The clock is ticking on time poverty

We all have the same 24 hours as Beyonce, according to the tired old meme influencers trot out to motivate us to do more.  

It’s clearly a flawed premise. The daily billable hours put in by the chefs, stylists, designers and army of experts that make up team Beyonce no doubt run into the hundreds (if not thousands). For most of us, the harsh reality in our hyper-accelerated lives is that there just aren’t enough hours in the day. 

“We’re all expected to socialize, to have a rich and healthy personal life, to preserve democracy in societies and to maintain an active civic and cultural life, all alongside the many other personal activities that demand our time,” says Conxita Folguera, a senior lecturer at Esade. 

Writing in El Periodico, Folguera argues that to be able to achieve a healthy balance, we need to be able to work much less, not eke out the little time we have to do more. 

What is time poverty?

Time poverty is the situation in which a person does not have enough hours to cover all of their essential needs: paid work, caregiving, rest, leisure, and social participation.
Unlike economic poverty, it is not measured in money but in minutes. And like economic poverty, it is distributed unequally, affecting women, families with dependent children, and people in precarious jobs more heavily.
 

How time poverty affects health

“Raising children takes time. Education takes time. Caring for the elderly takes time,” Folguera continues. “The widespread adoption of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic left a lasting lesson: the disappearance of physical boundaries between work and home did not reduce the time burden—it intensified it. Years later, with the hybrid model now established as the norm in many organizations, stress levels and the difficulty of disconnecting remain a central concern in studies on workplace well-being.”

Time is a political issue and can be conceptualized as a right of all citizens

According to the Barcelona-based organization Time Use Initiative (TUI), this situation affects people both physically and mentally. The TUI (Time Use Institute) maintains that "social organization directly affects people's health through the disruption of circadian rhythms." Chronic time poverty has been documented to be related to various health issues:
 

For those who combine long working hours with caregiving responsibilities, these risks multiply. This is a dimension closely related to flexible living and remote work. The disappearance of physical boundaries between work and home can worsen time poverty rather than alleviate it.

The right to time: a political matter

The individual right to time has been on the Spanish agenda for over a century. In 1919, Spain was the first country in the world to introduce an eight-hour working day. And now, it’s leading the way in pushing for the introduction of a comprehensive Time Use Act to address the inequalities in time distribution and establish a framework for obtaining a sustainable, healthy life balance. 

In a study produced for the Spanish government, the TUI examined the basis for a new law and the areas it should address. The report contains over 100 key recommendations the organization says will help ensure a more efficient and equal use of time.  

Women are disproportionately affected by time poverty

Esade professor of labor law Anna Ginés is a member of the TUI regional expert lab and a contributor to the report.   

“Time is a political issue and can be conceptualized as a right of all citizens,” she says. “Since Spain introduced the eight-hour day, society has been profoundly transformed. The topic of working hours in the day is once again a discomfort for many.” 

This perspective connects directly with debates on the future of capital, labor, and talent in increasingly complex societies: time poverty is not just an individual problem but a matter of economic and political structure.

The four uses of time: a finite frame 

There are four main uses of time structured within the finite 24-hour frame: work schedules, school and care, leisure and consumption, and rest. The work sphere has the greatest impact on the way the remaining three spheres are structured. The TUI argues that to ensure balance and harmony, this aspect should be governed by mechanisms to ensure a balance.  

“The organization of working time and the way it is distributed alongside the activities of daily life — including care, rest and leisure — are fundamental to the employment relationship and have important consequences for both workers and companies,” the TUI says.

Who suffers most from time poverty: inequality and gender

Not all sections of the population experience time poverty in the same way. According to Anna Ginés, "time poverty disproportionately affects women, who have less time for themselves and take on most care-related tasks." This imbalance reproduces and amplifies other forms of inequality.

The groups most vulnerable to the lack of time are:

• Women with a double workload: they combine paid employment with the greater burden of caregiving and unpaid domestic work.
• Single-parent families: without support to share responsibilities, time poverty is almost inevitable.
• Workers in precarious jobs: those linked to the gig economy and job insecurity face unpredictable schedules that make planning impossible.
• Older working people: those who care for their parents while maintaining an active job face a particularly intense time overload.

To these structural factors is added, in 2026, the growing pressure of artificial intelligence on work rhythms. Far from having reduced workers' time burden, task automation has in many cases led to an intensification of productivity expectations, generating a new form of time pressure that regulatory frameworks have not yet managed to address, a fresh layer of lack of time management that didn't exist a decade ago."

These patterns reflect that time poverty is, to a large extent, a symptom of inequitable labor and care structures. Addressing it requires systemic policies, not just individual solutions.

How time poverty affects the environment

As well as the individual benefits of introducing a time-use policy, there are multiple environmental advantages.  

“Designing policies that take into account natural and social uses of time to align our lives with the sunlight can positively affect sustainability and decrease our collective carbon footprint,” the TUI claims in its report.  

Time policies can help reduce our collective carbon footprint

“The design of the so-called 15-minute-cities, such as those promoted by Eurocities, C40, United Cities and Local Governments, and Metropolis, amongst others, all minimize our impact on the natural environment.” 

In Spain, the debate over the right to time has had notable moments in recent years. In 2025, the Government pushed for a reduction of the maximum working week to 37.5 hours, but the bill was rejected in Congress in September of that year by the PP, Vox, and Junts. Currently, the legal working week remains 40 hours. What is moving forward, albeit with setbacks, is the Royal Decree on mandatory digital time-clock recording, still pending resolution following an unfavorable opinion from the Council of State.

The specific Law on the Uses of Time still has no formal parliamentary process underway, which confirms that the debate has focused more on monitoring time than on redistributing it.

What Esade and the TUI propose to combat time poverty

The report prepared by the TUI for the Spanish Government includes more than 100 recommendations. These are the main areas of intervention identified:

The Spanish Government is reviewing the study, although there is still no definitive timeline for implementing it. The European Commission has promised to safeguard the right to work-life balance, but Conxita Folguera believes it is time to go further:
"The time for continuing to debate is over. The reduction of working hours must be turned into a realistic goal," she states.

Time poverty is the lack of time, the new poverty that the 21st century has placed at the center of social debate. As long as there are no public policies that redistribute time equitably, some people will continue to have far more hours in the day than others. And that gap, invisible in conventional economic indicators, has very real consequences for the health, equality, and sustainability of society as a whole.