That is--do you feel overwhelmed? Does the never-ending busyness of life weigh you down? Is there any time for...anything???? Maybe there is; and maybe there's something you can. There's a new book out; read more about it:
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When did we
get so busy? For many of us, life unspools as a never-ending to-do list.
Wake up, pack lunches, get the kids to school, get ourselves to our
jobs, work all day, collect the kids, make dinner, supervise homework,
do the laundry, walk the dog, pay the bills, answer e-mail, crawl into
bed for a few fitful hours of sleep, wake up already exhausted, then do
it all over again. Weekends, which ought to be oases of leisure, have
their own hectic rhythms: errands, chores, sports events, grocery
shopping, exercise. Dispatch one task and six more take its place, a
regenerating zombie army of obligations.
This brain-eating assault of to-dos leaves its victims wrung
out, joyless, too tired to stop and smell the roses (which probably need
pruning and mulching anyway — add that to the list). But “this is how
it feels to live my life: scattered, fragmented, and exhausting,” Brigid
Schulte writes early in “Overwhelmed,” her unexpectedly liberating
investigation into the plague of busyness that afflicts us. “I am always
doing more than one thing at a time and feel I never do any one
particularly well. I am always behind and always late, with one more
thing and one more thing and one more thing to do before rushing out the
door.”
She could be describing my days and probably yours, especially
if you’re a working parent in the overcommitted middle part of life.
Schulte, a longtime reporter for The Washington Post and the mother of
two school-age kids, has a word for this shared unpleasantness: the
Overwhelm. She takes her own harried-working-mom life as the jumping-off
point for her research on where the Overwhelm comes from and what we
can do about it.
Busyness has become so much the assumed default
of many lives that it feels as elemental and uncontrollable as weather.
So Schulte’s shocked when John Robinson, a University of Maryland
sociologist known as Father Time, tells her that women have at least 30
hours of leisure a week, according to his time-use studies. She can’t
reconcile that statistic with how her hours seem shredded into “time
confetti — one big, chaotic burst of exploding slivers, bits, and
scraps.” Nor does she believe it when Robinson tells her that we feel
busy in part because we decide to feel busy.
Schulte quickly moves on to other researchers’ explorations of
workplace culture, gender roles and time management, finding both
reassurance and confirmation that she’s not making up the Overwhelm. She
learns that the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that “acts
like a patient yet controlling kindergarten teacher,” shrinks under the
neurochemical onslaught of constant stress. That lets the amygdala, “the
seat of negative emotions like fear, aggression, and anxiety,” take
over. Anyone who has ever yelled at her kids while searching frantically
for the car keys 10 minutes after the family should have left the house
understands this.
If the neuroscience Schulte reports is right,
feeling busy all the time shrinks the better part of our brains. But
busyness also delivers cultural rewards. We feel important when we’re
always booked, according to researchers such as Ann Burnett, who has
studied thousands of the holiday letters people send to trumpet the
year’s accomplishments.
Burnett’s collection of letters, which
date back to the 1960s, make up “an archive of the rise of busyness” as
something to aspire to.
As Burnett tells Schulte: “People are competing about being
busy. It’s about showing status. That if you’re busy, you’re important.
You’re leading a full and worthy life.” The more you do, the more you
matter, or so the reigning cultural script goes.
That script
dictates how many offices and homes run. At work, the cult of the
always-available “ideal worker” still “holds immense power,” Schulte
writes, even as more people telecommute and work flexible hours. The
technology that untethers workers from cubicles also makes it very hard
to not be on call at all times. (I’d have liked to see Shulte spend more
time on how technology fuels the cult of busyness.)
Those who
escape the “time cages” of traditional workplaces confront what Schulte
calls “a stalled gender revolution” at home, with consequences
especially burdensome for women. She cites work by psychologist Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi on how women’s time is “contaminated” by “keeping in
mind at all times all the moving parts of kids, house, work, errands,
and family calendar.”
Only in Denmark does Schulte find a culture that appears to
balance work, home and play in a truly egalitarian way. Because
“Overwhelmed” sticks closest to the experience of working American
parents, she goes after the shameful lack of affordable child care in
this country. She even interviews Pat Buchanan, who in the 1970s helped
sabotage a bill that would have created universal child care.
While that’s a useful bit of policy history to contemplate, and
one that still affects us today, the most engaging sections of
“Overwhelmed” stick to the here and now and how we let the cult of
busyness lay waste to our hours. “Contaminated” time eats away at
leisure, according to researcher Ben Hunnicutt, and by “leisure” he does
not mean hours spent parked on the sofa in front of the telly. Leisure,
to Hunnicutt, means experiencing “the miracle of now” or “simply being
open to the wonder and marvel of the present” — the sense of being
alive, which no to-do list will ever capture.
Although it
illuminates a painfully familiar experience, “Overwhelmed” doesn’t speak
for or about everyone. It lingers most on the conditions under which
middle-class mothers and fathers labor, but the Overwhelm afflicts the
child-free, too. The working poor are stretched even thinner. And how
workers in China or Indonesia or India or South Africa feel about the
balance of their lives is understandably beyond Schulte’s scope,
although Europeans make a few appearances.
The question raised by
“Father Time” John Robinson nags at this book like a forgotten homework
assignment. The further I read, the more I began to wonder how much of
the Overwhelm is at least partly self-inflicted and to see opportunities
to reclaim time. Like Jacob Marley’s ghost, we’ve forged chains of
obligation that we drag around with us. But if we made those chains, we
can loosen them too, as Schulte has tried to do, with some success. In
an appendix, “Do One Thing,” she offers useful starting points, such as
learning not to give your time away and setting clear expectations about
what really needs to be accomplished. Not every to-do item is created
equal.
Do our employers really expect us to be on call 24/7,
tethered to our smartphones as if they were oxygen tanks? Just because
we can check e-mail at all hours, should we? Do our offspring really
need to be hauled around to every soccer game and music lesson? Does
every last piece of laundry have to be folded and put away before we can
sit down with a cup of coffee, stare out the window and daydream? As a
neighbor said to me not long ago, your work e-mail can wait. Your life
can’t.
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