Edel Coffey: When it comes to time - there's never enough

Picture: Bríd O'Donovan

Is it possible to find more time in a day?

Every year, I get fooled by the ‘extra hour in bed’ argument of daylight savings. 

As the clocks went back last weekend, my busy little mind thought — ‘Great! Another hour in the day into which I can cram the overflow from my daily life’ — but by 4pm it felt like I had been awake for days and by 9pm I was ready for bed.

So much for an extra hour. But it got me thinking about the nature of time and how we use it.

In recent years, I’ve noticed what I would describe as a crazy trend of people starting their days as early as 3am just so they can be more productive. 

The first person I heard of doing this was the actor Mark Wahlberg, who started his morning routine at 2.30am, which involved workouts, golf, and praying. I wondered did he ever pray to go back to bed.

This kind of competitive early rising now appears to be commonplace, particularly amongst high achievers, CEOs, and billionaires, to the extent that it feels like if you want to be one of them, you need to get up in the middle of the night too.

Sleep, it seems is for wimps, and those of us setting our alarms for a luxurious 6am need to buck up our ideas.

Sometimes, I become enamoured with this idea myself, and think perhaps this is the way forward. I’ll commit to getting up at 5am, before the demands of children and the morning routine kicks in. I’ll get an hour of writing done, maybe do some meditation or gentle yoga.

But when it comes to the crunch and the alarm goes off at 5am I hit the snooze button and wonder what madness possessed me to think that getting up one hour earlier was the equivalent of gaining an hour of free time in my day.

There are more demands on our time than ever and we are expected to do more with it than ever before — have a career, have children, prep home-cooked meals, work out, keep up with the latest books and binge-worthy TV shows, stay young, maintain friendships and relationships, wash the car, dig the garden — and as comedian Michelle Wolf says, don’t forget to smile.

We live in a productivity-focused world where finding extra time in the day is the holy grail of modern life.

We schedule everything, so much so that scientists regularly remind parents that it’s important for us to make sure we’re scheduling in some free time so our children can get bored (it’s good for their mental development).

So much of our time feels committed to getting things done, completing tasks, and if we’re not completing tasks we’re feeling guilty about being unproductive. Obviously the demands on our time change at different stages of our lives.

I remember as a child, with endless hours unspooling before me, I used to wonder why my mother didn’t clear out the cramped press under the sink once her working day was done.

Now, as a grown woman with my own admirably cramped press, I understand why she might have let that one slide.

As we get older, life’s tasks expand. Even though we are all working within the same 24-hour structure that we always were, more and more things get added in.

When it comes to time, it seems, there is just never enough. So what do we do?

There comes a point where something’s gotta give. For me, it’s probably standards.

When I look around my kitchen at night before bed and think about all of the perfect kitchens around the country, swept and mopped with every stray crumb brought to book from their hiding places behind toasters and coffee makers, I momentarily think about staying up for another half an hour to perfect the kitchen, before a voice tells me to snap out of it and go to bed.

There is never enough time and all you can do is make your peace with it. There are only the same 24 hours in every day.

We should know by now that there is no such thing as an extra hour in the day, and if there is, it’s likely we’ve stolen it from somewhere else and, inevitably, will have to pay it back.

Still, it’s good to remind ourselves that we get to decide how we spend our free hours, however few they may be.

Time is one of the few remaining things we cannot buy, it’s one of the most meaningful gifts we can offer our friends and loved ones, and it’s probably our most precious resource next to our health.

So it’s worth being careful with it, making sure we don’t waste too much of it on the things that don’t matter and spend some of it lying on the grass and watching the clouds go by. The toaster crumbs will still be waiting for us when we get back.