The fast pace of modern life has placed productivity on a pedestal. However, when people work almost all day, they leave little meaningful free time, including time for rest, socializing, pursuing hobbies, or even simply eating a quiet meal. This creates time poverty, a condition closely linked to the growing deterioration of mental health worldwide.

What Is Time Poverty?

Time poverty refers to a person’s lack of time for free or self-chosen activities because a significant portion of their time is spent working. This work includes both paid and unpaid, such as domestic work and caregiving. Moreover, long working hours and low incomes increase the risk of time poverty for certain groups of workers.

Time poverty is also related to the structure and the division of labor in households. Research shows that the accumulation of paid and unpaid work is a major factor that determines leisure time, especially in households with limited resources. In this regard, the number of household members, employment status, and the income necessity are variables that directly influence levels of time poverty at the individual and household levels.

Hence, time poverty is also a matter of gender inequality. A UN Women report shows that women, on average, spend significantly more time on unpaid care and domestic work than men, even when engaged in paid employment. This inequality increases the total daily workload and directly reduces the time available for personal activities. This pattern is linked to social norms, limited access to quality and affordable care services, and unequal labor market structures.

Technology and the Modern Work Landscape

Time poverty is increasingly impacted by the use of digital technology, which expands the boundaries of work time and space. Studies show that the use of instant messaging apps for work communication has increased expectations of quick responses, even outside formal working hours. This setup extends daily work hours and reduces the time and quality of rest.

Research has found that the constant need to be connected through digital devices is associated with emotional exhaustion and decreased sleep quality. Consequently, this continued exposure to work outside of work hours often leads to burnout and mental health disorders. Furthermore, the changing work landscape with the emergence of a platform-based economy offering flexible work goes hand-in-hand with an uncertain distribution of working hours. Gig economy workers tend to work longer hours with uncertain incomes. 

In turn, time poverty increases the risk of depression and anxiety in the working age group. A WHO report states that those who work long hours are more likely to experience mental health disorders than those who have clear work schedules. These phenomena suggest that digital connectivity for work purposes contributes to time poverty and is likely to negatively impact physical and mental wellbeing. 

Links with Income Poverty

Time poverty among workers, particularly those in the lower-middle class, is also closely linked to income poverty. One study found that limited income forces individuals to work longer hours, take on additional jobs, or travel longer distances to achieve a more affordable cost of living. Consequently, this ‘lifestyle’ severely limits their free time and mobility.

This situation confirms that poverty measurements based solely on income do not fully capture the socioeconomic vulnerability of the community. Households just above the poverty line may remain vulnerable because they must allocate a significant portion of their time to work and commute, leaving them with very limited time for recovery, caregiving, or capacity development. At the same time, time constraints can also hinder social mobility for low-income groups due to limited access to education, training, or better employment opportunities.

Overcoming Time Poverty

Beyond personal time management or lifestyle changes, addressing time poverty requires interventions at the policy and systems level. Fundamentally, changes that shape people’s time allocation, including employment regulations and wage systems, the availability of care services, and transportation and spatial planning that determine mobility times, must happen.

Furthermore, overcoming time poverty means increasing attention to mental health issues. Various policy frameworks have identified reasonable working hours, the development of affordable, quality care services, and support for work-life balance as contributing factors to workers’ physical and mental health. In this regard, a study provides several policy recommendations to address time poverty:

• Improvements to physical and technological infrastructure, including expanding access to clean water and proper sanitation, as well as improving transportation infrastructure.
• Increasing minimum wage standards and equitable income distribution to close the gender income gap.
• Strengthening care infrastructure, such as providing quality and affordable childcare and elderly care services.
• Flexibility in the workplace that takes into account the unavoidable realities of household workloads.
• Implementing paid family and sick leave policies to support work-life balance.
• Integrating time poverty into poverty measurement.

Furthermore, establishing policies that clearly define work and personal time is also crucial. Several countries have introduced laws regarding the Right to Disconnect, which guarantee workers the freedom to ignore work-related communications outside of work hours.

Ultimately, a prosperous life is not just about productivity. It is also about being physically and mentally healthy with meaningful leisure time for oneself and one’s community. Valuing and positioning leisure as part of the dimensions of wellbeing is essential to ensure that progress is measured not only by material indicators, but also by an individual’s ability to have sufficient space to “breathe”, recover, establish and maintain social connections, and engage in other activities freely.

Editor and Translator: Nazalea Kusuma

The original version of this article is published in Indonesian at Green Network Asia – Indonesia.

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