How to Kill an Afternoon in Atlanta

I live in metro Atlanta, a region that is a crossroads rather than a destination for most business travelers, who pass through Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport on their way to somewhere else. But what if Atlanta is your final destination? This brief guide will give the business traveler to Atlanta a few ideas to make the most of her time between meetings.

• Even without your kids in tow, the Georgia Aquarium is worth a visit downtown. The main tank in the world's largest aquarium holds over 6 million gallons of water behind the second largest window the world, offering stunning views of the whale sharks, rays, grouper, and thousands of other fish; you can feel as if you are standing on the bottom of the ocean. Half an hour in front of the window watching the fish glide by is a remarkable way to relax after a stressful morning meeting.
• If you are more a plant person than an animal person, the Atlanta Botanical Garden in Midtown offers a variety of exhibits both indoors and out, including a nice collection of orchids, and is compact enough to get through in a couple of hours. The new canopy walk through the treetops is proving popular, too. Best of all, the garden is located adjacent to Piedmont Park, the finest public space in Atlanta, and a pleasant place to stroll or jog if you are here in the temperate months (late September through May).
  
• At the High Museum of Art in Midtown, the highlight may be the buildings themselves, a 1983 Richard Meier classic which was further improved by a Renzo Piano-designed expansion that opened in 2005. Check to see if one of the regular blockbuster exhibitions is on while you are here; if not, the best part of the permanent collection is the top floor of the new Wieland Pavilion, where natural light filters through a specially-designed high ceiling onto a part of the Contemporary art collection. If you don't believe that architecture can affect your perceptions and mood, visit this space.
  
• For the quintessential Atlanta shopping experience, head to Lenox Mall in Buckhead. Built in the late 1950s as an outdoor shopping center, expanded and covered since then, it has been THE place to shop in Atlanta since it opened. Housing both everyman department stores and luxury boutiques, this is the place to see metro Atlanta's mix of society matrons, hip-hop urbanites, modernist hipsters, and suburban families, all in one place.
• Atlanta is a great restaurant town, but if I had to pick just one place to recommend to a traveler staying in the downtown convention district, I would recommend French American Brasserie on Ivan Allen Jr Blvd. Walkable from all the convention hotels, FAB offers excellent French comfort food, Parisian-inspired decor, friendly service, and a cool rooftop bar that is an ideal place for an aperitif. Your clients will be impressed that you know about this place.
  

Spare Time

One potential benefit of the severe recession we've been through since 2008 is that fewer work hours, whether due to layoff or simply working less hours, is a time dividend that can be put to more productive use (psychologically, if not economically) building relationships, experiences, and memories with ourselves and our loved ones.

It appears, however, that reality may be a bit different than the theory. The Wall Street Journal yesterday ran an article highlighting how unemployed and under-employed Americans are spending the free time they used to spend working. Comparing 2007 and 2009 data from the Labor Dept.'s American Time Use Survey, the authors find that most people are watching TV and sleeping; daily time spent on those activities increased by an average 12 minutes and 6 minutes, respectively, over the two years. Meanwhile there was virtually no increase in the time spent volunteering, exercising, participating in religious activities, pursuing education, or even working on household chores. Says University of Texas economist Daniel Hamermesh of the time dividend: "It's a waste."

A couple of thoughts here. First, the Time Use Survey covers all Americans, not just laid off or under-employed Americans, so those left behind at companies, who are now doing the work that two or three used to do, could be offsetting the statistics from the unemployed. Second, some desirable activities may not show up in the available answers to the questions. If I now spend the afternoon helping my wife make dinner, it may take us 20 minutes instead of 30 minutes that it takes her alone. In the survey result her time on housework would go down while mine would go up; but the intangible benefit of doing something together and spending more time talking doesn't show up anywhere in the data.

Still, the fact that TV time is growing is troubling because it is growing off an already high base: nearly 3 hours per day for adults. There is nothing inherently wrong with TV, but to think that three hours out of every 16-hour waking day is spent in passive consumption of entertainment is disappointing, and indicates that many of us are missing much that is happening in the world around us. As I've noted before, very few of your most precious memories are created in front of a screen. Only by engaging with the world around us--the people, the sights, the sounds--do we really live; living comes through doing. Passively watching other people live their lives on screen (terribly misnamed as "reality TV") is a poor substitute.

What are you doing with your free time?

Long Day

Here at Present Tense Living, our philosophy is to make the most of every day, to enjoy life in the here and now. I've recently returned from Alaska, where long summer days open open up an entirely different perspective on "make the most of today."

While all of us in the lower 48 enjoy the longer summer evenings, in Alaska summer is a totally different experience. One evening I did my bedtime reading by the light streaming through my window at 11 pm--the trees were still bathed in the orange glow of the setting sun. Still adjusting to the four-hour time change, I awoke the first morning at 4 am--to bright sunshine forcing its way into the room around the blackout curtains. With 20+ hours of daylight, in Alaska one can pack two days worth of activities into each day--talk about "making the most of today"!

June 21 marks the summer solstice, the day with the most daylight in the Northern Hemisphere. I checked the stats for Fairbanks today: sunrise at 2:58a, sunset at 12:48a. I now know the answer to that hypothetical question: "What would you do if you only had one day to live?" Answer: Go to Fairbanks on a June day--the day never ends.

The payback comes, of course, in December, when I am told the night seems to never end. But for a few weeks in the summer, our friends in Alaska can do more in a day than any of us dare even attempt.

Wherever you find yourself on this longest of days, spare a moment to take notice of and appreciate the sights, sounds, and people around you. This is the day the Lord has made--let us rejoice and be glad in it!

Magical Time

Our home is filled with four children, which means every evening from about 6:00 to 8:30 or so is what we call the "triple witching hour", filled with hungry and tired kids, messy rooms, cooking, dirty dishes, baths, bedtime stories, and other activities typical of suburban American families. It is chaotic, noisy, and exhausting, and it gets repeated every night.

But for the past few evenings, blessed by lovely late-spring Georgia weather, Sylvia and I have been able to recover from triple witching hour by sitting on our back patio, under the canopy of trees that surrounds the back of our house, while dusk falls. The calmness is restorative, and mentally invigorating. The sky slowly fades from the light blue of afternoon into gray, then to dark gray, then to the dark blue of night as the few stars that are able to shine through the urban light pollution twinkle in the heavens. The sounds add to the effect: the ubiquitous traffic noise of inside-the-perimeter Atlanta forms the background, but does not overpower the bark of a distant dog, the rustle of leaves in the dusky breeze, the occasional chirp of a late bird, the soft splash of our neighbor's pool fountain. This week even smell has come into play: the gardenias along our back wall are in full bloom, bathing us with fragrance on the evening breeze.

Our stress level falls with the dimming light; although I am in general a morning person, I have to admit this is a magical time of day. As I watch the earth fall asleep, it is easy to let the cares and concerns of today fade away with the light. Tomorrow will bring a new sun and a new opportunity to work and worry and strive and play. For now, we let our mind rest, just as the earth rests.

These evenings are a good reminder: sometimes it is doing nothing that makes all the difference.

The Technology Double-Edged Sword

USA Today last week ran an article describing the blessings and the curse of technology-enabled work at home. It turns out that the advantages of working at home are not quite so clear-cut as it first seemed they would be, and that there are clear trade-offs to being always available.

As we have written about before on Present Tense Living, the problem is one of boundaries. Technology blurs the distinction between working and playing, and for most people, who rely on their work for income and fulfillment, work will nearly always win in the conflict between the two.

The article makes clear the distinction between time and attention. Your Blackberry may enable you to be home earlier or more often, but if your attention is on your device instead of your spouse or children, then what is the point? The picture of a houseful of individuals each surfing their own screen, oblivious of the others around them, is a sad one. "Home alone together" we might say, and it seems silly when we describe it, but how often have you been in a room with your loved ones but unaware of them as you tapped away on a screen? We think we can multitask, but we are only fooling ourselves and cheating those around us.

Technology enables us to work anywhere, but it does not relieve us of the responsibility of setting our own boundaries. You still have to determine when you are going to work and when you are going to play. If you need to work a lot, fine, be conscious about it and do it. But don't work from home thinking you are spending quality time with your family when your attention is never fully on them.

Turn off the cell phone; shut down the Blackberry; put the computer to sleep. Focus your attention on your loved ones for at least a few minutes each day. They will thank you for it, and in the long run you will thank yourself.

Forget Mustitasking

All of us are tempted to multitask nearly every day. With companies trying to do more with fewer people, the demands of work seem to be relentlessly increasing. If you have kids their schedules are packed too, and you have to be involved in that activity while managing your own affairs. Then there is the information stream we try to keep up with: news sites, blogs, Facebook updates, Twitter feeds. It is a lot of busyness, and so no wonder we are tempted to text while driving, to email while eating, and to exercise while talking on the phone.

But evidently we are fooling ourselves. On NPR's Morning Edition program today, Renee Montagne interviewed Douglas Merrill, the former CIO of Google who holds a PhD in Cognitive Science, and who recently published Getting Organized in the Google Era. According to Dr. Merrill, we are fooling ourselves when we think we can multitask:

Everyone feels like they're tremendous multitaskers. It's a little like Lake Wobegon - everyone thinks they're better than average, but you're not. You can't multitask. When you shift from one context to another you're going to drop some things. And what that means is that you're less effective at the first task and at the second task that you're trying to do at the same time. It's much more effective to spend time doing your first task, take a small break, and then do your second task. Managing the context shift is much more effective than pretending to multitask, even though we all think we're good at it.

When he says "you can't", what he means is your brain is not set up to operate that way:

Your brain has a short-term memory which it uses to store the things that happen around it in the world, and then it takes from that short-term memory and encodes into long-term memory so you can find it later. That short-term memory can hold between five and nine things and that's all. And if you're multitasking, you're more likely to forget the things that are in that short-term memory.

So, it turns out we are all fooling ourselves when we think we can get more done by doing two or more things at once. It is a false victory: we seem to do more, but in the end we do it poorly, or we forgot what we did, or we forget to do all the things we are supposed to do. Plus, Dr. Merrill goes on to say, the constant switching our attention back and forth between different contexts is actually a time-waster.

Far better, as he says, to do one thing at a time, take a short break to reset your brain, and then start on the next task. Focus on what you are doing right now--live in the present tense, we might say--and do it to the best of your ability. Of course, doing that doesn't lessen the flood of information, tasks, emails, and other demands on our time; so we have to be deliberate about setting priorities, saying no when possible, and otherwise taking control of our own lives to ensure we are accomplishing the truly important (as you can read about elsewhere on this blog).

I haven't read the book yet, but from the review it appears there might be some interesting tips and tools that Dr. Merrill suggests for helping manage all that information flow. Let me know if you've read it, and what you think.

The Productivity Trap

Personal productivity is a holy grail for many knowledge workers in the contemporary American economy. Just like pilgrims seeking the original Holy Grail, today's knowledge workers pursue an almost single-minded quest for the next new productivity tip or trick. (Examples: using a desk setup with two monitors to work more efficiently; becoming a disciple of David Allen's generally helpful Getting Things Done; multitasking anywhere and everywhere).

All this fascination with efficiency leads quickly to the Productivity Trap: the idea that contentment, or success, or happiness is achieved by getting more done. We become convinced that we are one tool away--a new tabbed notebook, perhaps, or one iPhone app--from working efficiently enough to allow us more evenings off, or to avoid Saturday work, or to earn the higher bonus we crave. "Once I'm efficient enough to handle this workload," we say to ourselves, "I'll be able to get my time back."

Sounds good, but no. Once you get efficient enough to handle it, your boss will be so impressed that she will put you on the even bigger project with even tighter time demands. "Congratulations!" she'll say. "You did so well on the small project that you get to lead the big one!" Or, you'll get to be the boss, and not only have to do your own work but make sure everyone else is doing theirs too. Your time commitment will increase, not decrease, and you'll be off again in search of a few tips to "save time". You are stuck in the Productivity Trap.

The Productivity Trap becomes a self-perpetuating cycle when we spend more time working on our productivity systems--organizing browser bookmarks, shifting folder tags, re-writing to-do lists, optimizing Outlook, etc.--than we do actually working. In trying to be more productive, we get less real work done. We end up with the strange ability to precisely track, file, and retrieve the list of things we didn't get done today.

This is not to say that all productivity is bad or that efficiency is a false goal. To the extent that a work-saving tip allows you to complete a necessary task in less time, then productivity is a blessing; you are being both efficient and effective. Disorganization often results in duplicative or unnecessary work; any form of organization that prevents this is a net gain and should be praised. However, we get stuck in the Productivity Trap when productivity becomes an end in itself, not a tool to be used to achive our real objectives.

The only way to free up extra time for yourself is to do less. Learn to be honest about what is really important. Be ruthless in saying "no" to unimportant obligations. Be disciplined in doing your important tasks first in the day, before interruptions divert your attention. Yes, be efficient (do things well), but only while being effective (doing the right things). Efficiency without effectiveness is waste.

Let Your Boat Be Light!

I recently read Jerome K Jerome's comedy classic, Three Men In A Boat, first published in 1889 and continuously in print ever since. It is the story of the adventures of three friends who decide to take a several-day boat trip up the River Thames, observing life along the way. Filled with amusing situations and spiced with the narrator's (presumably Jerome himself) philosophical musings, the book is a rare mixture: thought-provoking comedy.

As the three friends are preparing their boat for departure, they bring everything they think they will need to the river, only to find they have brought more stuff than they can ever fit in the boat. One of the friends, George, comes up with a different idea, and Jerome's observations about that idea provide excellent advice for life:

George said:

"You know we are on a wrong track altogether. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can't do without."

George comes out really quite sensible at times. You'd be surprised. I call that downright wisdom, not merely as regards the present case, but with reference to our trip up the river of life, generally. How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is ever in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless lumber.

How thy pile the poor little craft mast-high with fine clothes and big houses; with useless servants, and a host of swell friends that do not care twopence for them, and that they do not care three ha'pence for; with expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and fashions, with pretence and ostentation and with--oh, the heaviest, maddest lumber of all! The dread of what will my neighbor think, with luxuries that only cloy with pleasures that bore, with empty show that, like the criminal's crown of yore, makes to bleed and swoon the aching head that wears it!

It is lumber, man--all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, and you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment's freedom from anxiety and care, never gain a moment's rest for dreamy laziness--no time to watch the windy shadows skimming lightly o'er the shallows, or the glittering sunbeams flitting in and out among the ripples, or the great trees by the margin looking down at their own image, or the woods all green and golden, or the lilies white and yellow, or the sombre-waving rushes, or the sedges, or the orchids, or the blue forget-me-nots.

Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need--a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

You will find the boat easier to pull then, and it will not be so liable to upset, and it will not matter so much if it does upset; good, plain merchandise will stand water. You will have time to think as well as to work. Time to drink in life's sunshine--time to listen to the Aeolian music that the wind of God draws from the human heartstrings around us.......

"Let your boat of life be light"--what excellent advice to those of us who live in a society that drives us in the constant pursuit of more, better, faster.

Consider your own life; there are naturally many things you'd like to have on the journey, but what are the things you truly can't do without? What will you do to devote more of your time to those things?

Lazy, or just efficient?

Paul Johnson, the prolific historian who recently published a concise biography of Winston Churchill, once met the great statesman, when Churchill was old and Johnson was young. "Mr. Churchill, to what do you attribute your success?" asked Johnson. Churchill responded, "Economy of effort. Never stand when you can sit, and never sit when you can lie down." I thought of this story over the weekend when in the course of a conversation with my wife I made the observation that I am lazy.

"You're not lazy!" she exclaimed, reminding me that I manage to hold onto a decent job, I help out around the house to a (generally) satisfactory degree, and I even occupy many of my leisure hours with meaningful activity. She was of course thinking of the dictionary definition of lazy: "disinclined to activity or exertion," and I suppose by that standard she is right. I am certainly no workaholic, but I am not afraid of a little exertion.

But modify the definition with a qualifier--"disinclined to unnecessary activity or exertion," and by that revised definition I am proud to consider myself lazy. Indeed, it is my hypothesis that this kind of laziness is going to come to be seen as a virtue in the 21st century, as computing power continues to increase and the information stream turns into a river that threatens to drown us all who are trying to keep up.

Laziness is not yet mainstream; busyness is still the norm, and many people aspire to appear even busier than they are; this is because of the American tendency to equate busyness with importance. Indeed, my laziness probably limits my career prospects: I work for a big company, and the politics of big companies require one to excel at certain superfluous activities: face time in meetings that decide nothing, preparing reports and analyses of data that don't directly contribute to decisions (but do contribute to a perception that one must be busy), PowerPoint presentations to other groups in the company to explain graphically how busy one has been. (It is the grown-up version of your high school History teacher who demanded a 20-page paper on the Boston Tea Party. What if I can tell the story well in 15 pages? or 12? or 10?) Parkinson's Law is alive and well: "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion."

The lazy person fights a lonely fight against this pattern of measuring inputs, and instead shifts the focus to outputs. The question for a lazy person is not "How much work am I doing (regardless of outcome)?" but "What is the minimum amount of input I need to provide to achieve the desired outcome?" Laziness does not mean always do the minimum acceptable; it means do as little as possible to achieve the desired result, which might still be a very high standard. Churchill attributed his success to economy of effort, and yet he still accomplished more than most of us would even dream of, and to a very high standard.

But in the knowledge-based economy of the 21st century, laziness will deliver distinct advantages. Lazy people learn to discern the important from the merely urgent; this skill is invaluable when sorting through an email inbox that seems to refill more regularly than the miraculous jars of water that Jesus turned into wine. A lazy person is not afraid to say no to activities that don't support the goal; again, useful in work environments filled with cross-functional teams with no clear boss and no clear mandate. Finally, lazy people are efficient; they are constantly looking for a better way to do routine tasks, to free up time for more meaningful pursuits. In organizations that are trying to do more with less, this expertise can set one apart. Remember the old adage: "Want to know the best way to do something? Ask a lazy person."

Laziness involves certain challenges, however. First, one must be very thoughtful and clear about objectives. I believe much of our day-to-day busyness is merely activity that we use to avoid being honest with ourselves about what we need to or want to do. Second, if you work at a conventional company, you may have to accept a certain diminished career outlook, at least until your company recognizes the virtues of laziness for its bottom line. Unfortunately, many companies still like face time and frenetic activity, rather than actual results, as a signal of importance. And finally, you have to have a plan--what are you going to do with the time you free up by being more efficient? Are you interesting enough to have a life outside of work? Less work on any one project should mean you can work on more projects. If instead less equals less, then you have reverted to the traditional definition of laziness, and that is not a good place to be.

So join me in shedding the fear of being called lazy. Embrace economy of effort! Take back your time! Don't let the pervasive culture of busyness lead you to the trap of measuring your inputs instead of your outputs. Remember that what you do is more important than how you do it. Take Thomas Jefferson's advice to writers that the greatest skill is that of "never using two words when one will do" and apply it to all areas of your life.

Be lazy!

The Best Gift

The holidays are a fading memory now, and I'm not sure if the arctic cold that seems to have gripped the entire country will preserve those memories a little longer than normal, or freeze them out as my mind focuses instead on getting to the next warm place as soon as possible. Just in case it is the latter, I'd better get my holiday thoughts written down now.

Did you get a favorite gift this year? My friends and family were once again abundantly generous. I will be looking smart in my new clothes, and I received enough interesting books to keep me reading for months. My in laws added a touch of class to my office life with an attractive set of desk implements--including a cool desktop telescope, with which I can watch for attacking rival bankers from my sixth-floor office window. For me, it was a typical year of material blessing at Christmas.

But one of our tenets at Present Tense Living is to seek to be rich not in things, but in REM: relationships, experiences, and memories with the people in our lives. With that in mind, I must declare that my favorite gift of the year was not a thing at all: it was time. I got to spend nearly two full weeks with my family, including my brother and parents, in Phoenix. The trip was a blessing of time well spent, and not just because of the warm weather. I played in the pool with the kids; took morning jogs while the rising sun painted the desert sky; lingered over the table with my parents and brother, catching up on personal news; showed my kids the Grand Canyon for the first time, and watched them delight in throwing snowballs into the abyss; and walked with my toddler as he chased desert bunnies across the sidewalk. We had a grand time, and oh how hard it was to return to freezing Atlanta.

In short, it was two weeks of doing nothing, but it meant everything to me. There were no schedules to keep, no pressures to be productive, no rushing around to do more in less time. We were simply there, enjoying each other's company, and delighting in the gift of time. We built relationships, shared experiences, and created memories that will last long after our last Christmas gift has been consigned to the landfill.

If only we could capture a little of that feeling in regular life! The ability to set aside the quotidian cares of existence for just an evening, or a weekend day, would do wonders for our psyches, I believe. Perhaps my new year's resolution should be to pick one evening a week to do nothing, or to have no purpose, other than to spend time with my family. If we all agreed to do it, maybe we could capture a little of that holiday magic throughout the year--what an enduring gift that would be.