Would you take a year off?

Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote about a bewildering choice made by several elite Yale Law School graduates last year to pass on an offer to take $80,000, plus benefits, plus student loan payments, to defer for a year starting as Associates at the elite Cravath law firm in New York.

Ashby Jones, who writes the Journal's Law Blog, points out some reasons why a student might choose to go ahead and work: the offer was optional, and the full-time pay is double the deferral offer; the students have been trained to do something and they want to get on with doing it; and, the types of people who thrive at top-tier law schools value structure in their lives, so a year with no structure or externally-imposed goals would be unthinkable.

But still. To me, the opportunity to get paid for a year off, before starting a job that is sure to consume nearly every waking hour for the first several years, seems a no brainer. Even now, mid-career, the idea of a sabbatical to pursue other interests for a year or so would be a welcome opportunity. I could write more, I could travel with the kids, I could be much more active for a year in church and charity work. I wonder if I would ever want to return to an office.

What about you? Would you take the money? What would you do for a year if you didn't have to work to support yourself?

Who Are You?

"What do you do?"

This is nearly always among the first questions we are asked (or that we ask) when we meet a new acquaintance. Appearance may form our initial impression of a person, but we want to know what they do in order to assign them a lasting place in our mental hierarchy. The answer conveys important social information about the person.

It signals their probable wealth, social status, perhaps the neighborhood they are likely to live in, and we may even project what we expect their house and car to look like. If I tell you, "I'm a doctor," your mind immediately places me in a certain size house, maybe with a sports car, probably with certain other status markers. If I tell you, "I'm a delivery driver," your mind immediately draws different conclusions.

We form these little judgments and opinions not only about the people we meet, but about ourselves as well. Anyone who works for a big company, unless you are a C-level executive, probably wrestles with self-image problems about his job. This is because big companies have splintered work into such tiny pieces that it is very difficult to describe what any one job is. Thus "Chief Financial Officer" is easy to understand, but "Financial Analyst in the Resource Evaluation and Recovery Group" conveys very little information to people you meet outside your company, and leaves them fuzzy about what exactly it is that you do. They therefore have trouble fitting you into their mental hierarchy. Is that better or worse than the friend they have who is an "Assistant brand manager for card processing products"? And if others are confused about our identity, then we get confused about our identity. This explains the people you meet who answer the question with a more general, "I'm in marketing," or "I'm in banking", which at least allows you to form a more clear picture of where they rank.

The trouble with all of this is that it means we form opinions of our acquaintances on gross generalizations and summary stereotypes about only a portion of someone's life. We may summarily dismiss very worthwhile people because "he works for the government" (stereotype: he's lazy) or "she's an accountant" (she's boring). When we turn these generalizations onto ourselves, we fall into the trap of defining our entire persona based on our work. While it is true that most of us must spend more time at work than doing anything else, it should not naturally follow that therefore work is the most important thing in our lives.

I work in an industry, finance, which has undergone constant change and upheaval over the past ten years. I have seen many co-workers laid off in restructurings and reorganizations, and even was displaced once myself. In my experience, the ones who are most resilient through the process are those whose self-identity consists of much more than what they do. When they ask themselves the question, "What do you do?", the answer is "I'm a painter," or "I'm a mother," or "I'm a biker" first, after which comes a job to make money.

Who are you? Yes, your career is important, but it will come to an end some day, perhaps at a time of your choosing, or perhaps at a time you don't choose. If you let your career define you, then that day will be the end of you; not your physical death, of course, but you will be adrift in the world, unsure of who you are, like a teenager trying to figure out where to fit in. Don't let that happen to you; be an interesting person, defined by a host of activities, relationships, and interests--in addition to a career.

Try this the next time you meet someone: don't ask them what they do. Instead, ask "What did you do last weekend?" or "Where are you going for vacation this year?" If they ask you what you do, answer first with a hobby: "I play guitar, and to make money I'm a banker." The conversation that follows should be much more interesting than "So how's work?", and it will teach you to value other people, and yourself, for who they are, not where they work.

Waste Not, Want Not

It was a sad week for my extended family as we gathered in Charlotte to lay to rest my cousin Amy's husband, Mike. Only 45 years old, he died from malignant melanoma barely three years after it was first diagnosed in one of his toes. He leaves behind my cousin and their three teenage children.

In the funeral sermon, Amy's brother, Steve, recalled a prayer offered by Mike this past January after learning the cancer had spread throughout his body, and having been given 9-12 months to live. "Lord, help me not to waste my cancer." It was a selfless prayer; recognizing that he was going to be unable to escape his fate, Mike sought some useful purpose for his cancer. By all accounts he found one, using the months he had left to spend lots of time with his family, reconnect with friends near and far, and to inspire others with God's love the best he could to all he met. He did not waste his cancer.

I am impressed with Mike's attitude and inspired by the example he set. Too much of my daily life is spent wanting something: a promotion, more pay, a bigger house, a better car, a nicer TV, more time, etc. All that focus on wants makes contentment hard to come by, since I am always noticing what I don't have. Wants create more wants in a never-ending cascade of greed and envy. As Epicurus wrote: "Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with little."

But as Mike demonstrated, the key is to take what you have and do the most you can with it. Sadly, Mike didn't have nearly as many days on this earth as any of us would want; but he made the absolute most of the ones he did have, and the world is a better place for it. He did not waste his days, and in the end he did not need any more days to have had a full life. Waste not, want not.

Don't waste your life. Don't waste your job. Don't waste your spouse, your kids, your friends, your money, your time. Use what you have to live a full life, today, and every day. Be defined by what you do, not by what you want. Wants will never fully go away, but they need not control our lives. Don't take for granted, or waste, the opportunities and blessings you already have, and perhaps the wants will seem less important.

Waste not, want not.

The Return of the Sun

After seemingly weeks of interminable rain in the Atlanta area, we were blessed with a sunny day yesterday. The sight of the sun after so long brought out the poet in me, so with apologies to all serious poets, I share with you:


The Return of the Sun

It was just when I knew
the heavens would never appear blue
during the day again,
my life to be spent in the rain
getting wet, drying off, getting wet.
I was resolved to my fate
when on a cold October morn
a bright yellow orb appeared, shorn of
the cloudy halo of many days passed.
At first thinking I was deceived
by a light in the trees, I walked out
under the green canopy and found,
in the gaps between the fading leaves
and the sturdy branches, that
there was not just sight-giving light
but life-giving warmth!

As small voices squealed under the canopy
I came to know something renewed:
The heavens are blue today, and with
my smile shining and my touch warming,
I will be like the sun.

BOOK REVIEW: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton

American culture has come to equate busyness with importance. If you are busy, you must be important. And, conversely, if you are not busy, then you must not be important. Since we seem to accept without question the premise that to be important is good, we therefore create a lot of busyness, and work. As a result, our identities become wrapped up in our work. Think about the last time you met someone new at a party; I'll wager the first question asked was, "So what do you do?"

Indeed, we often act as if what we do is very important to the proper functioning of the world. Memos are crafted on weekends; emails are returned late at night; phones are dialed as soon as the plane's wheels have touched the tarmac, so that we don't waste a precious minute as we do our part to advance the part of Western civilization that is dependent upon the widgets that our company produces. We behave like the sharks in the ocean, that must never stop swimming lest they die, as we rush from one "important" task to another.

Alain de Botton does a marvelous job of slowly letting the air out of our egos about our work in his thought-provoking book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. The book is based on the premise that nearly all of man's activity amounts to nothing in the grand scheme of the universe. Even 10 years from now, no one will know or care whether you get the Fitzsimmons memo to your boss by this Thursday's deadline. Or as de Botton observes:

If we could witness the eventual fate of every one of our projects, we would have no choice but to succumb to immediate paralysis.

In this view, the self-importance that imbues so much of our daily work, that leads us to choke down sandwiches at our desk while we read reports, to travel half way across the country for a one hour sales meeting with someone we don't really like, and to waste countless hours in meetings talking about decisions that need to be made rather than actually making them, is actually a sophisticated form of self-deception, of coping with the fact that we are just tiny meaningless specks in the cosmos.

I know that sounds depressing, but don't let it put you off of this book, because de Botton comes to that conclusion after what I think must have been very enjoyable field work, visiting the practitioners of ten different jobs in a wide variety of industries. Among other pursuits, he spots cargo ships with avid hobbyists; walks the path of high-voltage electricity lines with an engineer; sits with a landscape painter; attends an aerospace trade show; and traces the 52-hour voyage of a tuna steak from a swimming fish in the Indian Ocean to a dinner plate in Bristol, England, in a photo essay that alone is worth the price of the book.

Along the way, de Botton finds much to admire in the work we do. A career counselor is humanely portrayed, a sort of minister in the secular religion of career. Accountancy is shown to be an important part of the modern capitalist system, if a bit of a boring job (about what I would expect). Logistics, especially, seems to fascinate de Botton, and he very compellingly shows it to be the under-appreciated backbone of modern consumerist life. Take that tuna steak, and think about it the next time you are at the market: only fifty-two hours after it was swimming in the Indian Ocean, the tuna had been caught, taken to land, filleted, packed, flown half way around the world, and trucked to a suburban grocery store. I won't soon complain about the price of fresh fish again!

There are many such products that we take for granted--that we expect to be available whenever we want them--without ever sparing a thought for the magic of the markets that have developed to bring them to us. As de Botton observes:

Two centuries ago, our forebears would have know the precise history and origin of nearly every one of the limited number of things they ate and owned, as well as of the people and tools of their production. They were acquainted with the pig, the carpenter, the weaver, the loom and the dairymaid.....We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the manufacture and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude, and guilt.

Logistics is the enabler of this change, and a result of the change is the increasing specialization of our jobs. De Botton visits the offices of United Biscuits, a company of five thousand souls engaged in the manufacture of cookies and other sweets. We have all baked cookies in our own kitchens, and so understand that there is some meaning inherent in the work of a company baking them. But when that task is subdivided and spread across five thousand people and six manufacturing sites, does it still have the same meaning? Specialization has its benefits, especially in increasing productivity, but at what cost to our personal sense of meaning and accomplishment? Again, de Botton:

It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children's books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers. They are shopkeepers, builders, cooks, or farmers--people whose labors can easily be linked to the visible betterment of human life.....we cannot help but sense that something is awry in a job title like "Brand Supervision Coordinator, Sweet Biscuits".....

But just when it may seem that de Botton's melancholy observations will outweigh his admiration for the work that people do, he makes what I find to be actually an optimistic conclusion: we puff up the importance of our work precisely because we do understand, at some level, that we are insignificant in the universe, that death is our only certainty, and that through our work we can take our minds off that ultimate melancholy thought. In other words, working is life because it takes our mind off of death. De Botton:

The impulse to exaggerate the significance of what we are doing, far from being an intellectual error, is really life itself coursing through us.....To see ourselves as the centre of the universe and the present time as the summit of history, to view our upcoming meetings as being of overwhelming significance, to neglect the lessons of cemeteries, to read only sparingly, to feel the pressure of deadlines, to snap at colleagues, to make our way through conference agendas marked '11:00 a.m. to 11:15 a.m.: coffee break'.....maybe all of this, in the end is working wisdom.

So yes, you are important. Yes, that memo has significance. Yes, your sales calls matter. Do your best at whatever it is you do, for in the end we are all dead. Therefore, live while you are alive!

Success

The conventional wisdom for career advice in recent months seems to be this: express your thanks that you have kept your job by working even harder to succeed with the fewer resources that are now allotted to your company by the shrunken economy. I don't know where this conventional wisdom came from--probably a convention of employers--but it is a little depressing that the primary response to the worst economic slowdown in the lives of anyone under 50 is not to pause to evaluate whether a change is perhaps desirable--is it possible that our relentless pursuit of more, more, more was fruitless in the end?--but instead to double down and work even harder doing the same things. Yes, most of us need to work to live, but it seems to me the philosophy that work is the source of happiness has taken a beating in the past year or so.

Thus I was refreshed this week when while reading I came across Ralph Waldo Emerson's definition of success:

To laugh often and love much;
To win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children;
To earn the approbation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty;
To find the best in others;
To give of one's self without the slightest thought of return;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a rescued soul, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
To have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exaltation;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived;
This is to have succeeded.

Note that nothing in this definition requires a job to achieve; in fact, a person successful by this standard could work in any field, or none at all. Perhaps that is the point--he or she would not be defined by a job, but instead by the obvious positive results of a lifetime of relationships, experiences, and memories. What a way to live!

Being vs. Doing

My family spent a relaxing Labor Day weekend with our friends at their lake house in the mountains of North Carolina. It was a great trip for everyone: the kids had someone to play with, and the adults had someone to talk to. We spent a lot of time on the lake, pulling the kids on the Great Big Mabel (a giant tube on which they ride, bouncing crazily in the wake). It was a good 15 degrees cooler than in Atlanta, and we reveled in the crisp air.

I realized upon returning that one of the delights of the weekend was the lack of pressure to do something. The weekend wasn't about doing; it was about being. Instead of my usual daily rush of doing--emailing, phoning, cleaning up, shuffling papers, reading memos, all the busyness that makes up life--I got to enjoy just being a father, a friend, a passenger in the boat. We sat a lot; we talked a lot; we watched a little football on TV. We just were. Ask me what I did, and I'd probably answer, "Oh, nothing." But I loved every minute of it; I returned with my mind clear, feeling a little less rushed, appreciating my friends and family a little more.

This week has seemed more rushed than usual. It could be the deal I'm working on, or it could be the contrast between being and doing. I wonder how I can incorporate more being into my daily routine, to balance the doing and bring peace to my endeavors?

Diversions

There are many ways for bored office workers to waste time. Doodling has been popular for decades, and chatting at the water cooler or at a colleague's cubicle are standard. Technology has dramatically expanded the possibilities: first came Solitare, and now Facebook and Twitter disguise time wasting with a thin veneer of respectability. ("I'm networking.")

Occasionally a diversion turns into a worthy pursuit itself. That sudoku puzzle not only helps pass the time on your commute, but it also keeps your brain young. Crossword puzzles build vocabulary; language tapes exercise the mind, too. Many artists feel they can't support themselves with their art, so their doodles become a meaningful outlet for creativity. A worthy diversion, in fact, is one that aids in the avoidance of real work; requires thought or creativity; and has the potential for being useful or artistic in its own right.

The creator(s) of this map achieved all three to perfection. It is an anagram map of the London subway system; every station name has been replaced with its anagram. (To compare them with the real station names, click here.) Imagine the time spent on this diversion! Admire the creativity! Marvel at the tenacity to stick with the project to completion after the obvious ones were done! What a marvelous example of a diversion turned to art.

May all your work avoidance schemes yield such sublime results.

BOOK REVIEW: "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" by Muriel Barbery

Time is deceptive; that hour you spend stuck in traffic seems a lot longer than the hour you spend on the beach, yet according to the clock, they have the same duration. Time is also valuable; we spend it, save it, or make the most of it whenever we can. But can we make time stand still?

According to Muriel Barbery in her delightful philosophical novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog, time does indeed stand still when there is perfect consonance in the world; indeed, such consonance between what we see and what we feel is what defines Art. Through the thoughts of one of her protagonists, Barbary asserts that great paintings share this ability to stop time, to make us appreciate the exact moment pictured, while forgetting all our own cares and desires. For that moment, we are experiencing "existence without duration."

This is a novel of essays, disguised as thoughts and diary entries of the two primary characters, that cover a diverse set of topics: art, the nature of beauty, our animal natures, and houseplants, to name just a few. (As you might expect of the author of a philosophical novel, Barbery is French, and the novel was originally published in French. The English translation was nicely done by Alison Anderson.) Barbery's diverse musings all follow the same thread: how do we find meaning in our individual lives that are so evidently insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe? What are the little charades that we erect around ourselves to try to convince others, and ourselves, that we matter?

The story follows the inhabitants of a smart Parisian apartment building, in particular two seemingly very different, but in the end quite similar women: Madame Renee Michel, mid-50s, who is the long-time concierge of the building (sort of like the superintendent); and Paloma Josse, 12, a precocious young woman whose family lives on the fifth floor of the building. They know each other only by sight, since the typical posture of an inhabitant of a smart apartment building is to speak to the concierge only when necessary.

Much of the first half of the book is taken up with introducing us to these two characters by way of listening in on thoughts (Mme. Michel) and reading diary pages (young Paloma) that encompass the aforementioned philosophical essays. From this, we conclude that neither woman is what she seems, that both are playing the roles that their circumstances find them occupying. Mme. Michel is careful not to let on to the snobby residents that she is anything more than a simple concierge, while in reality she spends hours reading literature, especially Russian literature, and thinking sophisticated thoughts about life and philosophy. Young Paloma is obviously smart--she is a good student--but her very adult outlook is kept secret from her family, whom she believes to be stupid.

Midway through the novel, the narrative pace picks up as the stable world of the apartment building is turned upside down by the arrival of a new resident, a wealthy Japanese gentleman, who sees beyond the facades of the two women and undertakes to introduce each to her true self. Suddenly the charades are exposed; the careful walls that Renee and Paloma have erected to keep the world out are knocked down by the subtle and measured actions of Monsieur Ozu. That Barbery has done a masterful job of creating her characters through their essays became apparent as I found myself rooting for Monsieur Ozu to keep pressing Renee to knock down another brick, to have the courage to display in public her true nature that has been kept so carefully hidden in her apartment all these years.

Barbery's technique of characterization by essay has its weaknesses, among them that the plot is slow to unfold, leaving the reader wondering at some points early on whether the whole story has come to a stop. Also, the peripheral characters, whose thoughts and diaries we are not privy to, are not as well developed. Even Monsieur Ozu is only a shadow; I was left wondering much about where he came from, and how he got to be so wise as to see in a short time the interesting, intelligent women that so many others had missed.

But these are mere quibbles, for once Monsieur Ozu befriends the two women, the story picks up pace steadily, and our care for Renee and Paloma pulls us right into the stunning denouement. Once the walls are down, we find that the two women, who seemingly had nothing in common other than an address, are soul sisters in a very special way.

Through it all, Barbery challenges us to a new appreciation for the Art of life; for those moments in memory that seem like "existence without duration." Next time you are at a museum, go to a masterpiece painting and stand before it. Gaze at it and notice that you can almost sense what the moment was like that the artist captured, whether it was 50 years ago or 500; it seems as if everything is just where it should be, that it is just as you would have recalled it had you been there. In that moment, you are experiencing existence without duration, and time is, in a way, standing still, since you are sharing that moment with everyone who has ever looked at the painting.

I think about memories I have that share that same sense of being timeless. I think of the birth of each of my children; I don't recall every detail, but the impression in my memory is of a perfect moment--the smile of my wife; the press of her hand in mine; the wet tears striping my cheeks; the jerky first movements of the infant; the excitement of new life. That is a timeless memory; what I saw and what I felt were in perfect consonance; at that moment, life was Art.

May we all find many such moments that add meaning to our otherwise insignificant lives.

When Fast Fails

John Freeman writes thoughtfully in today's Wall Street Journal about the destructive effects of speed on our lives, particularly the relentless speed of communication that we now feel obligated to keep up. Email offers fantastic benefits, of course, but as he points out, those benefits do not come without costs, and he at least gives reason to ponder whether we are near a point where the costs are beginning to exceed the benefits.

My favorite question he asks is this: "How many of our most joyful memories have been created in front of a screen?" My guess is that your answer is the same as mine: none. Yet we spend more and more of our lives in front of screens, from the 24" monitors on our desks to the 2" screens on our phones. The more time we spend staring at screens, the less time we have for creating, building, and sustaining the relationships, experiences, and memories that yield the true wealth of life.

So what will you do this week to reduce your addiction to email? How can you manage your inbox instead of letting it manage you? Let me know your ideas.

The Philosophy of Present Tense Living

Present Tense Living is about appreciating life in the here and now.

Our consumerist society, for all the advantages it offers, has the big disadvantage of relentlessly pulling us toward a promised future of bliss. Happiness is always just one more promotion, or one more purchase, or one more move away. Once we gain something we think we want, our pleasure in the gain often is all too fleeting, as quickly our thoughts turn to the next big thing.

Does the following sound familiar? 

You seek to be “happy.” Happy is some combination of health, wealth, and relationships.

So you go to work to earn money. You try to work at something “meaningful” or that somehow contributes more than money to your happiness. Work—and the commute—takes more time than you would like. So you start trying to “save time.” You multi-task. You time-shift (e.g., you work a flex schedule from 7a to 4p). You place-shift (e.g., you Blackberry at your kids' soccer practices). You let work seep into personal life and personal life seep into work. You tell yourself this is “balance.” You try to optimize this balance of money and time.

All this happens against the backdrop of our culture that says you can “have it all.” You can make the most of every opportunity. You can be a great dad, a perfect mom, a smart investor, a buff athlete, a desirable lover, and a dedicated volunteer, all at the same time. It’s hard to fit all that in, but you feel like you should. (After all, the magazines and TV shows say you can and should.) So you sleep a little less. You try to become more “efficient.” You multitask even more. You rush. You hurry. You demand that others do too. (How many times a week do you tell you kids to “Hurry up!”)  Welcome to the rat race! You’ve entered the track and you’re well on your way to a life of hurry and scurry.

So: are you happy?

For many people, the answer is: "not exactly." Yes, there are material benefits to our efforts. Yes, the kids are in a good school and get lots of cool stuff. Yes, we have the big house and the big TVs and the big cars. But somehow, we don't feel as happy as, in theory, it seems that we should. Why?

I believe we get so caught up in the rat race--the chase--that we fail to appreciate the milestones that we pass along the way. The idea of present tense living isn't to abandon the race and get off the track; instead, the idea is to slow down and enjoy the route. Notice the buildings along the road; slow down to chat with the spectators lining the way; stop and smell the roses growing in the field beside the turn.

Does that mean you have to give up on winning the race? Perhaps....or perhaps not. (Remember the tortoise and the hare!) I think it is more helpful to redefine "winning": it is not he who crosses the line first, or with the most stuff collected along the way, who wins. Rather, a winning race is a race well run, with a big collection of relationships and experiences enjoyed along the way. Who among us knows how long our race will be, anyway? Better to enjoy it as we run, lest we save all our enjoyment for a future that never comes.

Present Tense Living is about deciding what is important to you, and making that the focus of your life. Don't let a consumerist, materialistic culture decide for you how much to work, and what to spend your money on, and with whom to socialize. Be deliberate about what you will do; do one thing at a time; take time to do it right; enjoy and appreciate the benefits that today offers. Don't ignore the future, but don't be beholden to it either. Live in the present tense!

The Background of Present Tense Living

I've just spent two weeks of vacation in the Smoky Mountains during which I did no writing, but did do lots of thinking about writing. Specifically, while gazing at distant peaks, I found myself inspired to return to first principles and describe, for myself and my readers, just what I mean by "Present Tense Living" and what is the philosophy that drives my musings.

But before I set forth the philosophy, I think it will be helpful to provide the background for my thinking about matters of time and life. It is now a trite observation that life in the 21st century moves very, very fast. The immediacy with which we can communicate, research, and share information would be unthinkable to anyone living just 75 years ago. With current technology we can do more work, alone, from our living rooms than our grandfathers could do in their offices with an assistant or two at their disposal.

And as these things seem to go, once we CAN do work anywhere, it quickly becomes the norm that we SHOULD do work anywhere. The pressure to be always available, productive, and active is relentless, both from our employers and from our families, friends, and even ourselves. We can do more in less time, the thinking goes, which is unquestionably good because if we do more, we can have more, and then we will be happy.

As I pointed out in this early post, I was eventually struck by the fact that all my busyness wasn't necessarily directed at things I meant to be, or wanted to be, doing. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that a lot of the busyness was a front; that in a culture that worships work, to appear NOT to be busy is to be a misfit, a "nerd," as it were. Plus, if the do more=have more=be happy equation holds, then all the busy people around me should be very happy. Yet, my own observations of my friends and colleagues, plus anecdotal evidence from articles and surveys, shows that Americans as a whole aren't any happier now than they were 40 years ago. Could it be that the entire premise under which we are all living is false?

So, against this background of pressure to constantly do more, to be better, to have it all, I began wondering if there was another way. I eventually realized that all this searching for the next big thing, for the key to happiness, caused me constantly to be living in the future. (Once I get _______, then....." or, "As soon as I finish_______, then........") On the other hand, when things didn't go just right, the thing to do was search my past for something or someone to blame. ("If my parents hadn't _______, then.....", or "If my old boss had only _________, then......") In essence, like most people, I was always either looking forward or backward--anywhere but in the here and now, appreciating what I had today. I began wondering: how much of life right around us do we miss, because we are scanning the horizon in front of us or behind us looking for something else? What if I could learn to live in the present, appreciating and enjoying the world around me, today, and what I already have rather than getting caught up in the constant scramble for more, more, more? Perhaps that could be a happier existence, even if it meant doing less or having less over the long run.

Thus began my reading, thinking, and writing about life in these fast-moving times, and how to "live in the present tense." Over the next few posts I'll outline my philosophy as it exists today, based on my reading and writing and thinking so far. Some of it will be new, some of it is just explicitly stating some of the principles I've already referred to in this blog. You may agree with it or think I'm crazy, but I hope to at least encourage you to think about why you are doing what you are doing, and whether it is the best way to live a full life. Let me know what you think.

Ways to Slow Down

Is it just me, or do people seem to be rushed more than ever this summer? I would have thought that things would be moving at a more languid pace given the macroeconomic slowdown, and indeed my friends who have been laid off from their jobs are indeed forced to move more slowly, since they have nowhere to go. But for the majority of my acquaintances who still have jobs, the microeconomic effect of the recession seems to actually be to speed things up.

Offices are doing more with less, meaning the people left behind are swamped. Some people have had hours or pay reduced and so are working an extra job to try to make up the income. Some companies still have aggressive growth targets in the face of the recession, and so workers are having to press harder to try to make the targets. Whatever the cause, it seems the world is speeding up even more than it had been even a few months ago.

Add pressure of financial setback--whether in reduced salary, or loss of bonus, or the fall in 401k or college fund value--and it can feel like you have to run even faster just to keep up. Speed can be beneficial, of course, but speed also kills. In emotional terms, it is the stress that speed creates that can lead to emotional breakdowns, health problems, and neglected relationships. Dealing with that stress thus becomes a vital skill, on par with the finance, or marketing, or human resources, or programming, or whatever skills you need to excel at your job.

I don't have all the answers for dealing with stress, and different people will find different solutions that work for them. But the main theme of the stress reduction techniques that work for me is this: Slow Down! Here are some ways I do it:

1. Do Less. If job or school pressures have increased, our tendency is to add the new responsibilities to our previous list and try to cram it all into our already-harried lives. If I try to do that, it guarantees mediocrity. So, when I start to feel the stress of too much to do, I prioritize and cut out one or two activities at the bottom of the list. If I'm already down to my core activities, then I look for ways to do them more efficiently, like changing a client meeting from a visit (requiring travel time in addition to meeting time) to a conference call. But realistically, there are always one or two activities that I can cut out without affecting my job or my family.

2. Set priorities. Even after I've culled my activities, my daily to-do list is often long. So I next look at it with a focus on deadlines: what MUST be done by today or tomorrow? I then do those things first, to make sure they get done. Some tasks have very clear deadlines: if I have a client meeting tomorrow, then I know I've got to finish my presentation by the end of the day today. It must be my priority. I like what Merlin Mann has written about priorities: "true priorities are like arms; if you think you have more than one or two, you're either lying or crazy." There are lots of things that are important to me, but on any given day there are very few must-do priorities. If I'm honest about what HAS TO be done today, and do that first, then my stress level goes down.

3. Don't forget to live. For me, that means don't skip meals and breaks. I may not linger over a three course lunch, but I will still leave my desk, walk outside with a sandwich, and take a 20- or 30-minute break from my tasks. Better yet if I can get someone to go with me so that I can have a human conversation, preferably about something other than the task I'm working on. I return from these breaks refreshed and ready to work again. And only very rarely will I not stop at an appropriate time and go home to eat dinner with my family. Again, the interaction with other people, the break from the monotony of a task, the reminder of life outside of work, far from being a waste of time, actually makes my work better. Remember, we are working to live, not living to work. Don't shortchange your life, and your work will be better.

DO LESS is probably not the advice you would expect, but it works wonders for me. What do you do to manage the stress of the modern world?

Understanding the Amish

It turns out the Amish, who outwardly seem so different from the rest of us, may not be so different after all. This article in the Wall Street Journal last week describes the Amish community in northern Indiana that partially joined modern society by taking jobs in the region's RV factories during the boom years in the middle of this decade. The result? For many, an increase in debt; a weakening of the traditional community ties, replaced by a more assertive individualism; and conspicuous consumption. (I would love to see one of the horse-drawn buggies with LED lights--who would have thought there would be a way to "pimp my buggy"?)

I think the article reflects more on mainstream American culture than on Amish culture. Take adults who have been raised outside our culture and drop them in, and what happens? The urge to spend takes hold almost immediately. Spending more then causes selfishness, as the list of wants exceeds the available cash, and so generosity and community-mindedness suffers; plus, now that work is so necessary to earn the money to buy the stuff, time is hoarded for selfish pursuits instead of community pursuits. Finally, the need to show the world this new bargain one has made (trading work for money and stuff) leads to pride and the purchase of "positional goods"--stuff that displays one's new status to others. The process is very clear in the case of the Amish, because they started outside of the culture and were thrown into it. But what about those of us who were raised in it?

It is very, very difficult to break the habits that your cultural upbringing has left you with. We are subject to the same cultural pressures: the focus on material things as a sign of success; the pressure to buy stuff to display our economic status; the push to work harder and longer to be able to afford more of the stuff to impress the people around us. To us this is "normal", and thus very, very hard to break out of. Unlike the Amish, we have no other community to go back to, no community organized under principles of collective living and modest consumption. If we so choose, we have to go it almost alone in living counter to the prevailing ethos. That makes it very, very difficult to adopt a lifestyle that avoids overwrought consumption.

Friends Forever?

Most of us would claim that relationships are one of the important things in our lives. Even if we discard boyfriends or girlfriends with alarming regularity, or we've traded an old spouse for a new one, or we spend way more time with our MacBook than with our so-called friends, we at least pretend to value relationships above stuff.

This is partly because, in theory, a relationship--especially the strongest bonds, like parent/child or husband/wife--will endure longer than any material object. Fortunes come and go, fame is fleeting, jobs change; but we hope that at least one special person will always be there for us. We pledge to our spouse to be there "till death do us part." Relationships matter because relationships endure. True wealth is being rich in relationships.

So I was struck by the total lack of support from any loved one for Bernard Madoff at his sentencing hearing in New York yesterday. (Read about it in the WSJ or the FT.) There was no one there to support him except his attorney, who is paid to be there. According to the WSJ, he "appeared without a single member of his family in attendance." Furthermore, in the days leading up to the sentencing hearing, Judge Denny Chin received more than 100 letters from victims of the fraud urging a tough sentence, but not a single letter or statement of support for Mr. Madoff.

Now, no doubt Mr. Madoff committed a heinous crime, carrying on the largest financial fraud in history for over 15 years, and evidently since his arrest he has not fully cooperated with the authorities trying to unravel the fraud, contributing to the maximum sentence of 150 years he received. He apparently deceived even his own wife and sons, who would normally be expected to stand with him through thick and thin. There is no way for a bystander like me to understand the sense of hopelessness of his victims, many of whom went from wealthy to paupers overnight, or the betrayal felt by his family.

But, still. Even murderers usually have someone--a mother, a brother, a friend--that stands with them for emotional support, not defending them or condoning the action, but being there to say "I care." Did Mr. Madoff not have a rabbi who could provide religious support? Did he have no friends who were unaffected by the fraud who were willing to stand with him while the victims excoriated him in public, to silently say by being there, "you are still human"?

Certainly during the boom years of the fraud, Mr. Madoff had a lot of friends. He had yachts and homes; he offered fancy dinners and expensive gifts; he ran in high circles. I guess we could say more accurately that his money had lots of friends; Mr. Madoff himself was perhaps more lonely. I wonder: which of my friends like me, and which like what I have to offer them? Who am I friends with only because I like their stuff or status, but I haven't even bothered to really get to know them?

I don't know what I would have actually done had I been a friend of Mr. Madoff's; but sitting here from afar, it seems like the Christian thing to do would be to stand with him as the abuse was heaped on him, to pray with him and for him, to assure him that despite his terrible deception, God still loves him. I wonder if I would have the courage to do that.

Most of us will never face such a situation. Instead, we have relationships with people who run into more common problems: kids that make bad decisions; friends who get into financial or other trouble; a spouse who lets us down. Similarly, we will run into our own troubles--a lost job, a stupid decision, a health challenge. I hope I am building the kind of relationships that will leave me with someone standing behind me, even when most have abandoned me. I hope that I will have the courage to stand behind my closest family and friends, even if their own actions have got them into predicaments that I don't approve of. "Friends are friends forever" says the old song--no matter what.

Staycation

My wife and I marked our anniversary last weekend by taking a "staycation" right here in Atlanta. At a charity auction last fall we had won a two-night stay at the Marriott Marquis in downtown Atlanta, so we used it to celebrate our 13 years of wedded bliss. Thanks to the inlaws for taking charge of the four bambini while we were away!

A "staycation"--vacationing at home--is enjoying a moment of popularity right now because of the financial advantages of not having to pay for journey expenses. But we experienced another benefit of staying close to home--the chance to see our own city in a new light. We had been downtown many times before--our hotel room had an excellent view of the office building in which I spent about nine years of my professional life--but always with a particular task or destination in mind, after which we turned right around and headed back out. This weekend, by contrast, we could just hang around and see what is going on during both the vibrant party hours of Friday night and the relatively calm mornings of Saturday and Sunday.

Downtown Atlanta is certainly more lively than its reputation allows, but it is not yet ready to be mistaken for New York or Chicago, either. The streetscape suffers from the years of growth and development when the car was put at the center of planning, and so many blocks of downtown are fronted by nothing but parking decks. The scale of buildings and intersections is huge, designed to be admired from afar as you drive in; Atlanta has a glittering skyline seen from your car as you zip along the freeway, but get up close and it is like you are seeing the backstage supports for the set of particularly large-scale movie. There are exceptions: the historic Fairlie-Poplar district, which of course was developed before the automobile, has a more human scale. But overall, when walking around one feels a bit out of place, as if intruding on an industral site.

There is also the unfortunate issue of the Downtown Connector, the freeway that bisects the city and separates the leafy residential neighborhoods from the concrete core. Venture across one of the bridges that spans this river of asphalt, though, and the city is downright pleasant. Both mornings, we walked across the Baker-Highland Connector bridge to Highland Bakery on Highland Avenue. It is only a 15-minute walk but you seem to have entered a different town altogether. The leafy streets, the presence of residents of all types--young, old, single, families--the repurposed old buildings: this part of town has a human scale, and thus is a welcoming environment. It helps too that Highland Bakery has fantastic baked goods, delicious breakfast items, and quite good coffee, too.

After breakfast Saturday morning we walked the streets of Inman Park near the bakery, admiring the century-old homes that have been lovingly preserved and updated and envying the walking lifestyle that these old neighborhoods allow. It was peaceful, fun, and just as different to us as a trip to a faraway city would have been.

So embrace the newfound thrift of our times, and instead of lamenting your lost vacation this year, get out of your routine and your well-trod path to discover a new section of your home city. You might be pleasantly surprised at what you find.

The Art of Slow

The May 2009 issue of Monocle carries an interview with Bruno Contigiani, the Italian founder of the Art of Slow Living movement. (Article available here online for subscribers. If you are not a subscriber, you can find Monocle at Barnes & Noble or Borders in the Current Affairs magazine section.) The focus of the article is Contigiani's imaginary "last meal," but what caught my attention was his definition of time:

Time is defined by the realisation that you do not live forever. When you move slowly, you live life better.

It is counterintuitive, but true: once you come to grips with the fact that you will NOT live forever, that time really is a limit on your life, then you are free to slow down. Once you admit you can't do everything, no matter how hard you try, then you become free to change your focus to doing things well, like Bruno Contigiani does, instead of doing more things.

Contigiani was not born knowing this; in fact, he was a hard-charging PR executive in Italy with a schedule that many of us would recognize: "with every minute packed with activities," he says. But 10 years ago, on holiday in southern Italy, he was seriously injured when he dove onto a rock in the water. During his long recuperation, grateful for his survival, he realized that most people, including him, were not making time to do the important things in life. So he started the Art of Slow Living movement, devoted to appreciating life each and every day.

Remember the Present Tense way to happiness: REM--Relationships, Experiences, Memories. Be rich in these, and you will have a life well lived, whether it is long or short. Let the measure of your life not be found in the area of your house, the balance at your bank, or the letters in your title. Let it be instead be in the number of people who call you friend, the sum of minutes you spend around the table with your family, or the number of stories you can recall of good times passed.

And finally, remember too what Bruno Contigiani says about eating (emphasis mine):

I try to eat healthily but I am not militant about it. We are not trying to live to 140 years of age. We just want to make sure that we stay healthy.

Eat well, and don't feel guilty about it. Life is good--enjoy it!

Introducing Weisure

Continuing our look at CNN.com's special series on work-life balance, I point you to this article that introduces a new word to the lexicon: weisure. As you might be able to guess, weisure is a melding of work and leisure; weisure time is spent doing a little bit of both, like checking your Blackberry messages at your kids' soccer practice. According to the article, weisure is fast becoming a lifestyle choice, in which it is usually ambiguous whether you are working or living; you are doing both, 24-7, easily switching from one to the other at will.

In many ways weisure is a welcome innovation. If you are a member of the creative class in the knowledge economy, whose job it is basically to think, you already know that work is doesn't always fit neatly into defined time boundries. You don't just turn your brain off at 5 pm (I hope), and good ideas have a way of popping into your mind at odd times. The rise of technology that allows us to capture and share these ideas, when and as they happen, undoubtedly is a good development that boosts efficiency.

In fact, I think fully embracing the weisure lifestyle is very alluring, particularly if you have an employer that supports it. Think about it: what if you could do your work whenever and wherever you wanted. Want to spend the summer at your family's cabin in Maine? No problem, we're paying you for your ideas, not your presence. Decide to move the family to Hilton Head for the slower pace of life? Great, just keep doing the work and check in at HQ once a month. You're a night owl but not a morning person? Fine, we won't schedule any meetings before 11a. It would take self discipline, an understanding boss, and explicit, measurable performance metrics, but it is certainly a compelling vision. (And similar in concept to the Results-Only Work Environment practiced at Best Buy and other companies, as explained here.)

But there are a couple of reasons for caution in embracing the weisure lifestyle. The first is reflected in a quote by author Dalton Conley in the CNN.com article:

"For the first time in history now, the higher up the economic ladder you go, the more likely you are going to have an extremely long workweek."

The shift over the past century from the rich being called "the leisure class" to being known as the "creative class" (implying creating, i.e. work, rather than leisure) is a topic for another time. For now, I simply point out that once it is established that you CAN work everywhere, it is not a big leap to believing you SHOULD work everywhere. And as you strive to draw the line between work and leisure, when there is a conflict, which one usually wins?

Suppose you take a one week vacation, and you notify the office of your intent to check your email and phone messages once during the week, on Wednesday. Which is more likely to happen: (a) you are so relaxed that you forget to check messages until Friday; or (b) the little blinking red light draws you like a moth to a flame on Monday, you discover an urgent issue that "requires" your immediate attention, and you end up spending an hour a day of your vacation on work issues? You see the problem: the balance between work and leisure in practice can easily end up much more lopsided than you intended. In fact, we may end up with"worksure" rather than "weisure"--the work is much more prevalent than the leisure.

The second caution about embracing the weisure lifestyle is to realize that we do not live in a vacuum. If you are all you have to worry about, then by all means embrace working and living 24/7. But most of us--I would say all of us, even the unattached among us--have relationships of some kind with other people, and those other people often ask for, and even need, our UNDIVIDED attention. When there are no boundries on our time, it becomes very hard to give that undivided attention. As cool as it is that our offices can now fit in our palms, if carrying that "office" prevents you from holding the hand of your toddler, or embracing your spouse or significant other, or lending a helping hand to your elderly parent, then what is the point? The office in your palm will not comfort you when you are lonely, or cheer you up when you are sad, or encourage you when you are weak. The work will not love you back, no matter how much you love your work.

So embrace the weisure lifestyle, counting your blessings that you live in an era when you are able to take control of your time to an extent unthinkable to workers just a generation ago. But beware lest that technology allow the work you are trying to balance instead grow to new levels unimaginable to you and the loved ones around you.

Having It All?

I stumbled across an online series on work-life balance on CNN.com this week, entitled "HAVING IT ALL: Work-Life Balance". There are several interesting topics covered in the articles in this series, and I'll comment on a few of them in the next couple of posts. But let's start with that title.

HAVING IT ALL. Is that really the goal? I believe that trying to have it all--the unchecked desire to accept no limits on money, stuff, achievements, status, hobbies, or time--is the genesis of the rat race. We want all the work we can get, without sacrificing our home life or hobbies. We want leisure to pursue our hopes and dreams, without sacrificing our career ambitions. But there are only 24 hours in the day, and the number of our days is limited, so we can't have unlimited wants. Thus every day we face micro choices with our time and attention that reflect the macro dilemmas of our lives: career vs. children; status vs. spouse; work vs. play; finances vs. friends. Presumably a series on work-life balance should help us decide NOT to try to have it all, but rather to have just enough: just enough work to satisfy our ambition, and just enough life to satisfy our soul. Finding that dividing line is an intensely personal quest, and where to draw the line is often difficult to discern.

Present Tense Living is not about having it all, it is about deciding what you WILL have. Many of us are blessed with a wealth of opportunity and choices: jobs, where to live, choices of stuff, travel, hobbies, etc. We can choose, and choose we must. If your ambition is strong and leads you to a demanding career that requires long hours, then by all means go for it--do your best, do it for the Lord, and don't look back. But make that choice fully aware that your choice means you won't be able to have the same family life, or pursue the time-consuming hobbies, of someone who chooses a slower track. To pretend otherwise will only frustrate you.

Similarly, if you choose a slower lane on purpose in order to leave plenty of time for cultivating relationships and hobbies, then don't lament you relative lack of material resources and long for the material goods that you can't afford but the person working twice as much can. We can't "have it all"--both time and money with no limits--and so we must learn to be content with what we do have, once we have been explicit about the choices we make.

So don't get caught in the trap of trying to have it all. It's impossible, and you have to be deliberate about where you draw the lines in your life. Make sure you choose where to draw them; don't let someone else draw them for you. To the extent that a series on work-life balance can help us make that decision, then it will be a welcome tool indeed.

Eat, Drink, and be Merry

This blog preaches a lot about living in the moment and enjoying every day. Who is actually doing it? The OECD has released their latest survey (2006 data) of time use in developed countries, and the Economist has printed a chart here showing two of the key lifestyle components for various countries. On the horizontal axis is total time sleeping per day, while the vertical axis represents the total time eating and drinking every day.

My first observation: who knew Americans sleep so much? Nearly nine hours a night, according to the chart, only 15 or 20 minutes less than the world-beating French. One question for the OECD: whom did you interview here? Most people I know seem perpetually tired and are lucky to get anywhere near 8 hours a night, let alone close to nine. Perhaps that's because the majority of my friends have small children, which are proven sleep destroyers. But seriously, if almost nine hours is the average, who are the people getting more than that?

My second observation: Vive la France! To come top of the chart in either one of sleeping or eating/drinking would be reason for pride, but to top the league tables in both is truly a feat to be commended. This opens up many questions for further study, such as: is the sleeping related to the drinking? Does anyone in France work? Did they count the time Americans spend eating in their cars?

I like the title to the Economist chart, which alludes to "simple pleasures." They are indeed; sleep is free, and getting enough improves life in so many ways. We have to eat to live, of course, but to take time to eat a proper meal, savoring the food and enjoying the company of those with whom you are eating it, is a life-affirming use of precious minutes in your day.

Let's do our part to boost America's standing in the world: eat at the table with your family or friends, slowly and well, and go to bed early tonight!

What is Essential?

Well, a week of spring break, followed promptly by a week or more of illness, and suddenly I find it's been a month since I wrote in the blog. Writing was not the only thing that fell behind; when one is fighting a sinus/lung/bronchial infection, one must be choosy about where to expend one's limited energy and attention every day.

Thus I quickly each day established the absolute must-do priorities each day to make sure I got those done before the funk set in. As it turns out, the truly essential does not always take long to accomplish each day. This frees up time for more prosaic activities--for me, unfortunately, it was resting and nose blowing and trying to get rid of headaches. But the point is, there is plenty of time in the day to do both the necessary and the desirable--it just takes discipline to identify the essential and get it out of the way first.

I've proved to myself yet again that time management isn't about scheduling or list-making; it's about priorities. What is it essential that you accomplish today? What else are you doing with your time? Why?

Be Rich in REM

No matter what is your actual station in life, it is easy to feel poor these days. Your house is worth a lot less than it was a couple of years ago, but your mortgage is still the same. If you've managed to keep your job, you probably won't be seeing much in the way of a raise or bonus anytime soon. And don't look to your 401k or investment account statement for solace: that's like staring over the edge of a cliff. (Oh look, way down there--there's my balance!) And even if things are going pretty well for you financially, the reality of the culture right now is that you'd better act like times are tough--so don't be too flashy with new clothes, restaurant meals, or God forbid a new car. Conspicuous consumption has been replaced by conspicuous thrift.

But, if anything, the recession has thrown into even greater focus the absurdity of seeking happiness in money and the stuff it can buy. When you levered up and bought the big house three years ago, I'll bet you thought it would make you happy forever. Did it? Be honest with yourself: even before the markets melted down, and the pressure of the mortgage started to hurt, hadn't the happiness already faded a little bit? Did you settle into the house, then your mind moved on to the next thing that you thought would secure your happiness? (e.g., "I would love a big screen TV over the fireplace. Then we could really use this room.")

Stuff is beside the point, and so is happiness, to be honest. Happiness is a byproduct of a life well-lived, not our life's goal. If we now, in difficult times, get stuck in the past (we used to live so well!) or stuck in the future (once the economy turns, then I'll be happy), we are going to repeat our mistakes and once again miss much of what is good in life today. Yes, even in austere times, there is much to find that is good.

How to find it? The Present Tense way: focus on REM--Relationships, Experiences, and Memories. Become rich in these three, and life will be good. Yes, losing a job or facing reduced hours will be hard to cope with, but spend some of your freed-up time with your partner or children or friends, and make those relationships richer. No, you can't afford the 4-star restaurant outings anymore, but get the family together in the kitchen and build a wealth of experiences cooking, eating, and cleaning up together. You will be rich in memories regardless of the balance in your bank account--and, I daresay, you will be much happier than the richest person in your neighborhood.

There will always be limits to the money we have--and right now, those limits feel uncomfortably tight. The one thing you have without any limits is love--so spend your love on those around you, and bank the memories to serve you for the rest of your life.


This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it!

Being Deliberate, Pt. 2

Last post was about being deliberate about what you do, and I presented the "bottom-up" method for being deliberate. Now, I'll present the top-down method, which leads you to the same place: a life spent undertaking the activities that YOU choose, rather than letting yourself get pulled along by the crowd.

The difference in the top-down method is that you start with a blank sheet of paper rather than a list of all your activities. Use the blank sheet of paper as a metaphor for your life: suppose you could clear you schedule of all appointments; relieve yourself of all current obligations; and start fresh deciding what you wanted to do. Your life is now that blank piece of paper.

So, begin filling it. What do you want to do? What do you need to do? (Sorry, no clean sheet of paper can make you independently wealthy so you don't have to work.) For things you need to do, how do you wish you could accomplish them? If you could spend your days any way you wanted, how would you do it?

This may be harder than the bottom-up method. Try not to fall into the trap of listing things you think you should do--we are doing blue-sky, what-if thinking here. You may find that, relieved of the burden of your current obligations and responsibility, you have no idea what you would do with your time. This is not uncommon, and it is strong evidence that you really, really need to give yourself a break, or you are in danger of being defined solely by others.

Your list may have major projects (e.g., "learn to sail") or it may have more mundane items (e.g., eat a sit-down meal with the family at least 4 nights a week), or both. It will still have your responsibilities--family, work, spouse/partner, etc.--but should include your ideal of how those responsibilities should work. The idea is to imagine your ideal life, your ideal way of spending your time. What do you want to accomplish? What do you want to be known for? With whom do you want to spend time?

Once you have a list, the rest is simple to understand yet difficult to undertake: compare your ideal life with your actual life, and think of one action you can do today to start moving toward your ideal life. Then do that action. Tomorrow think of another, and do it. And the next day. And the next. One step at a time, your real will start to become your ideal.

None of us is ever likely to fulfill 100% our ideal life. But nor will we ever even approach it if all we ever do is dream about it. Dreams without action will always only ever be dreams. With action, they could come true.

Be deliberate about what you want to do, and be a person of action in getting those things done. Therein lies contentment and a life well lived.

Being Deliberate, Pt. 1

One of the fundamentals of Present Tense Living is being deliberate about what you do. Being deliberate means that, to the greatest extent possible, you decide on what and with whom you are going to spend your limited time and attention. You do not let the culture or your peers decide; you decide.

Now it is unavoidable that some of our time has to be spent on activities that we may not choose to do. Most of us have to work for a living, and perhaps we work at something we wouldn't choose to do if we weren't paid to do it. Or, even if you find meaning in your work, all jobs involve some activities that are mundane or downright boring. (I call this administrivia.) This is true not just at work: if you are a parent, there are certain activities (like sitting through sports practices) that no sane person would choose to spend so much time on but which are part of the deal of having kids.

But sometimes we get swept up in what is popular and find that most of our time is spent doing stuff that "everybody" does but that isn't really meaningful to us. Not that these activities aren't fun, but they add up to more than our available time, so we find ourselves being "so busy" yet not accomplishing anything meaningful. Have you ever heard anyone say (or said yourself) "I'm on the go all the time but I never seem to get anything done."? Much of the rat race consists of doing/buying/giving attention to things merely because everyone else in our social or professional circle is doing them. This habit of keeping up with the Joneses with our time is easy to understand--we don't want to seem "different"--and difficult to break.

There are two ways to start being deliberate about your life: bottoms-up or top-down. The bottoms-up way begins with writing down every single thing you do. You could get really detailed and keep a time journal for a week or two, accounting for every hour of your day. But at a minimum, sit down and list on a sheet of paper each activity you do, both at home and outside the home, both for yourself and for others. Be as thorough as you can.

Once your list is complete, check off the things that you must do--work, commute, pick up the kids at school, make dinner for the family, etc. There are probably ways to minimize the time spent on these things, but for now we'll leave them alone and just accept that we have to do them.

Next, look at the unchecked items on your list. Before you do anything else, add to the list things that are missing: the activities you wish you had time for, but somehow never do. Now, thinking carefully about your goals, dreams, talents, and desires, rank the things on your list in order of importance to you. What do you want to spend your time on? To what do you want to direct your attention? Rank them in order of importance/interest to you. You may even want to cross some completely off the list; things you no longer want to do.

You can probably see where this is going. Once you have that list in order of priority, it is just a matter of being deliberate about making time for your important activities. You allot time first to the things you have to do, then make sure your high-priority items get some time in your day or week. After that, if you have time left, you can work in the lower-priority items, or just drop them all together.

In the next post we'll look at the top-down method for accomplishing the same thing. But the point of both methods is the same: to ensure that we are not spending our time on activities that we really don't care about, that are just a form of competition and keeping up that are every bit as prideful as spending our money on things we don't care about just to maintain appearances. In both cases, we are ceding control of our lives--whether money or time--to the culture around us. That's no way to live!

Today vs. Someday

I spent last weekend with my extended family, mourning the loss of my uncle, Tom Corts, and celebrating his life in a nice family funeral service as well as a bigger memorial service at Samford University. There is nothing like a funeral of someone who died too young to remind one that tomorrow is not promised, so make the most of today.

One of the neat stories that came out of the weekend was that on New Year's Day, members of the family sat around a table discussing their "bucket lists" (i.e., lists of things they wanted to do before they die). When Tom's turn came he stated that if he died tomorrow, there is nothing he wanted to do that he had not done. A life lived with no regrets!

Do you have regrets? Have you thought about what regrets you or your family would have if you suddenly died? Think about the various ways we live our lives in the future. Do you ever find yourself making comments like these?

• "Once the kids are grown up, then we'll be able to decorate the house."
• "When the economy recovers, then I'll change careers."
• "Once the baby grows out of diapers, then we'll start traveling."
• "When I finally make partner, I'll be able to come home for dinner every night."

All of these comments focus on the future, but what if the future doesn't come? These mental excuses take the focus off of action today and instead push it into the future. Take the last one: it takes discipline to to get up and leave the office at a decent hour, especially if everyone else then thinks you are slacking off. But how do you know you'll stop once you reach the next level? What if you then try to reach the next highest level? What if by then your family has left you because you're never around? What if you drop dead from overwork? Extreme examples, I know, but they make the point: We can't push all our supposed happiness into the future, when the future is not guaranteed. How much will we miss by doing that? We'll never know until it is too late.

We can't do everything we want here and now--that would be irresponsible (unless, of course, you really do want to work a lot). But we don't have to put everything off until tomorrow, or next year, or someday, either. It is a balance that requires us to examine our lives regularly to ensure we are keeping all facets--work, play, family, community, and self--in perspective. Then, make the most of every day.

The Unexpected

On a flight to Minneapolis this morning I passed the time reading Seneca, including this observation:

"Every day, therefore, should be regulated as if it were the one that brings up the rear, the one that rounds out and completes our lives.....If God adds the morrow we should accept it joyfully. The man who looks for the morrow without worrying over it knows a peaceful independence and a happiness beyond all others."

That nicely summarizes a principle of Present Tense Living: enjoy today, for today is all you have. We sometimes worry so much about tomorrow and the next day and the next that we fail to appreciate what is good about today: the bright sunshine, the joy of our family, the fun of our friends. Learn to appreciate what is good about today and you will go a long way toward conquering the power of worry over your life, which will lead to contentment.

Elsewhere Seneca writes to "practice" your death--in other words, to finish every day saying "I have lived" (quoting Virgil) and being satisfied with your life, as if when you fall asleep you will never wake up. It sounds morbid at first, but with such practice you truly will learn to view each day as a gift. You don't have to think you are going to die every night; but as your head hits the pillow, why not utter the simple prayer: "Dear Lord, thank you for the gift of today."

"This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it!" Practice "dying" and you will live more abundantly each day.

With those thoughts in mind this morning, I deplaned in Minneapolis to find an urgent message waiting for me from my dad with unexpectedly stunning news: my uncle, Thomas Edward Corts, aged 67, a mentor to me during my years at Samford and one of the most generous people I have ever known, died suddenly of a heart attack this morning. And so it hit me: you can "prepare" for your own death, but there is almost no preparation you can do for the sudden loss of a loved one. It is going to hurt, and your reactions are unpredictable until it happens.

Tom and Marla were surrogate parents to me during my college years, formative years during which their strong presence was an unqualified blessing. During my years as a young banker in Birmingham, making only $22,000 a year, Tom paid for countless dinners out for me, and even more valuable were the hours of conversation that I enjoyed with him and Marla, discussing Samford, family, Birmingham life, and the people in our lives. I was inspired by his work ethic, high personal standards, integrity, and eloquence in written and spoken word. I have especially thought often of his generosity to me, and have looked for opportunities to pay it back by passing it on to others in need. I will miss his wise counsel and good example.

So enjoy your own today, but be sure to enjoy the days you have with your friends and loved ones too. Every day is precious for every person; resolve today to reach out to a friend you haven't spoken to in a while; a family member you've not seen; an acquaintence you need to know better. Each day is a gift for you, and an opportunity for you to give of yourself to someone else. Seize that opportunity!

Control Your Environment

In a recent interview with Leo Babauta, Tim Ferriss makes the interesting observation that it is easier to control your environment than to control your behavior. This has interesting implications for all those new year's resolutions that are probably already starting to weaken by now: they often involve trying to change or control behavior, which is hard to do, and so they fail.

How might it look to control an environment instead of a behavior?

• Diet: Clear all dessert out of the house (control the environment) instead of trying to control your impulse to eat the chocolate cookie dough ice cream sitting in the freezer.
• Time management: if web surfing takes away a lot of your productive time, try not even opening your web browser (control your computing environment) unless you absolutely need to check something for the project you are working on.
• Exercise: try parking in the most distant parking lot everywhere you go (control your environment), which will force you to walk more. It may not train you for a marathon, but this simple practice will certainly get you moving more.
• Attention management: if you've resolved to spend more time with a partner, kids, or other loved one, make a house rule: no electronics (Blackberries, cell phones, landline phones, Nintendos, etc.) at the dinner table, and everyone has to sit down to eat. This controlled environment will force you to converse with those around you for at least the time it takes you to eat, and thus you can avoid the modern affliction of being "home alone together" (because everyone is in their own separate electronic universe).

Are you struggling to keep up a resolution? Think about how controlling the environment around you might boost your chances of success in changing your behavior.

Theory vs. Practice

I realized while leading a discussion about the Theology of Enough on Sunday that at some point, one must move on from merely thinking about priorities and the concepts of living in the present tense, and start actually taking concrete steps toward doing something about it. As fun as it is to sit and think about simplifying life, and reducing commitments, and rearranging priorities, and all the other indicators of present tense thinking, eventually something must actually be done about it. And that is when I realized I need to do more thinking about practical application.

What does Present Tense Living actually mean? How will you know you are actually doing it, or moving toward it? How do you overcome hurdles that get in your way of executing it? This will be my focus over the coming weeks, trying to develop a framework for living. I think it will be less than a 12-step method, but more than just "think about it."

Out of illness, a lesson

Nothing like a good bout with bronchitis to force me to slow down, and to throw into sharp relief what in my life really is a priority. It's amazing how many work projects and meetings turned out to be "optional" after all--no one wanted a coughing sicko there, and now I find I'm not out of the loop at all upon my return--and so it make me wonder how much of my usual workday is just busywork and unnecessary. There were a couple of important deadlines that did need to be kept, and I submitted my work from my quarantined office at home, and the world moved on. The true priorities rise to the top when you have limited time to work.

I listened to Leo Babauta's interview with Merlin Mann last week, and Merlin makes the point that if you have to ask yourself if something is a priority, then it is not. Priorities are obvious and clear. A good point to remember the next time you sit down to devote 30 minutes to re-prioritizing your to-do list instead of actually doing work.

Over-leveraged Time

As society works down its overload of financial leverage, I am amazed by various experts advising a "back to basics" approach to life: saving (a little at a time); investing (cash first, then riskier markets); career (focus on doing your best at the job you have now); dressing (more formal business attire is coming back). I will be interested to see if a simpler approach to time management becomes similarly faddish.

I believe our time has become as overextended as our finances. For too long, busy-ness has been a badge of importance; leisure has been equated with lazy. As a result, we don't sleep enough, we degrade our work through multitasking, and we stress ourselves out trying to lots of things competently rather than focusing on a few things and doing them well. The result: life feels like a 24-hour race. The rat race.

I don't know how a time deleveraging might look. Will people begin working fewer hours? Seems doubtful when one is trying to avoid a layoff. Will volunteer hours suffer? Perhaps, though people may substitute time for cash donations to causes they really care about. Will TV watching decline? One can only hope.

For me, I've vowed to identify and try to stop the time wasters that eat out chunks of my day, often without me realizing it. Blog reading on esoteric subjects; long conversations about non-business matters with co-workers; endless trying of new productivity tools instead of actually being productive. None of these things is bad in and of itself, or as an occacional diversion. But I sometimes find that they become the point of my day, not a sideline to it.

Control them, and I'll have more time for the things I really want to do: talk with Sylvia, play with the kids, read, improve my golf game. I shouldn't feel I have to "borrow" time to do these things I love; by breaking my bad habits, I can make them the focus of how I spend my time. I will be the richer for it.