In Overwhelmed, Schulte goes on a journalistic deep dive to explain what the heck happened and how we got here. It emerges that the main thing that happened is that women entered the workforce. Not everyone remembers but, in the United States, we came very close to passing a federal universal childcare bill that would have addressed one of the biggest ramifications of that fact—what to do with the kids?—in a very direct manner. But at the last minute the bill was kiboshed by, of all people, Pat Buchanan. And families with two working parents (let alone a single working parent) have had to scramble ever since to figure out childcare, putting a huge strain not only on financial budgets, but also on time budgets.
The other thing that happened was that, although most women now work outside the home, we never really lost the notion that housework and children were mainly women’s responsibilities. Schulte discovers that this largely stems from the relative prevalence of maternity leave in our society, and relative rarity of paternity leave. During maternity leave mothers become adept at caring for their babies. This expertise leads to the baby—and by extension the whole domestic sphere—becoming the mom’s domain, even when the dad is around. This happens even to couples who were equitable in their division of domestic labor before they had kids—after children arrive couples tend to revert to traditional gender roles.
The solution to this conundrum is straightforward: paternity leave. Dads who spend time home alone with their babies become expert childcare-givers too, and a more equal division of child and household labor follows from that single fact. But paternity leave is rare.
Of course, it’s not only moms, or only parents of children, or only straight couples, who feel the time crunch. The sweeping changes seen in recent decades in both work and technology have affected how everyone experiences time. Time is inevitably going to feel different when you’re accessible via the small plastic rectangle in your pocket 24 hours a day.
Add to that the changing nature of our very concept of being busy—which has morphed from its original 18th-century meaning of being happily occupied to a sort of sick badge of honor meaning I’m nearly drowning in work but at least that shows how important I am—and you have a perfect storm. The confluence of modern-day factors could hardly have been better designed to make us all feel super short on time and pretty much miserable because of it.
LET’S EMPOWER OURSELVES
GETTING OUT FROM UNDER
“We cannot retreat to the convenience of being overwhelmed.”
—RUTH MESSINGER
It’s so tempting to give up. To retreat, as Ruth Messinger eloquently put it, to the convenience of being overwhelmed.
Why does she call it “retreat”? And why “convenience”? There’s nothing very safe or convenient about feeling overwhelmed, is there? Except insofar as once we’ve retreated, we don’t have to fight anymore. Once we’ve declared we’re officially overwhelmed we can, conveniently, stop trying.
Oh, all those big amazing but also kind of scary dreams you used to have—if you retreat, you no longer have to bother to pursue them. All the injustices in the world? Not your problem—you’re too busy being busy. Nurturing empathic relationships with the people in your life? Who could expect you to do such a thing when you’re so overwhelmed all the time?
Instead of writing yourself the depressing get-out-of-jail-free card of being overwhelmed, what if there was another way? What if we could get out from under the towering burden of our to-do lists? Not because there will ever be anything other than a plethora of things to do, but because we are going to change both our way of thinking about time and the practical tools we use to manage our time.
TIME AS POWER
“I realized busyness had devoured my values.”
—DAVID SBARRA
When we stop retreating into a helpless state of overwhelm, we reclaim our power. The power to live our values.
This isn’t some vague self-help platitude. It is literally, practically, true. We may not have power over everything, but we do have power over this. Think about it—which would be more in accordance with your values: spending another ten minutes on email, or making time to call your congressperson? Doing another half hour of housework, or sitting down to draw with your kid?
This is not to say that the email and the housework—and the commuting and the cooking and all the rest of it—aren’t important. Of course they’re important and need to get done.
But they are not the boss of you. Your to-do list is not the boss of you. You are the boss of you. That’s your power. And your values are how you decide what your boss (you, remember?) is going to have you do next.
EMBRACING THE MESSINESS
“One must not think of life as an intrusion.”
—SARAH RUHL
Being opposed to distraction is outdated. E. B. White said, “Creation is in part merely the business of foregoing the great and small distractions.” And in some ways, hey, very good point there, E. B.
But in other ways, wow, what a privileged man-who-doesn’t-have-to-take-care-of-the-kids thing to say. Recent women writers like Sarah Ruhl, Lydia Davis, and Rivka Galchen have made the interruptions and lack-of-time that come with modern life—and particularly modern motherhood—into so much creative fodder. They’ve made art out of it. And there’s something phenomenally encouraging about that.
Davis’s story “What You Learn about the Baby” is a masterwork of this idea of turning the interruptions into the work itself. Written in numerous tiny short sections, it contains, among other gems, these lines that epitomize the interruptions inherent in the parent’s life: “You learn never to expect to finish anything. For example, the baby is staring at a red ball. You are cleaning some large radishes. The baby will begin to fuss when you have cleaned four and there are eight left to clean.”
It’s not just like, oh, look, Davis wrote about the scattered mind-set of parenthood. No. She turned that mind-set into the very fabric—both the form and the content—of an exquisitely beautiful piece of writing.
The idea that we have to wait for some ideal distraction-proof state to emerge in our brains or in our lives before we can properly work or create is absolutely poisonous and likely to result in never doing anything.
We are not going to solve our time problems by banishing distraction and mess. Not even if we choose a quite regimented schedule as one of our time–problem-solving techniques (which, as you will see, some people do and some do not). We are going to learn to work around and among and alongside of and, yes, even inside of the messiness to find the time we need.
GAINING SOME PERSPECTIVE
“If you think about what you’re here to do in life, the answer is probably not ‘get really good at time management.’”
—JOCELYN K. GLEI
Glei, one of our foremost writers on productivity, adds: “Maybe getting overly obsessed about time management is really just a sleight of hand. One in which we spend all our energy focusing on a difficult task that we will inevitably never succeed at—in this case, controlling time—as a distraction from the more difficult task of confronting what we’re really here on earth to do.”