Paper short abstract:

Popular mindfulness courses offer to help people to improve their 'work-life-balance'. The 'good life' is conceptualised as a well-timed life with clear temporal boundaries. Practices surrounding this phenomenon can be interpreted as oscillating between self-care and self-optimisation.

Paper long abstract:

How do people deal with stresses and strains of their everyday lives that often seem to be caused by a lack of time or wrong ways of using one's time? Why do people feel that they have to manage their free time and learn how to use it effectively? A wide range of courses nowadays offers to help people to improve their 'work-life-balance' and ways of thinking and feeling about time through concepts like mindfulness and deceleration. They convey practical skills like meditation, Tai-chi or forest-bathing and offer space and time to reflect one's life and to make new (mental and bodily) experiences. The participants shall leave the beaten track and accustom themselves to new 'healthy' habits and routines.

I have conducted ethnographical research in such courses and can therefore draw upon empirical data that hints at ways of narrating and practicing time in my field. In my talk I will show how both providers and participants conceptualize time as a tool that can be used to clearly divide areas of life, e. g. working time and leisure time, family time and 'me time'. Discourses and connected practices about the need for temporal boundaries and the danger of blurred boundaries are constant features of the courses. On an analytical level, these narrations, practices, experiences, thoughts and sensations while seeking a 'good life' through new ways of using time and structuring the everyday life can be interpreted as oscillating between self-care and self-optimisation.