In ‘Finding Time in a Digital Age’, chapter 7 in Judy Wajcman’s Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism (2015), she opens with a description of what economist John Maynard Keynes anticipated almost a century ago: increased productivity from technical progress will eventually alleviate the time and effort needed to produce and supply humanity’s material needs. Yet instead, Life is even more rushed in the accelerated digital age when the opposite was predicted. She argues that reducing of work hours as one way to alleviate time pressure. She attributes these long hour working conditions to a capitalist economy, hyper consumption, and a lack of public forum of what is a good life and what value and place leisure should have in it.
Her quote from sociologist Juliet Schor is only too relatable:
“they work too much, eat too quickly, socialise too little, drive and sit in traffic for too many hours, don’t get enough sleep, and feel harried too much of the time.” (p.167)
Whilst many have adopted the perspective that: the solution to our ‘temporal impoverishment’ is to return to a ‘naturalistic’ lifestyle and escape from technology, Wajcman’s analysis does not favour this as the answer. She highlights the complex duality technology have in our lives. On one hand, it has the ability to maximise our productivity, experience differently, and allow us to connect, produce, and operate in ways that weren’t possible before. On the other, we are constantly distracted, consuming and working as we are always connected.
The author’s commendable pragmatism, in response to the reactionary approach through returning to ‘nature’, shows great clarity and rational understanding beyond the emotional. She even proposes that we can find new approaches to adapt to our current environment. Just because technology has sped things up in our lives, doesn’t mean we can’t use technology, as we always have, to assist in improving human capabilities to adapt, to be versatile in new environments. This is demonstrated in the time management phone app that Wajcman mentions in the beginning.
“Smart, fast technologies provide an unparalleled opportunity for realizing a more humane and just society, only we need to keep in mind that busyness is not a function of gadgetry but of the priorities and parameters we ourselves set.” (p.184)
Wajcman also identified that, with the convenience of technology (particularly our personal devices, cloud services, etc), our divide between work and leisure seem to have dissipated.
This blurred lifestyle is something I experience on a daily basis, mostly working wherever I can fit it in. Some days I feel glad to be working from home and being able to spend time with my dogs, not realising that I am often not spending quality time with them, rather, bringing the mess and stress of my pursuit of my career into my ‘personal life’ and letting it invade the time i have set for other parts of my life. Whilst I have no complaints to putting in as much as I think I should for the results I desire, I have realised that I also desire and should cherish the companionship I am so fortunate to have at this point in my life. Which makes it difficult to prioritize one over the other. Incidentally, I have never thought this lifestyle I have unintentionally taken up might have anything to do with the fact that the integration of technology into our lives have made it possible to work anywhere we can, or want to.
This reading shed light on some subtle and sometimes unnoticeable factors that we should be reflecting on in our daily practices and work-life balance.