Burning the Candle at Neither End

November 25, 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags:

It’s common in today’s busy society to feel rushed and overloaded. Even when we actually have enough space in our schedules for all that we’re doing, we may still feel that there is too much going on and we’re on the brink of losing control of it all. Maybe we tell ourselves that things will get better when the big project at work gets finished or when the charitable fundraiser that we’re organizing is over. But then we discover that we’re still feeling much the same afterward.

Modern technology has plenty of time-management tools to keep us organized—task planning software, a calendar in the email program, and smartphone reminders of upcoming appointments. Even our plain old sticky notes, pocket-size notepads, and ballpoint pens are much more than our ancestors had before the modern age, back when they wrote with quill pens and wouldn’t have wasted valuable paper and ink on anything that wasn’t going to be kept for years. We have labor-saving devices they could only imagine in their dreams. So why do we feel as if we are, to borrow a phrase from a simpler era, burning the candle at both ends?

Yes, many of us are in fact busy at work and in our family lives. But a large part of that overwhelmed feeling, I suspect, is that our well-organized schedules have created a social environment where we feel obliged to account for every minute. Although our modern-day jobs can’t reasonably be compared to the hard physical labor necessary for survival in the small villages of the past, our schedules are far more regimented.

A farmer in olden times might have risen at dawn, trudged out through the snow to milk the cows, and then moved on to the next chore. No scheduling reminders were needed because the chores stayed about the same from one day to another, with slow seasonal changes, and didn’t have to be completed at an exact time. By contrast, today’s workers get up when the alarm buzzes and spend most days checking off the tasks on carefully planned lists. This is a much subtler pressure than a peasant farmer’s need for a good harvest to avoid starving over the winter; but it is pressure nonetheless, and it should not be ignored.

Because our social environment is the main cause of our rushed and overloaded feelings, just making a few small changes in what we experience every day can go a long way toward dispelling those feelings. For example, my husband recently pointed out that I had been making myself feel more rushed by keeping a notepad on my desk to jot down my work hours before entering them into the timesheet software. Although the notepad was useful, the drawer would be a much better place for it, to keep it out of sight so it wouldn’t be a constant visual representation of having to track my hours.

I took his advice and moved the notepad to the drawer. Then I bought a small battery-operated flameless candle to keep on my desk instead. When turned on, it flickers like a real candle and brightens my work area on dreary days. And because it never burns down, the candle provides a strong symbolic representation of having plenty of time.

desk candle

When we get busy with work and other responsibilities, it’s easy to forget how many choices are always open to us regarding the little details of our environment. Asserting our personal power doesn’t necessarily require drastic changes in our lives. Simple acts can be enough to feel much more in control—clearing away clutter, buying or handcrafting a few decorative items, and organizing one’s personal space more comfortably. Such things may not seem like they amount to much, but given time they can bring about a significant shift in perception.

Trading Time for Money

September 2, 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: , ,

We all have different perspectives on managing our money. One common approach to curbing wasteful spending is to think about each purchase in relation to the work done to earn it. Before buying an expensive new gadget or a trendy pair of shoes, a person first stops to reflect on how many hours of work were needed to earn that much money.

While this may be an effective way to break a bad habit of impulse buying, I believe it creates more problems in the long term by conditioning the subconscious mind both to see work in a negative light and to see scarcity rather than abundance. When we measure everything in small increments of time and money, weighing one against the other, we’re left feeling as if we never have enough of either.

Psychologists doing research in this area have found that when people look upon their work in terms of how much they’re paid by the hour, they are more likely to feel that they don’t have time to get everything done in their personal lives. Business owners and salaried professionals actually spend more time at work than hourly employees, on average; but they often feel that they have more free time.

Some of that is because they have enough money to buy their way out of time-consuming chores, such as by hiring a maid instead of having to clean the house themselves. However, I’m inclined to think that much of it really is just a matter of belief. Because business owners look upon their work in terms of challenges and accomplishments, rather than hours, their work doesn’t feel like it deprives them of personal time.

In contrast, when people avoid making impulsive purchases by reminding themselves how many hours of work they did to earn the money, this necessarily implies their job took time away from other things they would rather have been doing. Too much of that attitude builds a wage-slave mentality in which work is seen as a misery to be endured for the required number of hours, all for the sake of buying one’s carefully rationed rewards when each paycheck arrives.

One of the reasons wealthy people don’t think like that is because wages are not their only source of income. Maybe they’re working 60 or 70 hours a week to build up the business, but they have investment accounts earning a good return. They probably also have a substantial amount of equity in real estate and other assets. So when they go out and buy things, the cost is only a small percentage of their total wealth. They don’t see it as chunks of time sucked out of their lives in exchange for wages.

Most of us aren’t wealthy enough to make withdrawals from investment accounts and go on shopping sprees whenever we feel like it. We need to put reasonable constraints on our buying habits, while going about it in a way that won’t leave us feeling deprived of time, money, material goods, or some combination thereof.

I believe the key word in that last sentence is “habits.” We live in a very complicated society, and we navigate its complexities every day by relying on whatever routines we’ve developed. When these routines become unproductive or harmful, then they need to be modified by substituting another habit that works better.

We’re all familiar with the need to change our routines in the context of managing our weight. Those of us who have full-time sedentary jobs can’t eat as much as when we were teenagers, unless we want to spend large amounts of time at the gym. Many people avoid eating too much by reminding themselves of how many hours they’ll have to run on the treadmill to make up for all the calories in that fried chicken and biscuits. This is exactly the same trade-off that is often used to curb impulse buying—time vs. overeating, time vs. overspending, measured in calories and cash respectively.

I’ve found that a more effective way to avoid gluttony (of both the food variety and the consumer goods variety) has been to replace an overindulgent habit with a moderate one. It’s basically an “out of sight, out of mind” approach. I don’t often think about eating fried chicken and biscuits since I started regularly buying baked chicken and salad instead. If a particular store or website seems like it’s getting too much of my money, I change my routine so that I’m not visiting it.

And on the time side of the equation, I don’t force myself to do workouts that I dislike. There are plenty of ways to get exercise that are more fun and are just as effective. If a workout routine is so unpleasant that the thought of doing more of it stops a person from overeating, then the person isn’t likely to be motivated to do enough to get results. Same goes for jobs. Anyone who feels stuck 40 hours a week doing a crummy job probably isn’t performing well enough to earn much money there. It makes more sense to change jobs. Granted, the economy isn’t at its best right now; but as time passes, more opportunities come along.

Although it may sometimes feel like a struggle to control time, spending, and food, this doesn’t mean we should obsess about rationing them. Looking at it from another perspective, we have an unlimited supply of time because there is always more of it as long as we’re alive. As time goes by, there are plenty of things we can do with it. What’s needed is to choose wisely from among the vast possibilities available in today’s world, picking those that are well suited to form enjoyable, lasting habits.

Magic in a Bottle

July 7, 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: ,

I recently exchanged emails with someone I knew from a writers’ group several years ago. We’d had great fun sharing stories with a lively, imaginative circle of friends. Even the silliest stuff usually found an appreciative audience who understood it in the playful spirit it was intended. But after a while, we just got busy with other things and drifted away. We talked about how much we’d enjoyed the group and how we missed those days.

“Sometimes my husband asks if I’m ever going to get back into it,” my friend told me, “but I don’t know that it’s possible to recapture magic in a bottle.”

After the conversation ended, I thought about all the moments that we don’t fully appreciate until after they have gone by. We chase around after our kids when they’re young, and we feel exasperated because they’re so noisy and they make such a mess. Maybe we snap at them, “Grow up!”—and then they do, and we’re left looking at their empty places across the quiet dinner table.

Or we complain about trivial annoyances at work, even though it’s a pretty good job and we get along well with our coworkers. We let the small stuff get blown totally out of proportion, and we grumble about every careless or inconsiderate thing someone does. We fantasize about how much better a new job would be. But after we’ve moved on, we don’t remember the little annoyances; it’s the good times that stick in our minds.

Of course, we learn something every time our circumstances change. Our perspective broadens, and we become more resilient. Even though change is stressful, we’ve come to expect it, as creatures of our busy modern society. If we stayed in the same place doing the same things all our lives, as most of our ancestors did, we’d get bored and restless. Besides, we have much longer lives than our ancestors, so naturally we’re going to fill them with a greater variety of experiences.

The way I look at it, those magic-in-a-bottle moments aren’t really lost. They just get moved farther back on what I envision as a memory shelf, as present-day moments take their place. We write more stories and find other groups of readers who enjoy our creations. When our kids are grown, we still have conversations with them, even though they live somewhere else and we talk about different topics. Maybe we become grandparents, as more time passes. We find new jobs that challenge us to develop our skills in unforeseen ways, and after a while we discover that we’re pretty good at them.

Before we know it, we’ve built up a lovely collection of antique bottles sitting proudly on the imaginary polished hardwood of the memory shelf. They sparkle in different colors, glowing inside with fragments of the magic they once held. Here’s one that gleams softly in warm green-brown hues, holding memories of a beautiful summer morning at the river. There’s another, flickering a bright fiery yellow like the candles on a birthday cake. And look at that perfect red—it’s just the color of the roses around grandma’s porch, fragrant and humming with bees on a Sunday afternoon.

The magical moments we encounter in our daily lives can easily go unnoticed. We rush from one activity to another, worried about completing our tasks and staying on schedule. Often we don’t pause to be mindful of the dazzling sunlight coming through the window after a dark gray morning, the soft comfortable fabric of a new pair of blue jeans, or the affection in a loved one’s voice greeting us when we return from an errand. So many little details don’t find their way into our conscious awareness until many years later, when a scent or sound unexpectedly triggers a wonderful memory.

When we take the time to notice life’s small details as they unfold around us, we’re opening a door to invite the magic into the present.

Interruptions

June 1, 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: ,

We’re always busy doing something, or at least it seems that way. When we’re not at work, we’re running errands or doing household chores. On top of that, many of us regularly work out at the gym, watch our kids’ soccer games, attend religious services, volunteer with a charity, or fill our schedules with other obligations. Even the things people do to relax—such as watching TV, going to the movies or a sporting event, and playing video games—often take up distinct chunks of time too.

Because most of us have so little unscheduled, free-flowing time in our lives, we feel like we’re always being interrupted. We let the phone go to voicemail because we’re in the middle of something, no matter when we get a call. We feel annoyed when a coworker asks a question because it breaks our train of thought. When a family member wants help around the house, it’s a nuisance because we have to put aside whatever we were doing. Even if it’s nothing but Facebook or a mindless video game, we’re still getting interrupted, and we don’t like it.

In today’s society, interruptions often are described as wasting time, which in turn causes us to resent people who interrupt us. A common cultural script goes like this: “How inconsiderate they’re being! Don’t they know our time is valuable? We’ll never get anything done if they keep bothering us!”

When I’ve had a day with a lot of interruptions and start feeling annoyed, I find it helpful to remind myself that it’s not really a natural instinct to react this way, even though that’s what it may seem like. Getting angry when we’re interrupted is a culturally conditioned response—or, in other words, a collective bad habit. We can change how we react to interruptions by reframing them in our minds. When our coworkers or family members ask us something, it’s probably not because they want to waste our time. On the contrary, if they didn’t value our input, they wouldn’t be asking for it.

Living in such a busy world gives us both opportunities and challenges. Every year we have more choices about how to spend our time, and we can put together a schedule better suited to our needs and interests. We have far more opportunities than at any time in the past. But the more choices we have, the more mental energy it takes to navigate them effectively. We don’t have much left over for dealing with unexpected changes. Without predictable routines, we’re likely to get overwhelmed by stress. So when someone interrupts us, we may perceive it as a threat to our fragile coping ability. As such, it triggers the fight-or-flight response. We may snap at the person or storm off in a huff before we even stop to think about it.

Because so much of how we respond to interruptions takes place on a subconscious level, if we want to respond differently, we have to change our subconscious perceptions of what an interruption is. Put another way, we have to tell ourselves different stories. Humans are by nature storytelling creatures, and we filter all of our experiences through the narratives we use to explain them. Therefore, if we don’t want to get stressed out by interruptions, we have to convince ourselves that the interruptions are not really a problem.

Parents do this as a routine matter when teaching children good time management habits. We might, for instance, tell our kids that it’s time to do their homework now, and they can just pause the cartoon or the video game—it’ll still be there afterward. But often we don’t think about applying this simple lesson to our own busy schedules. When we get interrupted at work or while we’re doing something around the house, we’re likely to react without thinking and get annoyed about it. We’d do better to remind ourselves that the task isn’t urgent (which it usually isn’t) and can get done later.

As with many of the things we do, taking control of the interruptions in our lives is chiefly about developing better habits.

Restoring Balance

September 30, 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: ,

As we go through our days dutifully checking off the various tasks on our calendars, we may look around and notice that a few things have fallen by the wayside. Perhaps we haven’t written any blog posts for months, or the supplies we bought for a project we planned last year are still sitting at the back of the closet. Whatever it is, we start wondering where all the time went. We’re likely to tell ourselves, in a familiar modern lament, that our lives have gotten too busy and need to be brought back into balance.

Sometimes we really do get overscheduled to such an extent that we can barely function. But more often, I believe, the actual issue isn’t one of time management at all; it has more to do with all those nagging anxieties at the back of our minds, which accumulate until we can’t turn our mental focus to anything else.

We can make checklists for every imaginable daily task ’til the cows come home—but although that may help to manage the distraction and lack of focus often described as executive-functioning issues, I suspect there’s much more to the underlying problem than simply needing to organize our schedules more efficiently. We live in a hugely complex pressure-cooker society that has caused many of us to become, in the literal sense of the word, unbalanced. That is to say, we don’t feel confident in our ability to balance all the demands our society expects us to satisfy. And so our thoughts start to run in anxious frightened circles that distract us from getting our tasks done, causing us to worry even more—and the vicious cycle spirals downward.

In a bygone era, the natural rhythms of the days and seasons kept our ancestors’ lives in balance. Physically, they worked much harder than most of us can imagine. Their days were filled with strenuous, time-consuming chores as they struggled to bring in enough food to survive the winter. Their fears were much more immediate and concrete than ours: starvation, plague, tribal warfare, being attacked by wolves and bears. But although they experienced miseries that most of us thankfully will never have to face, their tasks were simple and predictable enough so that they didn’t have our modern-day anxieties. Their subconscious minds weren’t filled with worries about what they ought to be doing differently, how well they could measure up to society’s demands, et cetera. Whether they ate or got eaten on any particular day was up to Fate; they made whatever sacrifices they believed would keep the gods happy, and left it at that.

How can we cultivate our ancestors’ untroubled mindset in a world that has become vastly more complicated? I would say it begins with centering ourselves in the moment, so that our thoughts don’t habitually wander along negative paths. Meditation, exercise, and mindfulness can be helpful approaches to banishing persistent worries. They don’t necessarily require large amounts of time; it’s more a matter of arranging our daily routines in ways that provide for moments of peaceful reflection.

This morning, before I sat down to write this post, I got myself a cup of raspberry-flavored coffee and a whole wheat English muffin with raspberry jam. I thought about what good fortune it was to have these small comforts, how pleasant the coffee smelled, and how pretty the raspberry jam looked—bright sparkling red in the morning sunlight, with little seeds all throughout. One can’t simultaneously contemplate a raspberry seed and worry obsessively about some upcoming task or other. That simple fact seemed to be enough, at least for the moment, to bring my entire world into balance.

Time and its Telling

April 16, 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: , ,

Humans are a storytelling species. Even when we are not sharing stories with others, we’re full of internal narratives or “self-talk” by which we make sense of what’s going on around us. Sometimes we may talk out loud to ourselves; but more often, although we are silent, a constant dialogue goes on in our thoughts, describing our perceptions and sorting our thoughts into recognizable categories. We draw these categories in large part from the narratives our culture has taught us, often on a subconscious level. They may not always be accurate or to our benefit.

As a result, we’re likely to stress ourselves out unnecessarily by framing our experiences in terms of the popular complaints of our society. One of the most common ways this happens is in what we tell ourselves about time. The modern world is busier and more complicated than ever before. We have vastly more choices in our daily lives. This gives rise to free-floating anxieties that we can’t easily describe, and we end up expressing them in terms of not having control over our time:

“I’m too busy. There is too much going on. I don’t have time to get anything done.”

Our friends and family members are likely to respond—again, in a socially scripted way—by suggesting that we have too many obligations on our busy calendars and need to simplify our lives. While that’s not bad advice in itself, what often happens when we allow ourselves a few quiet, unhurried moments is that another cultural script promptly kicks in:

“I’m bored. There is nothing going on. I need to find something to do with my time.”

And round and round we go.

Time is, of course, neutral; it passes at the same rate regardless of what we happen to be doing. Our perceptions of time, however, are constantly changing in relation to our environment. For most of our history, people’s lives consisted of simple but time-consuming tasks such as hunting, gathering, and domestic chores. It would never have occurred to anyone to complain of boredom because there was always more work to be done. And because the work had a regular and predictable structure, with little room for individual choice, there was no reason to feel anxious about how one’s schedule was managed.

Nowadays, with all the options created by modern technology and our interconnected world, we have a multitude of scenarios playing out in our minds at all times as part of our internal dialogue; and we haven’t yet learned how to deal with it. There are so many choices that it has become overwhelming.

Last week a bird flew into my garage and couldn’t understand how to get back outside again. Even with both of the garage doors open and sunlight streaming in through the doors, the bird was so confused by the unfamiliar environment that it just fluttered around aimlessly. My husband tried yelling at the bird and waving a broom at it to chase it away, but that didn’t help at all—the bird only got more anxious and befuddled, while still not finding its way out. At last my husband hit on the idea of closing one of the garage doors. With only one possible exit, the bird promptly oriented itself and flew out.

Although humans (usually) have more sense than birds, I believe that we have a similar need for clear landmarks to guide us when we navigate our surroundings. In the context of time management and choosing among multiple alternatives, humans create such landmarks by developing routines and rituals. Those of us with an introverted temperament put more effort into organizing our homes and work spaces in predictable ways. Extroverts focus instead on social rituals, such as sports, shopping, and Friday night at the club. But the underlying motivation is the same—finding something that makes sense in a chaotic environment.

We need a new set of stories to explain our relationship with time. What can we tell ourselves about our ability to control and manage the choices available to us? How can we feel comfortable without always having to be in constant motion from one activity to another? Where can we find examples of how to live productively while looking upon time as an abundant resource?

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