – resulting in ill-health. Both Vanessa and Yeukai referenced experiences of sleeplessness or fatigue that directly reversed others’ arguments that busyness is beneficial for sleep. Yeukai describes this negatively as fatiguing: ‘I do it all [the housework]. So you’ll find I’ll be very tired by the end of the day’; ‘I feel very busy, and I feel fatigue.’ Vanessa similarly discussed the busyness of caring for her children as tiring in an unhealthy way. Vanessa's husband does drive-in drive-out work and is away from home every other week, leaving her with complete responsibility for their two young children during these periods. As Vanessa explains, this routine makes her days busier, disrupts her nightly sleep pattern, and makes it impossible for her catch up on sleep with an afternoon nap because her mind is too busy to take a break:

Vanessa: [M]y son can wake up at six or seven. I absolutely hate it. I hate waking up early. So when, if [my husband's] home, when my son wakes up at six, he gets up and brushes his teeth, makes him breakfast and stays with him until I wake up. But when he is off [at] work, I have to wake up at six, and [I] sleep at 12, one [am]. And I can’t personally, I don’t like to, I don’t take afternoon naps. I don’t know how to, so yeah. I just feel like there's something I need to be doing that I’m not doing. So I can’t sleep, even if I tried.

Elsie: Oh, really? You feel like you’ve got too much on?

Vanessa: I’ve got, yes, I feel like I’ve got too much. And why should I be sleeping? Well, I’ve got this, that, or something to do…

Similarly, Felicity (a 49-year-old single mother of two teenagers who combined gig work with two part-time jobs) described her busy schedule as ‘overwhelming’ and ‘stressful’. For Felicity, being mentally healthy is not a matter of increasing busyness (as it is for Sally or Austin, above), but of decreasing commitments to a manageable level:

Felicity: Sometimes, as I said, I take on too much and I say yes to too many people, so I can become a little busy and overwhelmed and stressed out. And I’ll find myself at [the supermarket] at 11 o’clock at night going, ‘what am I doing, shopping for groceries at this time?’… I’m just at that point now where sometimes I need to – I have to say no to people cause of other commitments – work wise, I have to say no to people. So family comes first. My own wellbeing comes first as well because I realized that if I’m not functioning properly and stressed out because of work, then everything else around me just crumbles. So that's really important. I’ve learned sort of that the hard way after maybe 10 years ago doing shift work, which was really awful.

Because Felicity's previous experience in shift work was too busy – leading to ‘burn out and stress’ and placing her in ‘not a happy place mentally’ – she developed strategies to alleviate busyness and related stress, including ‘taking 20 or 40 minutes to have a little nap’, giving herself ‘a 10 minute buffer each way of where I need to be’, and turning down certain gigs. Yeukai took a similar approach of decreasing busyness for her mental health, but applied this to her housework, rather than her paid work:

Yeukai: Sometimes I just say, if I see there's a mess in this room, I close the door for my mental health … So I learned to ignore some of the things, you know.

Interestingly, despite constructing busyness as stressful or unhealthy, Felicity and Vanessa still valued busyness as a normative standard for time-use. Significantly, both women drew upon busyness as an epistemic self-technology to better understand themselves: ‘I think I’ve always been – I don’t know how to sit and not do stuff. So I think it's just my nature. Like, yeah. I want to be busy’ (Vanessa); ‘I like being really busy, if I’m not busy, I hate it and I feel unproductive and I can’t stand it actually’ (Felicity). In fact, although Vanessa constructed her busy sleeplessness as unhealthy and something she ‘hated’, there is evidence that she utilised this tiring busyness despotically. That is, she utilised her busy disposition to organise household labour she needed to do later on:

Vanessa: [S]ometimes like when my husband is home, he’ll be like, ‘maybe go and take a nap.’ Or if I complain about how tired I am, he says, ‘oh go and take a nap. I’ll watch the kids.’ I get into the room, lay down, be on my phone. I try, try, try, try. I don’t sleep. I just get up.

Elsie: Is that because … you feel like there is something you should be doing?

Vanessa: I feel like there's something, it just plays on my head. It's something I should be doing. And then I don’t, I keep thinking about a few things that I need to do or need to – or start remembering all the things I need to buy and then start writing my grocery list on my phone. And then yeah … then I just get up.

Elsie: So you’re planning things even as you’re trying to relax?

Vanessa: Yes, exactly.

Notably, Yeukai was the only mother I interviewed who explicitly rejected busyness as an epistemic self-technology:

Elsie: [D]o you enjoy being busy or do you not like it?

Yeukai: I don’t like it. You know? No one likes to work hard, you know – I work hard at work, when I come home, I’ll be tired then, you know, you’ll be trying to make the kids happy, make the house look presentable. And we don’t have like family here in Australia. So I don’t take a break from the kids [laughs], you know?

Elsie: Yeah.

Yeukai: So everything will be like, oh, this, this, this, this! [Laughs].

Conclusion

Throughout this article, I have occasionally referred to participants’ acceptance, enactment and embrace of busyness as a ‘success’. Like ‘busyness’, this can be something of an ambiguous, morally loaded term, so it is worthwhile being explicit about what I mean here. By saying that participants ‘succeeded’ at busyness, I mean that they succeeded (at least partially, at least for a period) in meeting the neoliberal norm for quotidian time-use. For participants who utilised busyness wholistically – as an epistemic, despotic and attentive self-technology – this ‘success’ is obvious: these individuals not only act busy, they are busy, and enjoy this orientation towards activity and production. What is less obvious, however, is how to categorise the working mothers who employed busyness epistemically and despotically, but struggled to achieve (or rejected) the attentive dimension of this technology. I argue that this can be understood as a partial – but expected and culturally enforced – form of ‘failure’ that is borne of the feminisation of relational time.

As a group, mothers are arguably expected to work two (or three) shifts, multi-task at home and at work, and experience frantic, busy fatigue as a result of this. According to recent research by Ann Burnett et al. (2020), men are perceived to be better than women at disregarding the negative aspects of busyness and finding time for leisure. This perception is shored up by time-use research finding that men experience more and higher-quality leisure time that women: whereas men experience ‘pure’, restorative leisure, women's leisure is often ‘interrupted’ by, or synchronised with, caring labour (Bittman & Wajcman, 2000; Kamp Dush et al., 2018). I suggest that the relationality of women's time means that, generally, mothers are not assumed to experience busyness in a balanced or healthy way. Rather, as Heyes (2020) argues, mothers are presumed – and encouraged – to respond to their busy, frantic lives by seeking out ‘anaesthetic time’. For Heyes (2020, p. 99), anaesthetic time ‘is a logical response to’ and ‘way of surviving in an economy of temporality that is relentlessly depleting’, and includes experiences of checked out, numbed, sedated and unconscious time. Working mothers (and particularly white, middle-class working mothers) are encouraged to respond to their exhaustion by seeking out a low-risk, feminised form of anaesthetic time in ‘low-end, sweeter wines’ that are explicitly marketed to them with names like ‘Mommy's Time Out’ and ‘Moms Who Need Wine’ (Heyes, 2020, pp. 109–112). Here, wine fills the void of self-care that busyness cannot provide for working mothers. Importantly however, this cultural narrative still leaves space for mothers to engage with busyness as an epistemic and despotic self-technology: it is not suggested that working mothers should slow down or stop being busy, simply that they should find a way to attend to their unhealthy busyness. Although I did not ask my participants about their consumption of wine – or other engagements they may have had with anaesthetic time – Heyes’ analysis is interesting in that it demonstrates the lack of expectation mothers may have about busyness as a potential attentive technology, and their simultaneous willingness to engage with this activity epistemologically and despotically.

For these mothers, ‘failure’ at busyness is personal and individualised though its cause is social. The effects of this ‘failure’ manifest primarily as sleeplessness, stress and discomfort that only sometimes trigger questions about the status of busyness as a norm. In other words, they live in a temporal economy that demands their performance of busyness, but does not expect that this will be satisfying or transformative as it is for other people.