Time—or the sense that there is a lack of it--is one of my coaching clients’ most common challenges and sources of stress. Psychologists have noted that the “real or perceived sense that there is not enough time available” to complete tasks results in a particular type of stress that they call time pressure. Clients ask me for time management tools in order to reduce stress.

In thinking about the persistent sense of time pressure among my clients, I dug into some data. The time pressure clients feel is common. A 2018 Pew Research survey found that 60% of U.S. adults said they at least sometimes felt too busy to enjoy life, and 12% said they felt this way all or most of the time. A 2015 Gallup survey indicated that women, particularly women with young children, and people in the work force were more likely to feel that they didn’t have enough time to do all the things they needed to do than others. For example, 61% of women under 50 reported not having enough time while only 48% of men said the same. This, in spite of the fact that the average American work week has decreased by three hours since the 1960s.

When clients and I begin to drill down into the reasons they feel time pressure, things begin to look complicated. Yes, clients are busy, and they juggle many demands on their time and energy. Many work demanding full-time jobs even as they parent small children or teens or care for aging parents. Clients face numerous demands, and they are busy, but other factors play into their time pressure—the anxiety generated by demands on their time.

· Much of their time is allocated to tasks that do not engage them. Clients often report that their days are filled with routine, mind-numbing tasks: answering an endless stream of emails, driving kids to and from activities, completing yet another report that will disappear into a file. A 2004 study of working adults may illustrate this problem. The study polled men and women who did equal amounts of volunteering. Women reported feeling more time pressure from volunteering than men engaged in that work for the same number of hours. The researchers hypothesized that the work women were doing was more likely to be repetitive daily chores. As one author put it, women were doing “less cheering and high-fiving and more trying not to fall asleep at school meetings.”

· They aren’t mindful about how they spend their time. Clients describe days on autopilot. We all make this mistake. We often don’t actively manage our time but instead stay in reactive mode. As writer James Clear has written, “One of our greatest challenges in changing habits is maintaining awareness of what we are actually doing.”[i]

· They put pressure on themselves to do things because of societal expectations. For example, many of the working moms among my clients feel a persistent sense that they must attend every sporting event or orchestra concert and that they must drive their children to a packed schedule of after school activities in order to be good mothers. Some of my clients have been explicitly given this message by other mothers or by their children’s teachers.

· The way they are spending their time does not align with their own values and priorities. As clients and I talk about their time pressure, I usually begin by asking them to talk about their priorities. Often it quickly becomes clear that their days are filled with tasks that match other people’s priorities rather than their own. We all have to do things that fulfill others’ priorities some of the time, but the more we do this, the more we will suffer from anxiety because we aren’t doing the things we care about doing.

In short, the time pressure clients feel is real, but it is also complicated, and a few simple time management tricks won’t take away that stress. So, what do we do about it? I try to work with clients to develop habits of intentional time management. Here are a few of the tools we use.

1. Become conscious of how you are spending your time and whether you are spending your time in ways that engage you. I often suggest that clients use the Good Time Journal tool developed by Stanford University professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans to track their major daily activities.[ii] (Click here for instructions.) Using this tool, clients are often surprised to find how much time they spend on tasks that don’t engage them and drain their energy, and together we develop some strategies to increase the number of engaging activities in their days and to find ways to improve less engaging tasks. For example, a client might schedule a specific time every day to deal with email and make it a point to answer some emails with a phone call—a tactic which can not only save time but provide a brief and energizing social interaction. If you must spend precious minutes every day in the carpool line, can you listen to the audio book version of a title that you’ve wanted to read for ages?

2. Be honest with yourself how social expectations shape your schedule. Do you really need to attend that after work networking event? Is it really necessary for your child to play two sports each season and take piano lessons and attend junior Beta Club meetings once a week? Several studies (like this one and this one) indicate that overscheduling children can lead to burnout for children as well parents. I’ve long admired a strategy employed by one of my friends, a single mother of three. She limited each child to one after-school activity in fall and spring until they were old enough to drive themselves to activities. She explained that there were limits on her own time and theirs. They could choose any activity they wanted, but they were limited to one. (You might worry that this would limit her kids’ college prospects, but in fact, they earned scholarships to the colleges of their choice.)

3. Be an active planner, not a reactive one. I recommend that clients spend about ten minutes each week (usually on Friday afternoon or Monday morning) to review how they spent their time in the past week and allocate how they plan to spend it in the coming one. When you are already overscheduled it may feel daunting to allocate time for this, but it can actually be empowering. When you review your calendar for the previous week, you may be surprised to see that there were pockets of time you could have used more effectively if only you had planned in advance to allocate that time for one of your priorities. When you make weekly review and planning a habit, you will feel more control over how you spend your time.

4. Periodically (at least twice a year) review your priorities and values and evaluate whether the activities that fill your days align with those priorities. Ask yourself: What are my priorities in my life right now—at work and in my personal life? What things am I doing that don’t align with my priorities? How can you better align your allocation of time with your priorities? What activities create a lot of inner conflict in you? Can you let go of them? What do you need to say “no” to? What do you want to add to my life for my own enjoyment? How can you work more of that into your schedule?

Intentional time management is not a simple one-and-done task. It’s a process—and an ongoing challenge. But the more intentional you are about how you use your time—the more you take control of your days—the more satisfaction and the less time pressure you will feel.

How about you? What factors contribute to your sense of time pressure? What strategies do you use to be intentional about your use of time?

And for more on time pressure and ideas for addressing it, see this piece from Kira M. Newman at the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley.

[i] James Clear, Atomic Habits (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019): 65.

[ii] See Burnett and Evans’ book, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life (Knopf, 2016).