Eleven Minutes in the Car With a Yoghurt Was My Personal Best

Load · The Reading Room, Vol. 103 · 8 min read · what the research on time poverty found, and why the hour you are missing is usually there in pieces

“I have no time for myself” is usually literally true and slightly misleading at once. Researchers who study time poverty have found that the feeling tracks lower well-being and health, that it is common across wealthy countries, and that one unglamorous move reliably eases it. It involves spending money, which is exactly why you have not tried it.

My personal record for time to myself, last spring, was eleven minutes in the car on the driveway, engine off, eating a yoghurt with the plastic teaspoon I keep in the glovebox for emergencies. I was not doing anything. I was just not yet inside. I remember thinking, with real pride, that it had been a good week because I’d managed it three times.

If that sounds familiar, you already know the shape of this. Your days are full from the first alarm to the last dishwasher cycle. Somewhere in between there are gaps, but they are short and they are never yours: seven minutes before a call, the wait outside a school, the twenty minutes after everyone else has gone to bed when you are too tired to use them for anything but your phone.

The short answer: when you have no time for yourself, the problem is rarely only the total number of hours. It is that what free time remains arrives in scraps too small to use, and that you are almost certainly spending your own labour on tasks you could pay a little to hand over. Research on time poverty links the feeling to lower well-being and health, and a large study found that people who spend money to buy time back report greater life satisfaction.¹ ²

Jump to: Why it feels like no time at all · What time poverty is · What buying time did · Why you haven’t done it · The Sunday hour · Questions women actually ask

Why do I feel like I have no time?

Partly because you have very little, and partly because what you have is broken into pieces. You may, on paper, have an hour a day that is not assigned to anyone. In practice that hour is made of six fragments of ten minutes, each one sitting between two obligations and each one half-occupied by thinking about the next thing. Ten minutes that begin with you checking the time are not ten free minutes.

Brigid Schulte, who spent years researching this for her book Overwhelmed, called it time confetti: leisure that exists, technically, but has been shredded into bits too small to do anything with.³ The result is a strange double experience. You feel you never stop, and yet somebody examining your diary could point to gaps. Both things are true. The gaps just are not usable time.

The second reason is quieter. A great deal of the load you carry is made of tasks that could be done by somebody else, for money, and you do them yourself. The grocery run. The cleaning. The forty minutes on the phone rebooking a parent’s appointment. Some of that is necessity. Some of it is a rule you have never looked at directly, which is that paying for help is an extravagance, or a small admission of failure.

What does the research say time poverty does?

In a 2020 review in Nature Human Behaviour, Ashley Whillans and two colleagues pulled together the evidence and started from an uncomfortable observation. Over two decades, global wealth rose, and material affluence did not turn into time affluence. Most people now report feeling persistently time poor.¹

That matters because the feeling is not only unpleasant. Time poverty is linked to lower well-being, worse physical health and reduced productivity.¹ For a woman who is proud of her output, that last part is worth sitting with. The same pressure that keeps you working through every gap may be quietly costing the quality of the work.

If the missing hours are one line on a much longer list of things you absorb without counting, the Quiet Audit counts them, in ten minutes, on one page. Start here.

What happened when people bought their time back?

This is the finding I find hardest to argue with, mostly because I tried. In 2017 Whillans and colleagues including Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia and Michael Norton of Harvard published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences using large samples from the United States, Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands, 6,271 people in total.²

People who spent money on time-saving services, such as paying for cleaning, delivery or someone to take on a chore, reported greater life satisfaction. Then the team ran a small field experiment. Sixty working adults in Vancouver were each given $40 on two consecutive weekends: one weekend they spent it on something that would save them time, the other on a material purchase. They reported greater happiness after the time-saving purchase.²

The authors’ own conclusion was that using money to buy time can protect people from the damaging effect of time pressure on life satisfaction.² It is not a large or glamorous idea. It is the idea that the hour you are missing may be available at a price you can afford, and that you have been declining to pay it.

Why haven’t I just done that already?

Because paying someone to do what you could technically do yourself sets off a very specific alarm. It feels lazy. It feels like the kind of thing other women do. There is often an older voice in it too, a mother or grandmother who ran a house on her own and would have had views about a cleaner.

That alarm is worth noticing because it is doing a job the numbers do not support. The same money spent on a material purchase does less for you, in the research, than money spent buying back an hour.² You would not hesitate to hire help at work for a task below your pay grade. At home, the same decision reads as a moral failing, and it is the reading that is off, not the decision.

The limit is real and I won’t dress it up. Not everyone can spend money this way, and there is a whole category of work that no service can take off you: the thinking, the remembering, the noticing that the milk is low. That invisible part has its own research and its own name, which we set out in our guide to the mental load. Buying time handles the doing. It does not handle the carrying.

What to do when you have no time for yourself

The practice is a single question, asked once a week, and it takes about three minutes. On Sunday evening, while you are looking at the week ahead anyway, find one task you would normally do yourself and decide to buy it, drop it or hand it to someone else this week. Just one. Then write down, in the diary, where the recovered hour goes, as one block, with your name on it.

The second half matters as much as the first. An hour you win back and leave unassigned will be eaten by the week within a day. An hour written into the diary as a single block, Saturday nine to ten, has a chance of arriving in one piece, which is the thing confetti never does.

Do not start with the hardest thing. Start with the task whose cost you would least mind. If the first one works, the second is easier to justify, and within a month you may find you have two real hours a week that you did not have before. That is not a new life. It is a Saturday morning, which is more than the driveway.

Questions women actually ask about this

What to do when you have no time for yourself?

Look for tasks you could pay to hand over, drop, or share, and move one of them each week. Research found that people who spend money on time-saving services report greater life satisfaction, and that working adults were happier after a time-saving purchase than a material one.² Then protect the recovered time as one block.

Why do I feel like I have no time?

Because you probably have little, and what you have arrives in fragments. Most people in wealthy countries report feeling time poor, and time poverty is linked to lower well-being and health.¹ Short, scattered gaps between obligations rarely feel like free time, even when they add up to an hour.

What does it mean to have time for yourself?

It means time that is not assigned to anyone else’s needs, arriving in a block long enough to start and finish something, even something small. Ten minutes checking the clock between two commitments does not count. An uninterrupted hour you chose in advance does.

What to do when you have nothing going for yourself?

If that sentence feels true right now, start with one small thing that is only yours this week, rather than trying to rebuild everything at once. If it comes with a flatness that has lasted weeks, or a sense that nothing is worth doing, please speak to a doctor. That deserves care, not a productivity tip.

Is it selfish to want time for myself?

No. Time poverty is associated with lower productivity as well as lower well-being, which means the people who depend on you pay for your lack of it too.¹ Wanting an hour is not a luxury request. It is maintenance.

If the missing time is sitting inside a bigger pattern, where you are still performing well and quietly running out, our burnout guide sets out what that pattern looks like: everyone keeps telling you how well you’re handling this. And the research on why the gap between men’s and women’s free time exists at all is in why women don’t have more free time, even now.

On the research. The survey findings are associations, and people with more money can more easily buy time, which the researchers addressed but which remains a real limitation. The field experiment involved 60 people, small relative to the surveys. None of this research was done specifically on women in their fifties, and none of it measured the invisible mental work that no service can take over.

References
1. Giurge LM, Whillans AV, West C. Why time poverty matters for individuals, organisations and nations. Nature Human Behaviour. 2020;4(10):993-1003.
2. Whillans AV, Dunn EW, Smeets P, Bekkers R, Norton MI. Buying time promotes happiness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2017;114(32):8523-8527.
3. Schulte B. Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time. New York: Sarah Crichton Books; 2014.

Written by Tomasz Nowak for Blue Leaf Journal. Updated: 27 September 2026.