—ALEJANDRO GONZÁLEZ IÑÁRRITU
We all know: Mindless scrolling kills time you could spend on other, way more interesting or important things. And yet it’s so alluring. How do we fight the siren song of this little glowing rectangle that’s taken over our lives? Systems!
A basket near the front door, alongside where you keep your keys, where everyone leaves their phones when they come home.
A pile of phones in the middle of the table during restaurant meals with friends (they even make pouches of special shielded fabric for this—so the phones won’t ring or buzz alerts).
Phone chargers kept in the living room rather than the bedroom (plug in the phone before you retire for the night to avoid the sleep disruptions caused by looking at blue light at bedtime).
Phone sabbath—one day a weekend when all family members agree to not use phones at all.
MAKE TIME FOR FRIENDS
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
—SIMONE WEIL
As people’s lives get busier and busier, to the point where something’s got to give, it can often be our friendships that take the fall. We want to make time to see our friends, to nurture those relationships, but when everyone is busy it can be hard to make plans and even harder to keep them. Scheduled time with pals is often the first thing to get dropped when a work or family crisis rears its head. Even though we know it’s those very friends who could best bolster and support us. And we want to support them.
A regularly occurring social engagement is a great way to go. Having folks over for a monthly brunch or dinner. A recurring restaurant group or art-making club or happy-hour gang—everyone knows it’s happening, no one has to waste time asking or planning. Or establish among your friends that you’re always at a certain coffee shop on Saturday mornings and they should swing by and see you. Even just a regular time of day when you text your BFF might do the trick.
SPEND TIME ON NOTHING
“We have this cultural obsession with work and productivity, as if we’re better people if we don’t stop and take some time for ourselves.”
—ROXANE GAY
One of the great advantages of getting time on our side—of learning how to tackle our to-do lists and carve out time for the stuff that really matters—is the opportunity it affords to devote some of that newly found time to doing nothing.
That’s right. Nothing.
As the author Roman Muradov points out in his book On Doing Nothing, “There is no reason to do nothing. But then, there is no reason to fall in love, or gather autumn leaves. Life reveals itself most fulsomely in gaps and intermissions.”
At the end of the day, productivity ought to gain us nonproductive time:
Sitting at a table outside a cafe, drinking a coffee and watching the people go by.
Walking with no particular destination in mind, just looking at the world around us.
Puttering around the house, reading a book, sitting in a garden, getting an ice cream cone.
The sort of things we do when we’re on vacation, instead done right in the midst of our own busy lives.
This isn’t just some fantasy of sloth and idleness. Doing nothing does not mean you’re lazy. On the contrary. It is both an essential refreshment for our exhausted souls and a wellspring from which comes some of the biggest, most amazing creative thinking you’re ever going to do.
We don’t work hard at managing our time so that we can work hard some more at managing our time some more so we can work some more so we can manage some more so we can work some more . . . No.
We work hard at managing our time so that we can rest, so we can play, so we can dream the big dreams, and love the big love, and be in the world as our own best selves.
It’s a lot, this life. But, oh, it’s so beautiful.
CHOOSE YOUR FOCUS
“I’m reclaiming my time.”
—MAXINE WATERS
Ultimately, you decide how you spend your time. Your attention and focus and where you choose to put your energy are yours, no one else’s. This is what you have.
When you “let delight pull you,” like Paul Graham said way back on page 37, you’re reclaiming your time.
When you stop to remember that, in the words of the artist Susan O’Malley, “you are here awake and alive,” you’re reclaiming your time.
When you fight for what is right in the spirit of congresswoman and badass Maxine Waters, you’re reclaiming your time.
This is how we make time meaningful and not just something to be slogged through. Love. Joy. Mindfulness. Justice.
Take a minute. Find your time. Reclaim it.
CONCLUSION
Time is not the enemy. The writer Tara Rodden Robinson once said, “I came to realize that the entire field of personal productivity is rooted in this lie of scarcity . . . But the truth is: Time is an infinitely renewable and inexhaustibly abundant resource.”
When you first read Robinson’s words, you will probably want to punch someone in the face. Even after all we’ve talked about in this book, it would be pretty amazing if you didn’t.
“Time isn’t abundant and infinite,” you want to shout. “Time is finite! That’s just the nature of time!”
Maybe not on a cosmic scale, but on the scale of a human lifetime, yes, you’re right. We all only get so many hours, so many days and months and years. Then we die. The fact that we all, without exception, are going to drop dead someday is a big part of what drives us to race around in circles trying to do everything all at once all the time.
But it’s also a big part of what makes our lives, and the years and the months and the weeks and the days and the hours and the teeny-tiny fulsome minutes in them, so deeply, achingly, heartbreakingly precious and beautiful.
If we weren’t ever going to croak, could we ever know how good we have it? How miraculous existence is compared to nonexistence?
And this is where we start, slowly at first and then with increasing speed and momentum, to grasp Robinson’s point. Because we have so so so much. Maybe sometimes too much. We have abundance in all directions. And when did a scarcity mind-set ever get anyone anywhere except straight to miserable?
Thinking of time as the enemy—as a scarce, slippery, mean, and meager little thing dribbling away through our fingers—is a recipe for unhappiness.
Trusting that time can be our friend—that we have the tools and the resources and the smarts and the bigness of heart to choose to view time as abundant—well, that’s a recipe for plenty.
Making friends with time is not mind over matter, which is nonsense. It’s not effort over circumstances, which is privileged nonsense. It’s a commitment. It’s faith in our own capabilities. And, in a way, it’s faith in the Earth’s transit around the sun.
Days will pass. There’s nothing we can do about that. Indeed—given the alternative—there’s no way we’d want to do anything about that.
Stuff will need to get done. And, again—given the alternative—we don’t want to change that either.
How we choose to spend our days, how we choose to spend our spare quarter hours, what we decide to prioritize, who we decide to prioritize, how we view this maelstrom of a world and our place in it . . .