The Busy Person’s Lies

Offer a similar "budgeting" experience as YNAB, but constrained (you literally have 24 hours a day, no more, no less). Create categories and subcategories. Work - Programming, Meetings, blech; Meals - Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Preparation, Shopping; Kids - Transport, playing with, working with; Home - Bathroom, Kitchen, Floors, Mowing; Financial - Bills, Budgeting.

Open the app and log your time, specifying the appropriate category. Reallocate time. You wanted to spend 24 hours at the lake this month (rented a cabin, camping), but you needed to clean the gutters and forgot about it so you go to the lake later on Saturday, not first thing in the morning.

Would be able to generate reports at different levels of granularity, like a budgeting/accounting app can. Generate a daily, colored, chart so you can see where in each day you spend time (or don't for unaccounted for time) and identify trends and problems (I go to bed between 8pm and 11pm, maybe I should make that more regular).

And that's kind of the whole point of the article, isn't it?. The poor and working class people in my life don't complain about how "busy" they are nearly as much as the more well-to-do, despite being so much busier than the middle-class-and-up. They don't talk about it like that, because they're much more grounded in reality. Meanwhile, many college students, lawyers, doctors, engineers, programmers, etc. are acting like they can barely spare a minute because of how busy they are. Maybe these people are busy, in a sense, but the whole point of the article is that they're not nearly as busy as they believe they are.

I think there's a deeper issue at play that the article doesn't touch on: that acknowledging you're not busy is perceived as laziness. There's a certain culture of shared misery, where we all agree to tell each other that we're all so busy, and then we can all feel good both about what we do and about what we don't do.

Here's an anecdote (that's meant to illustrate a situation, not talk myself up): when I was in school, on more than one occasion I had someone tell me that I must be "so busy" because of my major and programs I was enrolled in (and the fact that I was pulling off good grades). When I told them that no, I really wasn't that busy, they were incredulous. There always had to be some explanation for why I wasn't busy, like that I was cheating or taking easy classes or something. The problem was that they thought they were busy, and they figured I must be doing at least as much work as they were, so by deduction I must be busy too. Well it turned out I was doing just as much work as they were; I just didn't think that qualified me as "busy." One person, after drilling me on how much time I spent on school work, scoffed: "Oh, so you are busy then," and thought I was just trying to act cool or something.

I don't believe that you're not allowed to write about a social phenomenon just because there are people in world to whom it doesn't apply. It's very clear the types of people the author is talking about.