26.284 - Whose Time Is Treated as Flexible?
“… it may even be the case that some of us have more time, but not time of the right kind or when we need it.”
Judy Wajcman, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism, “The Time-Pressure Paradox”, publisher’s excerpt (2015).
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Autonomy
Judy Wajcman is a sociologist whose research examines work, technology, gender, and the organization of time.
An emeritus professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, she brings attention to the social arrangements behind experiences we often describe as personal. In Pressed for Time, she considers why counting hours cannot fully explain how those hours are lived.
That distinction gives us a useful place to begin. An evening may contain time that can be used freely, time promised to someone else, and time that becomes available only through another person's help. A calendar can show each appointment while leaving those relationships out of sight.
Applied to a shared gathering, Wajcman's question encourages us to look beyond the hour we have reserved. We can ask what must happen around it, and who has the freedom to make those arrangements. The familiar task of choosing a time becomes an opportunity to understand one another more accurately.
The Same Hour, Two Different Days
Imagine placing two calendars beside each other. Both contain the same invitation: a neighborhood planning meeting, Tuesday, 6 to 7 p.m. The group is deciding how to use a small community space. Its organizer finishes work nearby and can walk to the meeting. The room is available without charge on Tuesday evenings, and the time has worked for several regular members. Choosing it again seems sensible. There is a real task to complete, a place to meet, and a reasonable effort to keep the gathering within one hour.
On the other calendar, that hour sits across an evening care arrangement. This participant helps a parent at mealtimes. To attend, they need to ask a relative to cover, explain what is needed, and agree on when they will return. None of this makes the meeting unimportant to them. They care about the community space and have ideas they want to contribute. They have made the arrangements before and may willingly make them again. Their acceptance arrives as a simple yes, with little sign of the coordination that made it possible.
The two acceptances conceal a difference. For one person, the meeting fits into an existing day. For another, part of the day has been rebuilt around it. That does not automatically make the invitation unfair. It does mean that repeating the invitation repeats a request for accommodation. A schedule that is easy to maintain from the organizer's position may depend on work taking place beyond the organizer's view.
At 6:55, someone raises a worthwhile question. The organizer suggests continuing until 7:15, and several people are happy to stay. The participant with the care arrangement begins calculating the journey home and whether the relative can remain. Leaving may mean missing the part of the discussion they came to influence. Staying requires asking someone else to absorb the change. The extra quarter hour has become a decision involving a person who is not in the room.
From inside the meeting, keeping to seven can seem unnecessarily strict when useful work remains. Yet the announced ending was part of the arrangement people accepted. It helped them decide what they could promise here and what they could promise elsewhere. Allowing it to drift changes those terms while the meeting is already underway. Once we see that, the clock becomes part of the group's consideration for its members. Taking the discussion seriously includes deciding how to continue it without quietly changing the conditions of participation.
We may recognize ourselves on either side of these calendars. In one part of life, we can move an appointment easily. In another, a change requires a chain of calls. Remembering both positions can soften a quick judgment about someone who leaves or declines. We do not need to know their private circumstances to allow that their day may be organized around commitments we cannot see.
How One Schedule Becomes Everyone's Default
The phrase “people make time for what matters” contains a truth we can recognize. We do sometimes rearrange our days for things we value. The difficulty comes when that observation becomes a complete explanation of someone else's availability. A person can care about a community project and also care about the parent waiting at home. Their competing commitments do not become less real because one is absent from the group's calendar. Asking which activity matters most may miss the possibility of arranging them more thoughtfully.
A recurring schedule can also shape the information used to defend it. In our imagined group, the organizer might ask the people present whether Tuesday still works. Most say yes. The response is useful, but it comes from people who have managed to attend. Someone who has stopped coming because their shift ends too late is missing from the conversation. Someone who attends by making difficult arrangements may answer yes because the alternative appears to be losing their place. The existing schedule can make its own supporters easier to hear.
It helps to separate the amount of time available from the freedom to decide when to use it. Goodin and his colleagues describe control over time as an important dimension of autonomy (Goodin et al., 2008). Consider a worker with a free afternoon whose evening shift is fixed, alongside someone with a crowded day who can move an appointment. The second person may find a six o'clock meeting easier to attend. Counting commitments would miss the difference. The relevant question includes who can rearrange them and what that rearrangement requires.
Even control over our own calendar reaches a limit where it meets other people's lives. A care handoff depends on another person arriving. A bus departure does not move because a discussion becomes interesting. Rest can need protection even when it has no appointment label. These circumstances differ, but each gives us a reason to be cautious about treating an apparently open space in a diary as time available for a group to claim.
Consideration becomes more precise when we ask which arrangements are workable without requiring people to explain their families, health, income, or private priorities. An availability question gives the organizer information relevant to the decision. A request to justify an absence asks for something else. The group can establish what it needs to function while leaving people room to describe their limits in their own terms. Respect includes the person who simply does not want to take on another commitment.
Predictability belongs in the same discussion. Moving a meeting each month may seem like a fair way to share inconvenience, yet it can make regular care or work arrangements harder to maintain. Keeping one time indefinitely can exclude the same people repeatedly. Neither repetition nor rotation settles the matter on its own. A published pattern, adequate notice, and a dependable duration may be as consequential as the hour selected. These are features a group can examine together rather than assume everyone experiences alike.
The organizer's circumstances belong in that examination too. They may be volunteering after a full working day, negotiating access to the room, and preparing the material others will discuss. Asking them to accommodate every preference through more unpaid effort would merely move the hidden cost. A fair decision needs to acknowledge limits on all sides. It can distinguish a condition that genuinely cannot change from a custom that has never been reconsidered, then identify which improvements the group has the capacity to support.
A Schedule More People Can Shape
The subtle error is to treat someone's demonstrated flexibility as an unused resource. When a person has repeatedly found a way to attend, we may come to rely on their ability to keep finding one. Their effort disappears into our expectation. Recognizing it changes the question we ask of ourselves. We can become curious about what makes another person's yes possible, without assuming that every yes is reluctant or that we are entitled to know its private details.
There is a more personal discovery here for anyone who chooses a time. The ease with which I can make a change may have become my unspoken measure of what is reasonable for everyone. If moving an appointment usually means editing my own calendar, I may picture other people doing much the same. Their hesitation can then puzzle me before I have understood what the change involves. Becoming aware of that assumption gives us something useful to revise. We can keep the responsibility to make a decision while allowing experiences beyond our own to inform it.
That awareness can be generous toward our own limits as well. Perhaps we have been proud of being easy to work with, always able to stay a little longer or adjust once more. There may be real pleasure in helping a group succeed. Naming the point beyond which we cannot keep adjusting gives others more accurate information and helps a willing contribution remain willing. We can be dependable without being endlessly available.
The positive purpose of this attention is to make room for what people can offer. The participant who must leave at seven may bring knowledge, imagination, or judgment that helps the group use its space well. When participation fits more reliably alongside the rest of life, there is more room to give that attention freely. A person can contribute here while remaining a dependable colleague, relative, or friend elsewhere. A shared project can support these connected commitments through the way it asks people to take part.
Return to our imagined group and let it compare Tuesday with a Saturday morning room that would require a hire fee. Suppose a brief availability check reaches regular attendees and residents who have stopped coming. Several regular attendees work fixed Saturday morning shifts; a resident who works Tuesday evenings could attend on Saturday. The participant with the care arrangement says Tuesday is manageable if the meeting reliably ends at seven. Neither option includes everyone. Saturday would create access for one person while removing it for others, and its cost would also reduce the money available for the community activity. That gives the group reasons to consider a limited Tuesday trial, with the remaining exclusion clearly acknowledged.
For three meetings, the group could keep Tuesday while sending material early and accepting contributions before decisions are made. A member who agrees to the role could bring those contributions into the discussion and report how they were considered. This gives the evening worker a route to influence the decision, although it cannot offer all the exchange of being in the room. After the trial, the group would ask whether people could contribute on workable terms, whether meetings ended as promised, and whether the added coordination was manageable. If important decisions continued to exclude the same people, that would be a reason to reconsider the arrangement. Consultation would have informed a choice that remained open to correction.
For a reader with little authority over a schedule, the available action may be smaller. You might explain that you can attend until the announced ending, suggest a time you could reliably use, or ask how to contribute before a decision. You may also need to decline. Improving a shared arrangement should not depend entirely on the persistence of those who find it hardest to use. Whoever sets the time has an opportunity to make those limits part of the group's judgment.
Now imagine it is 6:55 again, during one of the trial meetings, and an important question arises. This time, the organizer records it, agrees that it will lead the next agenda, and names when members can send their views before that discussion. At seven, the meeting ends with the question still open and a clear route for considering it. Its importance has been preserved, along with the promise about time. The person leaving can keep the care arrangement they made; the group can continue its work without asking them to surrender their part in the decision. An ordinary act of keeping time has made room for people to keep faith with one another.
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Practice: Make the Time Work for More People
Estimated time: 10 minutes
Choose one recurring meeting, gathering, or commitment. Note who sets its timing, what is genuinely fixed, and which assumptions you may be making about other people's availability. Include what happens before and after the event. Keep known facts separate from questions you have not asked, and leave private circumstances private.
Compare the current arrangement with two feasible alternatives. One could involve a different time; another could change the notice, duration, or opportunity to contribute without attending. Consider whose planning becomes easier, what difficulty remains, and who would do any additional coordination. If you control the schedule, identify what you can test. If you do not, prepare a suggestion or a boundary that reflects your own circumstances.
Your outcome is one concrete proposal, its remaining tradeoff, and a way to learn whether it helps. The worksheet will give you space to work through those decisions without trying to redesign an entire organization. You can use an imagined setting when that is more useful, and you need not contact anyone to complete the reflection.
Scientific Summary
On a screen, moving a calendar block looks effortless: drag Tuesday's meeting to Thursday and watch it settle into place. The people involved cannot always move their days so neatly. The difference brings two ideas together. Goodin and colleagues treat control over time as a dimension of personal freedom, or temporal autonomy; Wajcman's discussion of household coordination helps us see how that control meets responsibilities involving other people (Goodin et al., 2008; Wajcman, 2015). An apparently empty hour may be surrounded by arrangements that give it a very particular place in someone's day.
Follow the moving block into that day. A different meeting time might require another care handoff, a new journey, or someone else changing their plans. Even when a change is possible, knowing about it early matters to the person making those arrangements. If the block keeps moving, or its ending keeps stretching, the uncertainty becomes another thing to accommodate. Our meeting example illustrates how control, coordination, and predictability interact. Research on work schedules examines the significance of that last feature in a setting where workers' hours also affect their livelihood.
Schneider and Harknett studied survey responses from 27,792 hourly retail and food-service workers at 80 large U.S. companies. Unstable and unpredictable schedules were associated with greater psychological distress, poorer sleep quality, and unhappiness (Schneider & Harknett, 2019). Recruitment used targeted Facebook advertisements, and the researchers applied weighting and other checks to address possible bias. These observational findings show associations; they do not establish that unstable schedules caused the reported outcomes. The setting and sampling also matter: these are findings about the workers studied, not estimates of what a neighborhood meeting will do to its members.
The useful connection is a richer way of looking at the rectangle. We can ask who has the authority to move it, which arrangements move with it, and whether the people affected can plan around where it will stay. These questions distinguish an hour's duration from the freedom available within it. They do not identify an ideal meeting time or establish the worksheet as a validated intervention. They give us a practical way to examine a choice, notice its consequences, and improve it with the people whose days it touches.
References
Goodin, R. E., Rice, J. M., Parpo, A., & Eriksson, L. (2008). Discretionary time: A new measure of freedom. Cambridge University Press. Consulted: Chapter 2 publisher preview, “Discretionary time and temporal autonomy,” pp. 27–60.
London School of Economics and Political Science. (n.d.). Professor Judy Wajcman. Institutional biography.
Schneider, D., & Harknett, K. (2019). Consequences of routine work-schedule instability for worker health and well-being. American Sociological Review, 84(1), 82–114. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122418823184. Author manuscript.
Wajcman, J. (2015). The time-pressure paradox [Excerpt from Pressed for time: The acceleration of life in digital capitalism]. University of Chicago Press. Publisher excerpt.
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