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

Abstract

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 21st 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.