Americans have long felt that they had too much to do, but in the past few decades, this feeling seems to have become more common and intense, as new breeds of tasks have emerged and people’s finite mental energies have been depleted by changes to the modern economy. The mundane yet fraught place where these various obligations converge is the to-do list. Increases in busyness, she told me, are a matter of “both feeling like there’s more feeling that you have to ‘be the best you can be’ in all of the roles, or you’ve failed as a person.” But two developments that are making a substantial group of Americans busier, Sayer explained, are that a larger share of the country now takes on the combined “social roles” of worker, spouse, and parent, and that the expectations of each have risen. Overall, feelings of busyness do not appear to have increased population-wide, so this is hardly the case for everyone.

Working mothers and shift workers feel particularly crunched. According to Liana Sayer, the director of the University of Maryland’s Time Use Laboratory, many Americans who are employed, married, a parent, or a college graduate feel shorter on time today than people in those situations did several decades ago. A common 21st-century complaint is that life didn’t used to be as busy as it is today, but some people are more likely to think so than others.

Simple online to do list