Consistent with previous research^7,8,9, we refer to individuals as ‘time poor’ when they engage in long hours of unpaid work and have no choice but to do so. Time poverty severely affects low-income women living in developing countries. A lack of basic household amenities requires poor women to spend far more time on household production tasks like cooking and cleaning as compared to their richer counterparts¹⁰. For example, women in Sub-Saharan Africa spend an average of 4.2 h on unpaid work each day¹¹. These unpaid household activities can be conceptualized as a kind of tax that individuals, especially women, must pay before undertaking remunerated work. In this project, we propose that reducing time poverty, thereby lowering this personal ‘tax,’ will have direct benefits for subjective well-being, perceived stress, and relationship conflict, as well as indirect benefits for economic well-being.

Despite these potentially far-reaching consequences, there is little understanding of the psychological and economic consequences of the time poverty that often coincides with financial constraints. Traditional economic measurements of poverty often neglect the fact that households living below the poverty line face substantive time deficits (Hirway provides a comprehensive review¹²). Furthermore, aid programs tend to focus on material constraints. Billions of dollars of economic aid have been spent to provide monetary and non-monetary aid to people living in extreme poverty. The most common aid programs include food, livestock, and fertilizer, as well as services such as agricultural training, community health workers, and teachers^13,14,15,16. We suggest that the effectiveness of these aid programs could be increased by considering recipients’ time costs, either by adjusting how aid is delivered or by creating programs directly aimed at reducing recipients’ temporal constraints (Khera provides related arguments^17,18).