The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years.β β Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
There is no doubt that you are busy. We all are. Surveys after surveys are very clear on this. Especially the year that went by yesterday. A survey a decade back by the Management Research Group of senior leaders identified that 97% of them thought that strategic thinking - the ability to focus on long term goals was the key to their organisations continued survival and growth. However, in a different survey, the same group of leaders confessed to not having enough time to do long term thinking. Again it is borne out by the time we spend processing emails and meetings. In WEIRD countries, this number is as high as sixty-two meetings per month. There is a paucity of reliable data for our part of the world. So, why are we so busy? The late great John Keynes had postulated in the1930's that people in the future (probably this generation) would be working about three hours a day, and that too if it chose to. That has clearly not come to pass. Yet, our leisure times are growing. The average American works almost 12 hour less than they used to 40 years ago. The rate of work has been falling across the globe. However, all of us continue to be busy. There are many good explorations of this theme in behavioural science literature.
There is a lot of good work on temporal discounting from the investment point of view but not a lot that explores our relationship with halo that being busy imparts. As the orientation for work changes and we become more hybrid in our work, life research must pick up on it to untangle this gordian knot.
Could it be that it is partly a conflation of bad communication, and atrocious economics? Greg McKeown in his eminently readable book Essentialism brings this idea to fore. The fact that we have priorities instead of a priority. However, why did we have to get a plural for a very admirable singular? Sometime in the18th Century clocks were synchronised all over Europe to measure labour. Since then our time has been quantified, measured, saved, and in short has become valuable. Whatever is valuable ought to be scarce. Remember the old maxim about time is money? This tempo is not unique to us. William James in his masterly The Principles of Psychology went on to note, "Our sense of time seems subject to the law of contrast". So time and industriousness as the 19th century social reformers put it went hand in hand.
Our sense of time, money, and anxiety owes a lot to the work of Gary S Becker who writing in 1965 said "if anything time is more carefully used today than a century ago". This is where bad economics comes in, as people especially in post war America were paid more, the wages rose, standards of living became very good. The leisure time seemed to be wasteful, as it could be used for something better. To read more, to exercise better, to acquire new skills, and whatever other 'improving' things were out there. Staffan Linder a Swedish economist coined the term "harried leisure class". So how does it all come together? Professor Anandi Mani who did an experiment on cognitive effects on money scarcity, posits that time scarcity might be doing the same thing to our decisions. Making our decisions around immediate gratification than long term thinking. To create meaning and true value requires an active ability to work only on things that truly matter. And yet in our present gig economy, and it's extended influence we might not find it easy to see the truly important.
Meanwhile, we wish you a productive new year.

