Recently I stepped away from full-time equivalent work, and immediately jumped into a writing project to compensate. Then, at the beginning of October, the writing project was finished, and I started to have a very strange experience of time.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with time management. When I was around eight or nine my mom showed me that you could sort your day into a neat little list, the hours steadily ticking down the left side, and you could put everything you needed to do carefully onto that list, consulting it as the real hours ticked away. As I got older, I accumulated a series of colored Moleskine planners like the one my dad always carried around, imitating his neat handwriting in mechanical pencil.
I was also obsessed with the calendars that the Three Kings brought us every year on January 6 (coincidentally when Barnes and Noble’s glorious calendar collection was 50% off). After a few years, I realized I much preferred the wall calendars to the calendars where you pull off one day at a time. If all you can see is the current day, even if it is accompanied by a museum-quality photograph of a cat, how are you supposed to plan what happens next? What was more, I tended to forget to tear off the calendars on a daily basis, lending me the same strange feeling of living in the past that I used to have between January 1 and 5. Somehow, having a calendar to consult about my days was essential, but attending to each day individually enough to tear its perforated sheet felt like way too much work.
Even in my childhood, though, there were whispers of a warning that a planning obsession can go too far. There’s a timeless Frog and Toad story called “A List” that we read often, where Toad, overwhelmed by the many things he has to do that day, makes a list. “Now my day is all written down,” he says with satisfaction. But while on a list-prescribed walk with his obliging friend Frog, tragedy strikes.
“Help!” cried Toad. “My list is blowing away. What will I do without my list?”
“Hurry!” said Frog. “We will run and catch it.”
“No!” shouted Toad. “I cannot do that.”
Why not?” asked Frog.
“Because,” wailed Toad, “running after my list is not one of the things that I wrote on my list of things to do!”
The obsession with lists and calendars and schedules can very quickly—as time management expert Laura Vanderkam observes—become an obsession with saving little bits of time. In her TED talk, she describes this time-saving mindset and its reduction to absurdity:
Sometimes I’ll hear from magazines that are doing a story along these lines, generally on how to help their readers find an extra hour in the day. And the idea is that we’ll shave bits of time off everyday activities, add it up, and we’ll have time for the good stuff. . . . I’m always interested in hearing what they’ve come up with before they call me. Some of my favorites: doing errands in a way where you only have to make right-hand turns—being extremely judicious in microwave usage, so it says three to three-and-a-half minutes on the package, we are totally getting in on the bottom side of that—and my personal favorite, which makes sense on some level, is to DVR your favorite shows so you can fast-forward through the commercials. That way, you save about eight minutes every half hour, so in the course of two hours watching TV you find 32 minutes to exercise. Which is true. You know another way to find 32 minutes to exercise?
As a child I was very easily seduced by this obsession, coming up with an elaborate system for getting ready in the morning that I dubbed “emergency minutes”: specific number of minutes assigned to each getting-ready activity, with a set number of “emergency minutes”—to be used in the case of emergencies like brushing your hair taking longer than you expected. If you finished something a minute early, you could add that minute to your “emergency minutes.” (In retrospect, this gamification was probably because I found getting ready to be mind-numbingly boring, which I still do—my nine-year-old self wasn’t able to avail herself of podcasts.)
When I started using Google Maps, another piece of modern technology that I would be considerably worse off without (I would probably have wandered off around age 20 and never returned), another way of saving bits of time presented itself. Google Maps enables me to have an even more powerful illusion of control—projecting when I will arrive in the future. Whether driving or walking (it works even better with walking), I can travel faster than Google Maps expected and save a minute or two. To this day, anytime I arrive earlier than Google Maps expected it is a rush. And I always expect that somehow I will magically beat Google Maps by a lot more than is physically possible, meaning that I’m frequently late partly because of my love for the game.
This is noticeable on a daily basis (especially when I am going to physical therapy, which Google Maps says will take eight minutes, takes ten minutes, and I expect to take six minutes), but the best outlet for the gamification of Google Maps is a road trip. There’s nothing like the high of taking a rest stop or going through a drive through using time that you have carefully shaved off your Google Maps ETA over a period of hours. You pulled that time out of your hat! You are a time magician!
Unfortunately, however, the opposite can also be the case. Over the weekend, my husband and I traveled to a wedding in Toronto, which Google Maps even now blithely promises to be a four-hour and twelve-minute trip. We set off around 11am, expecting to make it, with a few generous stops, by dinner at the latest.
But it was not that kind of road trip. We drove for hours as the predicted remaining amount of time stayed the same, or lengthened. We were in the red, start and stop traffic, fighting our way down every inch of the 401. We rolled up, exhausted, to our Airbnb at 7pm and spent almost another hour in an Uber getting into town.
In this way, road trips are humbling. The presence of Google Maps on a road trip, though it can give you the head rush of control, can just as quickly tear you down and remind you that you don’t control time or traffic any more than you control the weather.
Moments like that remind me that really, a list is an imaginative construction. The projections I make into the future are just that—projections. Vanderkam speaks of time as elastic: “We cannot make more time, but time will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it.” The idea that there are individual things that take discrete and predictable amounts of time is a bit of a fantasy. There is just life, which wears away regardless, and activities that you can move through well or poorly, that you can rush by or be present in.
Oliver Burkeman, the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, calls living in this awareness the experience of “deep time”: “the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.” Laura Vanderkam argues in her TED talk for a conclusion that sounds more down-to-earth but is, at its core, similar: “We don't build the lives we want by saving time. We build the lives we want, and then time saves itself.”
I love calendars, and I love Google Maps. But I’m realizing that, for all the joy both bring into my life, they are to some degree imaginative props that help me move through something that is much bigger and more mystical than the symbols on the page or the screen. The last few weeks, away from the time constraints that had become second nature, have been a bit surreal. For the first time in a very long time, probably since Covid lockdowns, I didn’t have more to do than I had time to do it in. I didn’t even have enough responsibilities to pretend that I didn’t have time to do things that I simply didn’t want to do. I wrote a novel. I took walks. I slept in. Many hours vanished through the cracks unaccounted-for. I did build a schedule, very different from schedules I had built before. This one was constructed according to how long things actually took, and what was actually most important to me, rather than optimistic visions of a photo finish.
Most of all I attempted, sometimes with more and sometimes with less success, to shake off the ghost of my list—to remember what Toad forgot when he stood frozen, unable to run after the thing to which he had freely given control of his life. And I tried, for the first time in a long time, to just wait and see what happens next.
Come back in two weeks: for a patron-only post on why Tesla is like a pumpkin patch.
Actually original article on Taylor Swift: a true rarity. I don’t agree with all of it but it was refreshing to read a well-written piece of interesting journalism on Taylor.
Special thanks to the warmest October I remember:
Hi! 😊 Don't know if you might be interested but I love to write about sustainability (fashion, travel and our relationship with clothes). I'm a thrift shopping and vintage clothing lover who likes to explore the impact textile industry and consumistic culture have on the environment and also what people can do to shift the tendency.
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https://from2tothrift.substack.com/