THE COST OF NOW: Your Urgency, My Time
There is something slightly ridiculous about the way most of us talk about time.
We want more of it.
We want control over it.
We want flexible working.
We want fewer meetings.
We want proper holidays.
We want evenings where nobody bothers us.
We want weekends that belong to us.
We want the freedom to go for a walk, collect the kids from school, sit in the garden, read a book, disappear for an afternoon or simply do absolutely fuck all without feeling guilty about it.
I certainly do.
A huge amount of my work over the last few years has eventually arrived at the same place.
Autonomy.
Not productivity for productivity's sake.
Not squeezing another seventeen tasks into Tuesday.
The ability to decide, consciously, what deserves your time.
But there is an awkward part of that conversation that I don't think we acknowledge nearly enough.
While demanding greater control over our own time, we are remarkably comfortable making claims on everybody else's.
I want autonomy over my day.
But when I need something from you, I'd quite like you to rearrange yours.
I want the freedom to answer messages when it suits me.
But if I send you one, I notice when you don't respond.
I want suppliers to respect my working hours.
But if something matters to me at 4:45 on Friday afternoon, I would very much appreciate them sorting it before they disappear for the weekend.
I want businesses to understand that I have a life outside work.
But when I become the customer, suddenly I would quite like their lives to organise themselves around mine.
There is a contradiction sitting underneath modern ideas about autonomy.
We want sovereignty over our own time while increasingly expecting access to everybody else's.
And the more I think about it, the more uncomfortable that becomes.
My urgency feels different from yours
Imagine I email you at 8:30 on a Sunday evening.
Nothing dramatic.
I remembered something.
It was convenient for me to send it while it was in my head.
From my perspective, the transaction is finished.
I've got it out of my brain.
Excellent.
I can forget about it and carry on watching television.
But what have I just done to you?
Perhaps nothing.
Perhaps you won't see it until Monday.
But perhaps your phone lights up.
Perhaps you see my name.
Perhaps I'm your boss.
Or your biggest client.
Or somebody whose opinion matters to your career.
Perhaps the email contains no deadline at all.
And yet suddenly you're thinking about Monday morning.
Do I need to reply?
Does Adam expect an answer?
If I don't respond until tomorrow, will that look bad?
Should I at least acknowledge it?
The interesting part is that I may not expect anything.
Researchers Laura Giurge and Vanessa Bohns studied exactly this kind of situation across eight preregistered experiments involving more than 4,000 participants.
They found what they called the email urgency bias.
People receiving non-urgent work emails outside normal working hours tended to believe the sender expected a faster response than the sender actually did.
The sender thinks:
“I've sent that so I don't forget.”
The receiver experiences:
“I've just been given something that might require attention.”
Same email.
Completely different experience.
And the researchers found that this misunderstanding was associated with greater stress and lower subjective wellbeing for the person receiving it. Simply making the sender's expectations explicit, for example saying that no response was required until working hours resumed, reduced the effect.
That is fascinating because it exposes something bigger than email.
We experience our own demands from the inside.
We experience everybody else's from the outside.
When I send the message, I know my intentions.
When you receive it, you have to infer them.
And human beings are not especially good at stepping completely outside their own perspective.
My request feels reasonable because I understand everything that led to it.
Your delay feels unreasonable because I don't necessarily know anything about the life happening on the other side.
I know why I need it
That sentence explains an enormous amount.
I know why I need the quote today.
I know why I need the answer.
I know why the delivery matters.
I know why I need you to call me back.
I know what happens next in my process.
I know the client is waiting for me.
I know I'm about to leave for holiday.
I know my deadline.
You don't.
So I tell you.
“Any chance you could get this back to me today?”
Perfectly reasonable question.
Sometimes completely necessary.
But something strange can happen as soon as I press send.
My deadline begins migrating.
It started as my deadline.
Then I communicated it to you.
And somewhere in that transition it quietly became our deadline.
Sometimes eventually:
your deadline.
If you miss it, I'm frustrated.
But why was it yours?
That isn't a rhetorical argument that nobody should ever accommodate anybody else.
Human beings depend on one another.
Work requires coordination.
Families require coordination.
Friendships require coordination.
Civilisation itself is basically an enormous network of people agreeing to do certain things at certain times for other people.
The problem isn't asking.
The problem is forgetting that a request is still a request simply because the answer would make our life easier.
There is a huge difference between:
“Could you?”
and
“You should.”
Modern urgency has become very good at smudging that line.
Time isn't only about quantity
This is where the idea of temporal autonomy becomes useful.
Robert Goodin, James Mahmud Rice, Antti Parpo and Lina Eriksson developed the concept through their work on discretionary time.
Their argument is more interesting than simply measuring how many hours someone works or how many hours they technically have left.
What matters is also how much control they have over those hours.
Their research found that discretionary control over time significantly influenced whether people felt rushed and how satisfied they were with their lives.
That feels intuitively right.
Two people might each have an empty Wednesday afternoon.
One deliberately protected it.
They decided that after lunch they were going to walk the dog, read, think, sit in a coffee shop or stare at a wall.
The other person's afternoon is empty simply because nobody has yet asked them to do anything.
On a calendar, both have three free hours.
Psychologically, they are not necessarily the same.
One owns the time.
The other is waiting to see who claims it.
That distinction matters.
Because autonomy is not simply having gaps in your diary.
It is having some meaningful say over what fills them.
And once you look at time that way, everyday requests start to look slightly different.
Every demand for immediacy is, in some small way, a proposal to alter another person's use of their time.
Sometimes that proposal is entirely justified.
Sometimes the relationship explicitly includes that right.
If a firefighter is on duty, an emergency gets to interrupt dinner.
If an employee is contracted to provide emergency cover, the phone ringing has a different meaning.
If my daughter needs me, fatherhood has already answered the question of whether she is allowed to interrupt certain things.
Relationships create legitimate obligations.
So do jobs.
So do emergencies.
The problem begins when we behave as though our preference automatically creates somebody else's obligation.
Your calendar is connected to mine
Sociologists Naomi Gerstel and Dan Clawson use a lovely phrase when discussing control over working time:
a web of time.
Their review of research into work and family schedules points out that a change to one person's schedule rarely affects only that person.
It reverberates through connected lives.
A manager changes someone's shift.
That employee now needs different childcare.
Their partner changes their working day.
A grandparent changes an appointment.
Someone else rearranges school collection.
One change.
Five calendars.
You can see the same mechanism everywhere.
The client delays making a decision for three weeks and finally approves something on Thursday.
Now the supplier needs it Monday.
The supplier asks the manufacturer for priority.
The manufacturer changes the production schedule.
Someone works overtime.
Someone else's job gets delayed.
Their client chases.
Their team speeds up.
A decision made slowly at one end of the chain produces urgency everywhere else.
That particular problem deserves its own essay later in this series.
But the principle matters here.
Time is relational.
My decisions about time do not stay neatly inside my calendar.
They leak.
That means autonomy cannot be understood purely as:
“I should be able to do what I want with my time.”
Because everyone around me is trying to do exactly the same thing.
My autonomy exists inside a network of other people's autonomy.
And sometimes those things collide.
We have become very good at defending one side of the equation
Look at how we talk about modern work.
Protect your boundaries.
Block your diary.
Turn notifications off.
Don't answer emails outside working hours.
Take your lunch break.
Use your annual leave.
Say no.
Protect deep work.
Avoid unnecessary meetings.
All good advice.
I've written versions of most of it myself.
My entire experience of rebuilding my working life has involved learning that availability and value are not the same thing.
For years I was the person who took the call.
Solved the problem.
Stayed available.
Absorbed the pressure.
And because I kept proving that I could carry more, more kept arriving.
Eventually the expectation wasn't merely that I would do my job well.
It was that I would be accessible whenever the business required me.
The more useful I became, the less of my own time felt genuinely mine.
The response to experiences like that has rightly been a growing conversation about boundaries and autonomy.
But I think we've concentrated almost entirely on one question:
How do I stop other people taking my time?
There is another question.
How often am I taking theirs?
That's harder.
Because now we're not talking about boundaries as something other people need to respect.
We're talking about responsibility.
Mine.
Flexibility can create its own trap
Technology was supposed to improve this.
And in some ways it absolutely has.
Being able to work remotely means a parent might collect their child from school.
Someone can avoid two hours of commuting.
A person might work brilliantly at six in the morning and finish early.
People can arrange work around life rather than organising life entirely around an office building.
That is genuine autonomy.
But researchers studying mobile email found a peculiar paradox.
Melissa Mazmanian, Wanda Orlikowski and JoAnne Yates followed knowledge professionals using mobile email technology.
The technology gave individuals greater flexibility in where and when they worked.
Short term, it felt like greater control.
But as more people used that flexibility, they collectively created stronger expectations of continuous connectivity and availability.
What looked individually like autonomy started reducing autonomy collectively.
They called it the autonomy paradox.
Think about what that means.
I answer emails from the beach because it suits me.
You see that I answer emails from the beach.
Next time you're on holiday, perhaps you feel that you should too.
Nobody wrote a policy.
Nobody necessarily demanded anything.
We just demonstrated what was possible.
Then possibility became culture.
I might feel incredibly autonomous because I can work whenever I want.
But if everybody around me concludes that this means I can therefore work whenever they want, something has gone badly wrong.
That isn't autonomy.
That's twenty-four-hour availability with better scenery.
The customer version is even stranger
We behave differently depending on which side of the transaction we're standing.
As workers, we understand workload.
We understand staffing.
We understand that people get ill.
We understand lunch breaks.
We understand that complicated things take time.
We understand that mistakes happen.
We understand that one person cannot serve twelve people simultaneously.
Then we become customers.
Suddenly:
Why hasn't anyone answered the phone?
Why haven't they replied to my email?
Why hasn't this shipped?
Why can't they come tomorrow?
Why is there a queue?
Why is the restaurant short-staffed?
Why can't somebody just sort it?
We haven't forgotten how work operates.
We've temporarily changed roles.
And our perspective changes with it.
I can understand perfectly why my inbox is overwhelming while simultaneously interpreting silence from someone else's as poor service.
That should bother us.
Not because expectations are wrong.
Good service matters.
Reliability matters.
Keeping promises matters.
If someone says they will call at three and doesn't, that is different.
If a company promises next-day delivery and takes ten days, that is different.
Autonomy does not mean freedom from commitments.
Quite the opposite.
Agency requires taking responsibility for the commitments you deliberately make.
But there is a difference between expecting somebody to honour an agreement and expecting somebody to reorganise themselves around a timescale that existed only in your head.
We have become surprisingly poor at separating the two.
Power decides whose urgency wins
There is another uncomfortable layer.
Not everybody gets equal influence over the shared clock.
The boss usually has more ability to create urgency than the employee.
The major client has more leverage than the tiny supplier.
The customer often has more perceived permission to demand than the person serving them.
Research into working-time control repeatedly shows that the ability to influence when work happens is unevenly distributed.
Gerstel and Clawson's review notes that gender, class and other inequalities affect people's ability to control their schedules. More recent research similarly treats work-time control as an important resource associated with wellbeing and work-life outcomes.
So when we say:
“It's only a quick email.”
or
“It's only ten minutes.”
or
“I just need you to…”
we should probably ask:
Quick for whom?
Ten minutes taken from what?
“Just” according to whose priorities?
A ten-minute interruption may genuinely take ten minutes from the person creating it.
For the recipient, it can land in the middle of something that took forty minutes of concentration to reach.
A thirty-minute meeting may fit beautifully between two things in the organiser's calendar while destroying the only uninterrupted hour somebody else had all day.
Your request enters my life without carrying a map of what it displaced.
That's why it is so easy to underestimate its cost.
We need each other
There is a danger in taking this argument too far.
A world where nobody feels entitled to anybody else's time sounds wonderful until you try to achieve literally anything involving another person.
We need coordination.
Sometimes my timetable has to bend around yours.
Sometimes yours has to bend around mine.
Sometimes family takes priority.
Sometimes the customer genuinely does need something quickly.
Sometimes the boss has information you don't and the deadline really matters.
Sometimes your mate phones at the worst possible time because their world has just fallen apart.
I don't want a society where everyone builds a fortress around their calendar and communicates through appointment requests.
That isn't autonomy.
That's isolation.
Real autonomy has to work in the presence of other people.
Which means it requires negotiation.
Reciprocity.
Judgement.
The ability to recognise that the person on the other side of the request is not a resource.
They have their own plans.
Their own responsibilities.
Their own children.
Their own concentration.
Their own Tuesday.
Their own fucking life.
And perhaps that is the missing half of the modern conversation about boundaries.
We have become increasingly comfortable saying:
My time matters.
Good.
It does.
But if that principle means anything, the next sentence has to be:
Yours does too.
Perhaps autonomy has an obligation attached
This has started changing how I think about autonomy itself.
I used to think primarily about autonomy as protection.
The ability to choose.
The ability to say no.
The ability to control your attention.
The ability to design work around the life you actually want.
I still believe all of that.
But autonomy cannot simply be something we demand.
It has to become something we extend.
If I want the right not to answer immediately, I need to become more comfortable when you don't.
If I want you to respect my holiday, perhaps I shouldn't casually intrude on yours.
If I want the freedom to organise my working day around my family, I need to recognise that your working day may be organised around something I cannot see.
If I want people to stop manufacturing urgency for me, I need to stop manufacturing it for them.
That doesn't mean becoming slow.
It doesn't mean lowering standards.
It doesn't mean tolerating terrible service.
It doesn't mean abandoning deadlines.
It means becoming slightly more precise about what we are actually asking another human being to give us.
Sometimes it's work.
Sometimes it's information.
Sometimes it's expertise.
And sometimes, whether we acknowledge it or not, what we're asking for is:
control over what they do next.
That is a much bigger request.
Before you send the chase
Perhaps the simplest place to start is with a question.
Not a productivity technique.
Not a communication policy.
Just a pause.
Before sending the chase.
Before marking something urgent.
Before asking someone to squeeze something in.
Before becoming irritated that another person hasn't answered yet.
Ask:
Is this actually urgent for them, or merely convenient for me?
Sometimes the answer will be urgent.
Fine.
Say so.
Explain why.
Give them the information required to make the same judgement.
But sometimes the answer will be uncomfortable.
It isn't urgent.
I just want it.
I want certainty.
I want the task closed.
I want the answer out of their head and back into mine.
I want the next step.
I want my problem solved.
And there's nothing inherently wrong with wanting any of those things.
The mistake is assuming that wanting them creates an automatic claim over someone else's next hour.
We all want more time.
We all want more space.
We all want greater autonomy.
We all want a world that allows us to decide occasionally that nothing needs our attention right now.
Perhaps we don't get there simply by defending our own calendars more aggressively.
Perhaps we get there by recognising something embarrassingly obvious.
The person we're chasing wants exactly the same thing.
I want my time to belong to me.
If I genuinely believe that matters, I probably have to accept that yours belongs to you too.
Sources and Further Reading
Robert E. Goodin, James Mahmud Rice, Antti Parpo and Lina Eriksson, Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom, particularly their work on discretionary time and temporal autonomy. Discretionary time and temporal autonomy
Laura M. Giurge and Vanessa K. Bohns, You don't need to answer right away! Receivers overestimate how quickly senders expect responses to non-urgent work emails, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2021. Email urgency bias research
Melissa Mazmanian, Wanda J. Orlikowski and JoAnne Yates, The Autonomy Paradox: The Implications of Mobile Email Devices for Knowledge Professionals, Organization Science, 2013. The Autonomy Paradox
Naomi Gerstel and Dan Clawson, Control over Time: Employers, Workers, and Families Shaping Work Schedules, Annual Review of Sociology, 2018. Control over Time
Research Gaps
Most direct empirical evidence comes from working life. Research on temporal autonomy, schedule control, mobile connectivity and response expectations is comparatively strong in employment settings. The broader argument that similar perspective asymmetries operate between customers and suppliers, friends, family members and other everyday relationships is plausible, but less directly evidenced by the research used here.
Temporal autonomy does not have one universally agreed measurement. Goodin and colleagues operationalise it through discretionary time, while other researchers focus on schedule control, work-time control, flexibility or subjective autonomy. These concepts overlap but are not identical, so claims about “temporal autonomy” should not imply that researchers have settled on one definitive measure.
Interdependence and coercion need separating more carefully. Other people's needs inevitably shape our time. Families, employment, caring responsibilities and social relationships all involve legitimate reciprocal obligations. More philosophical work is needed to establish where ordinary coordination ends and an unreasonable claim over another person's time begins.
Power differences deserve deeper treatment. Employers, major clients, platform companies and consumers may have significantly more ability to impose temporal demands than the people responding to them. This essay deliberately concentrates on the everyday reciprocal contradiction. The unequal distribution of power over time warrants separate examination.
Cultural norms may differ substantially. Expectations around response speed, punctuality, working hours and availability vary between countries, industries and social groups. Much of the empirical literature referenced here comes from Western professional or workplace contexts and should not automatically be treated as universal.