INTRODUCTION
It is a truth universally acknowledged that no one in today’s world has enough time. Everyone is too busy. Everyone is overwhelmed. No one feels they’re devoting as much time as they’d like to their careers or their friends or their partners or their families or their creative pursuits or their social conscience. Let alone their own quiet inner selves.
A million opinion pieces and life-hack books have been written about productivity, about how to get more done in the not-enough-time we have.
And then a million other think pieces have been written suggesting we basically throw productivity out the window. Replace it with mindfulness. Replace it with minimalism. Replace it with self-care. Replace it with rest. Replace it with play.
But these ideals—wonderful and worthy though they are—in turn become just more occasions for self-loathing. Oh god, we think, now I’m not playing enough, I’m not meditating enough, I’m not purging my closets enough, I’m not taking enough bubble baths. What the hell is wrong with me?
The answer, of course, is nothing. And everything. We are all perfect exactly as we are. And, simultaneously, we are all profoundly flawed and infinitely improvable. That’s the conundrum, the essential paradox of being human. How do we accept our glorious and broken selves just as we are, while also constantly striving for the good?
The demands of life are pressing in upon us. The jobs need doing. The children need raising. The marriages need tending. The world needs saving. We need to hold ourselves, and those around us, with the same tenderness with which we’d hold a tiny baby. While at the same time we need to fight for what is right with the tenacity of a full-grown adult human who isn’t exhausted all the damn time.
We need to get going. We have big important things to do. And to do them we must get all the crap out of our way. Clear the underbrush. Banish the detritus. Muster our resources and get crystal clear about what’s worth it and what’s not. We must find the mix of practical tools and big ideas that allow us to make friends with time.
Yes, really, friends. Time, it turns out, is not actually your enemy. It’s not against you. If time could want, it would probably want to be enough for you. Just like we all want to be enough. Time is there for you to make something of it. Pockets of time are hiding in the corners, waiting to be found. Tools for accessing that time are at hand.
Time, it turns out, is on your side.
Ready to find out how? Here’s how.
BEFORE WE BEGIN
THE TIME PROBLEM
“The world is burning. I will have those content model updates ready by Thursday.”
—EILEEN WEBB
Before we dive in to fixing our relationships with time, though, we need to take a close look at a couple of matters.
For one thing, we need to consider how economics and social-justice issues play into the discourse of everyone being too busy. It’s never OK to just look at things from the default position of a dominant culture. We must figure out how we’re going to stay woke.
Second, it would help to have some background. What historical forces in the 20th century led to 21st-century people feeling the way we do? Your grandparents had plenty of challenges of their own, but a constant feeling of near panic about time was probably not one of them. What happened?
Where we are and where we’ve been. Whose stories get told and whose have been left out. Let’s look at the cultural and historical factors at work here, before we start complaining about our in-boxes (don’t worry, we’ll get to that, too).
WE’RE ALL IN THE SAME BOAT AND WE’RE NOT ALL IN THE SAME BOAT
“I think human societies tend to be problematic.”
—TA-NEHISI COATES
The elephant in the room when it comes to talking about time—heck, if we’re honest, when it comes to talking about just about anything—is privilege. Economic privilege and racial privilege and the way those two are inexorably intertwined.
Near the start of her book Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, author Brigid Schulte, concerned that people think lack of time is some sort of yuppie problem, visits a group of working-poor immigrant families—folks working two or three jobs, living two or three families to an apartment, unable to afford childcare—and asks them whether they feel they don’t have enough time in their day to do all the things they need to do. Every hand in the room goes up. She asks if they have time for leisure. Everyone just stares at her. “Maybe at church,” one woman finally says, “or when I sleep.”
This story neatly makes the point that, obviously, lack of time is not just a middle-class problem. Clearly a single mom working two low-paying jobs has a greater time problem on her hands than a married middle-class mom whose husband doesn’t do the laundry. Lack of time in our modern era is an everyone problem. But, like most things, it’s going to hit those with less privilege harder.
And while we may all be in the same boat of not having enough time, we’re not all in the same boat when it comes to privilege. Ta-Nehisi Coates incisively details, in his essay “The Case for Reparations,” how, throughout much of the 20th century, black people were shut out of one of the greatest wealth-building opportunities in American history: the middle-class home-buying boom—and how that fact continues to reverberate in racial economic disparities to this day. Race and economics are irreversibly tangled, and to deny the importance of either one to people’s lived experience is to be willfully naïve.
And yet, so many people still assume that the audience interested in this topic is a bougie one. “Knowledge workers,” “creatives,” “freelancers,” and “entrepreneurs” are presumed to be the readers for a book such as the one you hold in your hands—and all those terms are stereotypically assumed to pertain to people who are variously privileged, relatively affluent, and probably white.
So, before we go further, let’s stand for a moment in the reality that the 21st-century time crunch affects everyone, and that everyone is not the same. We live in a world of inequality and difference. And while many of the differences are beautiful, wonderful, and to be celebrated, others are the result of centuries of systemic oppression, of racism, of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
This book does not purport to be a universal panacea. What’s in it may prove more useful to some individuals than to others. But let’s never forget we all need help with these matters. Let’s aim to make our conversations about time—its challenges and its possibilities—as open, equitable, and inclusive as possible.
HOW WE GOT HERE
“You’re living life in fast forward. Your inbox is overflowing. Your days feel scattered in bits and fragments of what feels like Time Confetti. And maybe you think this is just the way life is.”
—BRIGID SCHULTE
OK, so, really, what the heck is going on? Why does no one feel like they have enough time?
Turns out, like so many things, deep down our lack of time is a feminist issue. It comes down to work and the family, and the ways women’s roles in those two arenas changed in the second half of the 20th century—and the ways our world did not change to keep up with them.