The Secret to Having Enough Time
Everyone’s so busy
these days! We wake up, we go to work, we have to stop by Time Warner after
work to drop off that old router, then an old friend wants to catch up, then
our boss surprises us by letting us know we need to turn in that report tonight,
and by then it’s 11 PM and when are you going to have any time to work out or
work on that startup idea you had?
At least, it seems that way. When you ask folks if
they’d like to spend time together, we all hear the same thing: “I don’t have
the time.”
It’s possible they’re telling a white lie to get
out of spending time with you. That they do have the time, but
they’d rather spend it getting some work done, so they have more time to spend
with someone else, later. But if that’s the case, there are an awful lot of
people around telling that white lie.
I suspect that we’re not all telling lies to each
other; we’re telling a lie to ourselves. The lie is that we don’t have enough
time to do everything. So, whatever gets added to the calendar first is what
gets done.
The fact of the matter is, we all have the same
amount of time. Elon Musk runs three billion dollar companies with the
same twenty-four hours you use to drop clothes off at the dry cleaner and grab
a sandwich at Wendy’s. If you aren’t able to do what you want to be done in
that twenty-four hours, the problem isn’t your calendar; it’s you.
That’s the secret this headline promised. But it
needs to be explaining. What does it mean that you’re the
problem?
Well, if you’re complaining that you never have
enough time, you’re probably packing your day with high-time, low-reward
activities. Most people in America do. In fact, many such activities in America
are considered valuable. Activities like:
·
Stopping in on social
media.
Most folks pause throughout their day here or there to message someone,
send some snapchats, scroll down their Twitter feed — but combined, these
take up 3.8 hours of your day. That is four solid hours you could be spending with
friends, reading that book you have sitting on your nightstand, or finishing up
that home improvement project.
·
On a related note,
pulling out your phone. What can feel like five minutes of wasting time can
often be upwards of fifteen minutes (or more). For the average American, this adds up to four hours of
the day. There is some overlap
between phone and social media use — but not as much as you
hope. And it turns out most of us underestimate our phone use. To see how much time you spend on your phone, download an
app that will tell you.
· Driving
Driving to and
from work is a necessary evil, but many people waste a lot more time driving
around running unimportant errands. In the age of Amazon, the most significant
way to waste time is driving half an hour to a store and back to buy something
that can be packaged and shipped to your house (for less money, I might add).
Many major grocery chains also offer grocery services where they pick the items
off the shelves for you. All you have to do is show up at the store and have
them load the bags into your car. This can save you multiple hours a day of
driving.
·
Puttering around.
This
includes activities like: Standing in front of your fridge, staring into its
depths as if it has the answers to life’s great questions. Sitting in front of
the TV and watching whatever it happens to be playing for a few minutes.
Staring into your closet wondering what clothes to wear for today. These
activities have little to no value in your life, and yet they
take up valuable mental energy.
That bulleted list makes it seem so simple. Most
of these time-wasting activities are easy to spot. It’s so easy for me to sit
here and write “stop doing these things!”
And yet, people still do these things. Why?
We’re forced to conclude that it isn’t the wasted
time that concerns people. In my case, I spend time running errands because
there is nothing, in particular, I’d rather be doing. So the problem isn’t that
I don’t have enough time; it’s that I don’t have the will to do something else.
But if we’re wasting time, turning off our brains,
why not go whole hog? Regarding relaxing, spending two hours watching a movie
is always more rewarding then spending two hours browsing low-performing HuffPo
articles.
I suspect that it is because we are not willing to
turn off. There is a pressure in American culture to go-go-go, to be doing,
creating, achieving. There is no space in American culture for relaxation, for
watching a movie. Sure, we do these things, but we always say we’re doing these
things with a tone of apology. There’s an implicit understanding that the
‘ideal’ action is to be working, and that relaxing is an unwanted but necessary
part of existence, like getting sick or having bowel movements.
It’s regrettable that Americans feel ashamed of
this because relaxation is as sweet and valuable a part of life as work. When
we feel ashamed of relaxation, we try to squeeze it out of our phones at work
or social media at home, like teenage students trying to gossip when the
teacher’s back is turned.
There is no teacher. We are in charge of
ourselves. It’s time to let ourselves know that it’s okay to take a break.
This is how people waste their time. Instead of
working, or relaxing, people drift off and spend their time in between. It
slips away from them without their knowledge. Then they come out of the trance,
dazed and blinking, wondering where the hell the day has gone.
In previous ages, it wasn’t possible to fritter a
day away this way. The farm needed working, the meat needed curing, the goat
needed milking, and a million other things. On top of that, there were no
phones or internet. If you weren’t working, you were staring at a blank wall.
If your only other choice is crushing boredom, it’s pretty easy to choose work.
In this day and age, it is the frittering which is
so easy. Notifications blink and pop and bounce on our devices and the devices
of everyone else around you. Other people bob their heads, ducking in and out
of their phone like it’s their only source of air. It’s hard to resist the urge
when everyone else is doing it as well.
My call to action is this: permit yourself not to
be doing. If you are going to be doing, do — don’t waste time on
social media or driving around or standing in front of the mirror wondering
which shirt you’re going to wear. And if you don’t want to, don’t — put on your nightie and
rewatch House M.D. for the seventh
time. Whatever you do, don’t waste time doing neither.
Megan
E. Holstein
https://medium.com/@meholstein/the-secret-to-having-enough-time-375b4c22a4a7
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