Good morning. For the next year, The Globe will be exploring our relationship with time, for better and for worse. More on that below, plus news on pharmaceutical temperature troubles and India’s issue with pollution. But first:

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Good morning, I’m Zosia Bielski, The Globe’s time use reporter.

Since last fall, I’ve been focused on our relationship with time: what we want from our precious hours, and how it inevitably goes sideways. I’d long been interested in our frustrations with time but the beat crystallized through the pandemic, when more people began seriously rethinking how they use their days.

This month, I spoke to researchers about why time can feel like it’s accelerating. Their responses all pointed to modern ills: busyness culture, screen time and our peculiarly modern inability to pause, ruminate or be bored.

For another recent story, I interviewed families using not one but three or four calendar systems to keep on top of a torrent of obligations. The parents were candid about chasing a “false sense of control” over their fast-moving lives.

For more than a decade, I covered human relationships at The Globe, and even then I loved dipping into time use. The paper devoted an entire series to the battle over house chores – which is actually spouses fighting over personal time. Another series explored burnout among people devoting a second shift to caregiving for sick and aging parents.

There were smaller oddities, too, such as the grocery store trying a slow-paced checkout lane for shoppers who might have no one else to talk to that day. Or the offbeat researcher who collected more than 2,000 Christmas “busy-brag” letters dating back to 1976 and found life growing more hectic with each passing decade.

Through the pandemic, questions intensified around this galloping pace of life. Time use studies multiplied, with researchers interested in how quickly people reorganized their lives during the crisis. Sent home, office workers discovered they could do good work beyond the nine-to-five. And when lockdowns whittled life down to baking and walks, parents vowed not to overprogram their kids again like in the Before Times (that’s a work in progress).

When I conceived this beat, I wanted to look at time through three lenses: at work; at home and among community; and in our personal lives, where burnout, distraction and a cultural reluctance toward rest are producing serious angst.

On the work front, I’ve reported on four-day weeks, right-to-disconnect policies and tension over remote work. I’ve pored over icky data on work-from-home employees saving many minutes a day by not grooming, parsed data on Canadians leaving prized vacation days on the table and written about the catty out-of-office replies we set up when we do manage to go away. These are remarkably new behaviours – people trying to redraw their boundaries on and off the clock.

At home, time has become a major pain point for families trying to survive an intensive parenting culture. Recently, I spoke to a father who believes we have a new rush hour: It hits just after dinner, when parents zigzag across cities, ferrying kids to their many extracurricular activities.

I’m also looking at our shrinking relationships as hosts, neighbours and friends, and examining how digital distraction dilutes our ties and personal hours.

I see this beat as an opportunity to explore how people in other places value their time, how they make more room for community and leisure. The way we spend our time signals our values: achievement, or experiencing life? A growing chorus of thinkers, authors and researchers hopes we’ll consider these questions more closely.

If you’ve got thoughts on mining time, our scarcest resource, I’m at zbielski@globeandmail.com.