What happened to all of that? When did we lose the art of relaxation? Many people now seem to return to work after the weekend feeling exhausted from the toil of the unrelaxing, chore-driven weekend. It has even been renamed "the workend".

According to new research, almost three-quarters of us now regard the weekend as an extension of the working week, rather than precious time for relaxation. We are so busy Monday-to-Friday that six million of us say we spend maybe 12 hours of Saturday/ Sunday doing chores which previous generations (of women) got done during the week.

Many people report doing as many hours of chores on Saturday and Sunday as they put in at their paid employment five days a week. We are much busier, and the drudgery of paperwork, shopping, laundry, gardening and household maintenance is squeezed more and more into the valuable time we used to have for unwinding and switching off from daily stress.

This busy-ness at weekends must be a result in part of everyone being more pressurised at work, with smaller workforces doing the same amount of work, or more, as of old, as well as difficulties of commuting and parents finding themselves constantly chasing the agenda of after-school and weekend activities that are so much part of the world of today's child.

Having grown up through a consumer boom, enduring a decade at least of TV programmes that exhort us to change our paint colours almost as often as our socks and continually improve our homes, some of us find that cleaning the paintwork is not enough. The pressure to renovate, get rid of anything that looks remotely "lived-in" and keep up with houseproud neighbours has probably never been greater.

The research, done by Dulux Paint, shows that 62 per cent of us would welcome more time at weekends to relax. But where do we find that time? Well, of course, Dulux are suggesting that we save time on the decorating by buying a new gizmo called a Paint Pod.

But most of us actually don't have enough hours in our weekend to contemplate getting onto that ladder and sprucing up the cornices... not while we're usually too pushed even to cover the basics like cleaning the loo and changing the bed linen. Oh, and we'd really prefer to talk to our partners, play a game with the children or veg out in front of old West Wing episodes with a glass of wine than change the shade of the bathroom walls – or vacuum the stairs – on a Saturday night.

The poverty of time identified by the survey of 1,100 adults is yet another example of how we simply can't have it all. We work long hours, often travelling longish distances each day, we try to do the best we can by our employers and families, and the price we pay is exhaustion and guilt. More than 40 per cent of interviewees said they wanted to spend more time with their children.

We have more women than ever in the workplace, contributing to the economy and to household finances, giving their children more material benefits and opportunities to explore activities musical, sporting and travel-wise. In the old days, when men came home to orderly households run by women who took on most of the domestic chores, of course weekends of seemed to be
more relaxed.

Today the chores still have to be done, so we stuff them into the weekend hours when we would far rather enjoy ourselves. We're flogging ourselves to keep up with a momentum that seems at times to be dictated by a force outside ourselves.

We have labour-saving devices, but still spend more time fussing with laundry because our living in our affluent society means that many of us have too many clothes. We iron things we could get away with not ironing because our mothers taught us
to look uncrumpled and smart. We wash the car when it could stay grimy for another week or two without the world crumbling.

Stressed-out people that we are, bent on keeping up appearances, our "to-do" list for the weekend is so long that if some poor soul in front of us at the supermarket check-out can't find their plastic, or is too slow to pack their shopping, we can easily boil over and go into meltdown.

Not much of a life, is it, when you feel you can't relax because of the tyranny of that list? The paint company might be doing us a favour in pointing out the folly of our madcap 24/7 lives and, contrary to what was intended, it should mean we do less decorating, not more.