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Many thanks to Kathryn Murphy (who makes an appearance in Chapter 9) for letting us film in her gorgeous house, two weeks before she gave birth. What a trooper!
Some warm morning, nearly 200 years ago, John Keats was lying outside enjoying the breeze:
“My idle days? Ripe was the drowsy hour;
The blissful cloud of summer-indolence
Benumb’d my eyes; my pulse grew less and less;
Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower.”
Into this lethargy crept an image of three figures: Love, Ambition and that demon Poesy, who disturbed this bliss by stirring in him the desire to, well, do something. Like write poetry. He was not happy:
“O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense
Unhaunted quite of all but – nothingness?”
Of course, he did go on to do something, namely get up and pen his “Ode on Indolence,” a delightful poem written in iambic pentameter, following a somewhat tricky ABABCDECDE rhyming scheme. He did this despite his warning to the figures that:
“Ye cannot raise
My head cool-bedded in the flowery grass.”
In other words, he got up and did his work, but like all of us, he liked to complain, and so his Ode on Indolence survives as an argument that lying in the grass on a summer day doing nothing is a great use of time.
And you know what? I totally agree. Keats’ poem arrived in my in-box the other day from a friend who was reading through 168 Hours, and thought he’d send me the counter-argument. Time management often gets a reputation as the discipline of scheduling every minute and always being “productive.” Many of us viscerally don’t like the idea because, like Keats, we find lying in the grass doing nothing to be quite pleasurable. We also recognize that these fallow times are when our best ideas can come to us; Keats scorned his three visitors, but he did write a great poem about their appearance. We complain of being starved for time because we don’t spend much time lying in the grass letting the ideas in our brains sprout as they will, and therefore like to assign blame – to society, capitalism, the monster under the bed, whatever – for this state of affairs.
But this argument is problematic for a few reasons. For starters, we have plenty of time for indolence. The easiest place to find it? The 19-24 (or 30, if you believe Nielsen) hours per week the average American spends watching TV. Keats lived before the electronic age, an age in which a spot of boredom could not be immediately ameliorated with 500 channels piping in everything from sex to murder to home repair, or email, if there’s nothing on. We may claim to like indolence, but we certainly don’t choose it when it’s an option.
Second, Keats, who died tragically young at age 25, never had children. Some people would argue that having a family inevitably depresses one’s creative tendencies, whether you feel the need to support the family financially (as society often asks of men) or care for the children (as society often asks of women). I don’t necessarily think this is the case, or at least I hope not given that I’m the mother of two small children trying to build a hopefully lucrative career as a writer!
But the reality is that if you want to enjoy hours of indolence as a parent, you’re going to have to schedule them in. You are going to have to create space for indolence, because otherwise it will simply get buried under the joys and needs of small children, under the demands and triumphs of making a living, or it will steal away in the arms of Love, Ambition and that demon Poesy.
And so I am trying to do this. I carve out an hour here and there just to amble outside (or run, which I find relaxing, though I realize other people don’t). I sit in coffee shops sometimes and stare at a blank page or look out my window and simply admire the brilliant canvas of a snowy day. I don’t think these activities are a bad use of my time, because I log my time and I know I’m spending plenty of time interacting with my kids and working on more concrete projects.
I hope people who read 168 Hours get that message. At least Martha Beck did! The Uber-Life Coach graciously gave a blurb for the book. My publisher had to make it short to fit on the front cover, but originally, Beck noted that while 168 Hours convinced her that she had time to read War and Peace in Russian, it “convinced me that my natural tendency—-squalid lethargy—-is also a perfectly viable option.” Indeed, “The advice in 168 Hours will suffuse every joyfully indolent hour.”
These days, growing numbers of us have projects, not jobs. If we work in traditional settings, we may be responsible for different activities, and many of us work for ourselves, and so are constantly juggling multiple clients. How do you do your work for all of them?
Over at the Wall Street Journal, Sue Shellenbarger’s Work and Family column today discusses this question. The headline, “Recession Tactic: The Mini-Shift” makes this out to be an economic issue. The thesis: in a recession, people unable to find full-time work have to juggle freelance projects or multiple part-time jobs. So they are working “mini-shifts” of 1-3 hours at a time, and toggling between them all.
She makes this out to sound rather harrowing, talking of brain freezes and, as organization guru Julie Morgenstern puts it, “mental gear-stripping.” (I intend to do a Julie Morgenstern fan post one of these days — I’ve been test-driving her Balanced Life Planner over the past few weeks).
But there are a few things to keep in mind. First, everyone works in 1-3 hour shifts–even people in “normal” jobs. That’s why coffee breaks exist. Going back and forth to meetings, or lunch, or to a different location all serve to break up the work day. Indeed, given that many people take email breaks every 15 minutes, I’d argue that devoting a full 1-3 hours to any given project actually shows shocking focus in our distracted world.
Second, Shellenbarger talks of people working until 10:30pm like it’s a bad thing. But I’d argue that splitting your workday into two chunks — 9am to 5pm, say, and then 8-10:30pm — is actually a great way to combine work and family. If your job requires more than 40 hours a week, and that is certainly the case for some of us, then working split shifts allows you to spend time with your kids and still get in your hours after they go to bed. The alternative is working later (a la people who work 9am-8pm), not seeing your kids at all, but then having the evening free to watch TV. You should only choose this option if television is more important to you than your family. That may be true for some people, but if so, you should acknowledge it.
The only caution I’d give with split shifts is that some parents of very young children–moms more often than dads–attempt such a work style in order to avoid using any childcare. The idea is that you get up before your kids and work, say, 5-7am, then hang out with them until nap time (let’s say 1-3pm), and then work from 8pm until midnight after they’ve gone to bed.
This does, in fact, give you an 8 hour workday. But it’s exhausting, as you don’t get to sleep. While giving up TV to balance work and family is a great idea, giving up sleep is not. And this sacrifice is prefaced on an odd idea, namely that non-parental childcare is bad. This would certainly be a surprise to our ancestors, who left their children in the care of their grandmothers, eldest daughters, neighbors, etc., while they worked in the fields or trekked to water sources. In theory, it’s a way to save money, but as I was writing 168 Hours, I interviewed parents who added a shift of childcare in order to have longer stretches of focused work time. Inevitably, they made the money back fast.
In my sole proprietor journalist life, I don’t have many conference calls. Basically, the only calls I’m ever on involve me and one other person, and hence we both need to pay attention and talk. Or at least I need to pay attention; I can’t vouch for the people on the other end, but I can never do something else at the same time. I am typing, taking notes, trying to get the right quote or bit of information for a story.
But apparently, my experience with phone calls — namely, that they are a way to get information and require my full attention — is not a universal experience. There appears to be an epidemic in the working world of conference calls that are so long and require so little attention that whole games have been designed so people can play them during these calls.
Or at least that’s the message I took from this CNN.com article on “The Facebook games that millions love (and hate).” I just joined Facebook last year (I know, early adopter, right?), and was startled to suddenly hear from various friends about their farms, their mafia wars, and so forth. Games can be lots of fun, and if Farmville brings you pleasure, by all means play it. As John Lennon, or possibly Bertrand Russell, once said, “Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.”
But I’d like to argue that if you are playing Farmville during a conference call, this should be interpreted as a sign: Maybe that call wasn’t actually that important to take. Maybe it didn’t need to be scheduled. Maybe everyone didn’t need to be on it. Maybe it could have been shorter. There is no such thing as multi-tasking; it is inefficient single-tasking. If you can play a game during a call, then you are saying that call isn’t worthy of your full attention. And if it isn’t, then why are you on it?
Maybe the answer is that your boss expects it, but then this requires some deeper thinking. Why does your boss not respect your time? Can you change your work situation so your boss will respect it? Or find a different working situation? Or make a convincing case that time spent on conference calls you didn’t add value to is time you’re not working on other projects that will make your company more profitable?
One of the reasons people “work” long hours is that they schedule hours and hours of conference calls or meetings, which then crowd out time for the actual substance of their professional craft. Meetings and calls “feel” like work. But often, this isn’t work, if you define work as activities that are advancing you toward your professional goals–particularly if you can play Farmville at the same time. Better to only take calls that you need to be on, and get home earlier.
Americans watch a lot of television. More than 30 hours a week, according to Nielsen, though time diaries put that number closer to 20 hours (19.33 hours averaged over all Americans; 23.86 if you only include people who watched TV on any given day).
Still, 20 hours is a lot of time. It is the equivalent of a part-time job. Since we spend so much time watching TV, it’s important to understand exactly why we do. The easy answer is that it is pleasurable, but it is a particular kind of pleasure — namely, one that is very easy to incorporate into our lives. Turning on the TV takes no effort, nor does sitting on the couch to watch it. The TV doesn’t care what you look like, or if you only watch for 30 minutes or so. The TV doesn’t care if you don’t pay complete attention, and most shows are accessible, even if you’ve never watched them before.
It’s important to know, though, that while TV is pleasurable, it is not that pleasurable. It scores in the middle on scales of human enjoyment that go from taking the car to get repaired to sex. Unfortunately, since it is so easy to turn on the TV, and since TV is so cheap as entertainment, it winds up crowding out things that would be more pleasurable.
But this suggests that the problem is solvable. TV time is a very easy place to find extra hours if you are not devoting as much time to some other aspect of life as you want.
For instance, instead of working until 7pm, spending an hour with your kids, and then watching TV in the evening, you could work until 5pm, spend 3 hours with your kids, and then make up the work hours after they go to bed.
Instead of getting ready for work in an inefficient fashion because you’re watching the morning shows, you could get up 20 minutes earlier, go on a very brisk short run around your neighborhood, and then power through the morning routine with no distractions.
Instead of losing a weekend afternoon on the couch, you could go to an art museum or do a project you might find meaningful, like building a dollhouse with your daughter, gardening, creating a family photo album, or volunteering at a soup kitchen.
Instead of watching TV before bed, you could use that time to read, or to write in a journal, to have sex or just to go to sleep. The earlier you go to sleep, the better the chances that you’ll have enough energy in the morning to tackle whatever difficult tasks you’re facing.
The easiest way to keep TV from controlling your life is not to have one, but your computer can be just as easily abused. Anyway, I do think that TV can be incorporated into your 168 hours. The key is to make sure that you can control it, rather than it controlling you. This is difficult, because the multi-billion dollar TV industry is all about trying to get you to watch that extra half an hour (and hence be exposed to more marketing messages). Here’s how to keep it in check:
1. First, step back and examine your life. If you’re watching a lot of TV, maybe it’s because there aren’t enough pleasurable, meaningful other things happening in your 168 hours. One recent University of Maryland study found that unhappy people watch 20% more television than happy people. If you don’t like your job, you’ll come home drained and watch TV to perk yourself up. You could try to set limits on TV… or you could get a different job. If you’re working in a job you love, getting enough exercise, focusing on making time to play and read with your kids, going on dates with your spouse, volunteering for a cause you believe in, and filling your time with hobbies that bring you joy, you will naturally watch less TV. Assuming you are doing all that…
2. Choose exactly how many hours you want to watch TV. Seven — one a day — is plenty. If you’re logging your time, one useful challenge might be to see if you can spend more time exercising than you do watching TV. Or only watch TV when you’re using exercise equipment as a way to combine them!
3. Get rid of your extra sets. No one needs a TV in their bedroom. Kids or adults. A high TV-to-person ratio only encourages more consumption.
4. Plan ahead to choose which shows you want to watch. If you only have 7 hours, you will naturally be picky. Is this show meaningful or pleasurable for me? If not, don’t watch it. Simple as that.
5. Buy a DVR and record those 7 hours of shows. That way you can watch them at a time that’s convenient for you and fast forward through the commercials. Snuggle with your kids or partner while you’re watching, and when the show is over, turn it off.
If you want to lose weight, you keep a food diary. If you want to get out of debt, you record your spending. Likewise, if you want to use your time better, you should keep a time log.
But how do you do that?
That’s a question I’ve been asked a lot lately. Here are some instructions:
I just finished reading Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project and, in general, enjoyed it. Reading some of the books I review for the Wall Street Journal, City Journal and other places is like a forced march. This was a pleasant stroll. Perhaps this is because Rubin and I have some odd similarities (we both have Sept 4 wedding anniversaries, December birthdays, trouble with names, in addition to being argumentative freelance writers married to businessmen).
But it’s also a fun book. Since this is a blog post, and I don’t have to follow the kind of format I would in a regular book review, I’ll just give some observations.
Things I liked:
-The discussion that happiness is, at least in part, the result of habits. We can choose to get enough sleep, to exercise and eat better, to revel in the present, to be grateful for such little things as the yellow roses on my desk against a backdrop of the snowy Manhattan skyline. All these things, chosen as part of our 168 hours, make for a better life.
- When you have a good life, you can get caught up in the remaining annoyances, rather than appreciate it. This is probably not wise, as all of the good parts could be taken away from you in a second.
Rubin is pretty sure how her life will come crashing down. Her husband’s Hepatitis C, contracted from a blood transfusion at age 8, will destroy his liver. He will need a liver transplant, which he may or may not be able to get, and which may or may not work.
We can’t all see into the future so clearly, but we can gird ourselves for the inevitable. I was frustrated last night because when I came home at 10:00pm from choir rehearsal, neither of my children were asleep. My husband was out of town, as he is more often than I would like, and so I had to deal with it. Then my 2-year-old asked to snuggle with me and the baby, and there is just no way to adequately describe the look of love on my baby’s face as he gazed at his older brother. Pure adoration. I was his sole source of nutrition for 4.5 months, and I don’t get that kind of look! I am not sure how many times in my life I will get to see such a miracle of veneration, so I’m glad I did.
-It is harder to be enthusiastic than critical. People assume enthusiastic people are easily pleased and not very perceptive. But you can still ask for things to be done differently after focusing on something that was done right. Of course, I’m not sure how that concept fits into my professional job as a critic; it is a fine line to walk of being scrupulously fair and honest yet positive if you can.
- A good life can be made better by filling it with as many positive things as possible. Happy memories don’t just arise, you create them. Then you savor them by doing things like writing in a journal or looking over photo albums. In 168 Hours, I talk about finding space for things that bring you happiness, and even using “bits of time for bits of joy.” Any empty space in your calendar can be made better with a good cup of coffee, reading a poem, writing a poem, or calling a friend.
- Children are only little once, and you should not act like they are a burden.
- Frugality may be a virtue, but like cleanliness, it’s a virtue best practiced in moderation. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that when I was little someone asked me what expensive meant. “Costs a lot of money,” I said. What does cheap mean? “We can buy it!” It has taken me a while to get to the point where I now recognize that I have more money than time and furthermore, while I can quite easily earn more money, all the money in the world cannot buy me one more second. I have 168 hours a week, period. So I should spend money in ways that make my time more enjoyable. It is also perfectly acceptable to spend small amounts of money on things that will make me happy. Money is a tool, not a good in its own right, and as long as I am living well within my means, buying fresh flowers for my desk and gourmet cheeses is not profligacy.
Things I questioned:
I had some quibbles with the book, too. To put my reviewer’s hat on, there were way too many comments from readers of the Happiness Project blog. These comments were not nearly as insightful or graceful as Rubin’s, which makes sense. She is a professional writer. Her blog readers are not. Better to sprinkle their quotes as a garnish in the text, rather than devote big chunks of the middle of the book to their not-so-profound musings. Then there were a few larger issues:
- Rubin makes the point that we should engage in activities like exercise, book groups, writing groups, etc. that make us happy. But she barely mentions what makes these things possible for the mother of small kids: childcare. At one point, Rubin describes popping over to a friend’s house for several hours to arrange her closet. How did she manage to do that? Did her husband take the kids? That’s great if they have a system where they trade off childcare (you go to your friend’s, then I go to the gym), but I’m sure readers would love to know how they keep a fair tally if that’s the case. Given that she describes how her husband travels for work, I am guessing that he often isn’t the one who takes the kids. So does she usually call a sitter? This requires planning ahead, and takes some of the fun out of spontaneous gestures of love like the closet-cleaning. Or does she have a nanny who covers both her work hours and the evenings? Or someone who lives with them? There is absolutely nothing wrong with 24/7 childcare, especially in a household where the two parents both have big careers. But it would be nice to have some transparency on how this all works.
- The biggie: Rubin is asking the question of what it means to live a good life, a life that involves joy, bringing joy to other people and feeling right. Every month she examines these questions in a different aspect of existence (energy, love, children). She gets around to the concept of eternity and God…in August. Yep, God is number 8 of 12. This is not surprising as part of a secular, urban sensibility, that the divine can be compartmentalized and viewed through the lens of one’s own happiness, as opposed to being a great, unknowable and infinite power. But since Rubin is so thrilled to discover Saint Therese of Liseux, the “little flower” known for her cheerfulness, it’s surprising that she doesn’t delve into exactly why Saint Therese could express such joy as she was dying in agony. Perhaps her happiness project happened in a different order. Still, all in all a good read – and good use of a few of my 168 hours.
Fortune magazine came out with its annual list of The 100 Best Companies to Work For recently, and North Carolina tech company SAS topped the list.
I’m sure that SAS is great, but what I find funny about these kinds of articles is that the reporters always get very excited about workplace perks, even when they’re not that exciting. According to the feature story in the print version of the list, at SAS you can get a massage… that costs $55. Yes, that’s pre-tax money (a fascinating article in its own right, of why such business expenses are deductible) but it’s not an order of magnitude cheaper than paying for a massage on your own.
Maybe the reporters get excited because journalism is not known for having many perks at all. I suspect many media organizations try to make money on their cafeterias, a la the company store, rather than subsidizing them. At the two companies I have done in-house work for, USA Today and Reader’s Digest, the salad bars dwindled during my tenure.
But this is because you can get away with it. So many people want to write and design and publish that many people would do it for free, and the interns often do. Fortune’s reporter got excited about SAS having two artists-in-residence, and I did too, until I recalled that Fortune has tons of writers and artists in residence… because they write and illustrate the magazine for a living.
Anyway, to my mind, the most important SAS perk is that the work week schedule is flexible. You are expected to work roughly 35 hours, and no one cares if you come in at 9 or 11. This is great for parents trying to optimize schedules around school or other commitments. But this gets less ink than the roughly $70,000 SAS spends on giving employees free M&Ms.
As everyone from Chris Anderson to Dan Ariely have pointed out, the human brain gets very excited about things that are free. What you have to remember is that there really isn’t such a thing as a free lunch. It’s nice that SAS wants to take care of its employees, but the perks are partly because SAS is private. No stock options mean little chance that you can become truly rich off your labors, so if you want to keep turnover low, you have to do something else.
Contrast this with life at Vanderkam, Inc. Being self-employed, I have no free perks. I pay for everything from my pens to (for a few years, before I got married) health insurance. On the other hand, I don’t view getting to work out in the middle of the day as a perk my benevolent employer gave me. It simply comes with the territory. So does getting to work when and where I want, wearing whatever happens to be relatively clean. My income is not subject to a wage freeze in hard times (as happened at SAS last year). If I can hustle more, it can grow.
Occasionally, I think about re-entering the regular W-2 workforce, but then I read about the absolute best companies to work for out there… and remember why I work the way I do. And then I go to my pantry and pull out a bag of M&Ms. Yep, it cost $2.99 at the grocery store, but it’s a small price to pay for working exactly the way I want.
I learned a lot from writing 168 Hours about how to use my time better. The best time management is not about planning conference calls down to the minute. It is about putting as many of the things you love in the 168 hours you have each week. Good time management also means chucking as much as possible that is neither pleasurable nor meaningful for you or the people you care about.
Of course, some weeks are better than others, so that’s why it’s important to take stock from time to time on how things are going. Over the past week, I had some good moments and bad moments.
Good:
- Using Fresh Direct’s QuickShop tool to do my grocery shopping. The website generates a list of all the groceries you’ve ever ordered from them, and then you go through and click the ones you want, so you don’t have to go hunting around for Cheerios.
- Rather than spend yet another hour hunting online for vacation rentals in California, just called an agency and had them send me a handful of appropriate listings.
- Planned a good weekend. My parents were visiting for Sam’s baptism, so in addition to the ceremony, we also did a lot of fun NYC activities like going to the aquarium in Coney Island (the ocean looks beautiful in February), thus recreating my husband and my second date — with our two kids in tow.
- Did “date night” on Saturday night. There are benefits to having grandparents in town!
- Started writing 1,000 words a day in a new novel. This is purely speculative, but I improve my writing by writing. If this is a long term priority, then I need to start blocking out the hours to do it.
Bad:
- Picked up the house instead of playing with my baby.
-Puttered around last night when I was really tired instead of just going to sleep.
- Did not run as many miles as my marathon training plan called for. I made excuses (I’m tired, it’s snowy…) but the excuses won’t really help when I’m trying to run 26.2 miles. I also haven’t been doing the requisite cross-training. I could download something interesting to read on the bike but…I haven’t. So there we go.
One of the reasons many of us think we do more housework than we actually do is the mental overhead caused by remembering that stuff has to be done, and then figuring out how to do it. This can be everything from finding a plumber to a dentist who takes your insurance to a store that sells a certain kind of lightbulb. Decades ago, people fantasized that robots would be taking care of all these things for us by now. Yet it hasn’t happened (nor have the flying cars, which is a real disappointment!)
But at least some entrepreneurs are trying to use artificial intelligence technology to make life easier. I’ve been enjoying reading about Siri, the new iPhone app, which can help with at least some of these tasks. According to this review in USA Today, Siri will remind you to wear your rain coat in the morning if the weather looks iffy, and will bring you to Stub Hub if you ask for tickets for tonight’s game.
Of course, it’s not perfect yet. While Siri may be able to learn your preferences, it doesn’t yet take on all the mental overhead that the “good wife” has always done. For instance, it probably won’t look at your schedule, note that you have a 7:30 meeting blocked but your nanny normally comes at 8, and then call your nanny to see if she can come earlier. It cannot actually take your shirts to the cleaners for you (though it might find a business that does pick-up). It will not make Valentines for your pre-schooler’s entire class. Though maybe that’s really doing everyone a favor, as that lands firmly in the category of things that don’t need to be done!
