Lockdown Month in Review

My last day in the office, before we began the social distancing lockdown to fight the novel coronavirus, was March 13.  So today marks the beginning of the second month confined largely to home with my family of six.  What has it been like?

1.  Pre-lockdown life was way too busy.  In addition to the "jet lag" problem that I wrote about earlier, our family online calendar used to look like a colorful contemporary art piece, with multiple events for multiple people every day.  All of that got eliminated overnight.  Some of it we miss (kids soccer games, monthly dinner out with our supper club); a lot of it we don't.  In fact, I think a lot of our activities we were involved in just to keep us from being bored at home.  Now we know we aren't bored at home, so hopefully we will be more selective once the lockdown ends.

2.  There is freedom in the structure of routine.  We value our routine that we have fallen into:  set meal times (approximately set:  we aren't running a monastery or naval ship), daily exercise breaks, plenty of time for school and work, nightly entertainment.  Having a routine eliminates decisions (what time should we eat?) which reduces stress.  Within the routine, though, there is lots of freedom for when school and work gets done.

3.  We like our family meal times.  my wife and I have been eating lunch outside in the sunshine every day.  Now that no one has activities in the evenings, all six of us linger longer at the dinner table.  (Longer is relative:  15 minutes instead of kids dashing off as soon as their food is chewed and swallowed.)  For some reason, there has been much less strife among the kids since the lockdown began, even though the college student really wishes he weren't here.

So now we are starting to think about life after lockdown, assuming it begins to lift in a month or so.  What should we add back to our schedules?  How can we maintain some of the good vibes we have now?

Jet Lag

One very minor upside to the social distancing quarantines we've been under for two weeks now:  I can find time to start writing again.

Week three of social isolation is underway, a long enough time that I can start to draw some conclusions about my "old" life.  I already wonder if I will ever go back to a daily driving commute--this walk up the stairs after breakfast is a lot less stressful than a typical Atlanta rush hour, and my productivity certainly hasn't dropped and might even be higher.  Most of my work days are spent on the phone and computer anyway, and my department is spread across the country, so it should have been predictable that remote working isn't that much different from office working for me.  (I'm lucky that my kids are old enough to be self sufficient at their home schooling, and that I have a wife who doesn't work outside the home and keeps the household running flawlessly.)

On the unpredictable side, I have been most surprised to find that I'm sleeping each night much better than I was before the lockdown.  Not more, necessarily, but better, deeper, more restorative sleep.  I have changed nothing else in my diet or routine to deliberately chase sleep; I would have though I was sleeping soundly before.  But the difference is enough to be noticeable, and I've been reflecting on why this could be.  The best idea I've had is that it corresponds to the sudden shutdown of my usual peripatetic travel schedule.  Is it possible I had been living in a steady state of jet lag?

I was not regularly jet-lagged in the traditional sense of my body clock being off by a few time zones.  Most of my business travel takes place in my home EST time zone or the neighboring CST that is one hour behind.  But what my travel lacked in distance was perhaps made up for in frequency:  according to Delta, I flew 83 flight segments in 2019, which is over 40 round trips.  Thanks to the fact that my home airport, ATL, is the busiest in the world with direct flights to dozens of cities, I am fortunate to frequently be able to make day trips for meetings.  Sometimes I might have two days like that in a week; occasionally they will be back-to-back so that I get home late one evening then get up early the next morning and head straight back to the airport.  Sometimes the return flights are late, so that I get to bed an hour or two later than normal.  In between trips, there are regular work days and kids activities and social outings, etc.  Many of us know what this business (or "busy-ness") looks like--and many have it worse than I do.

For three weeks now, all of this has come to a sudden and complete halt.  No rushing around, no extra  activities, no flights.  Instead, our family has settled into a fairly steady routine, with fairly regular meal times, a little outdoor exercise each day, and to bed at about the same time every night.  Some of what we've lost in outside socializing we are making up with family time together, playing games and watching movies.  And presto, I'm sleeping more deeply than I have in years.

My conclusion:  I was jet lagged--not so much by actual jet travel, but by the incessant activity that seems to be the steady state operating model for most American professionals and their families.  I wasn't always crossing time zones, but I was compressing and shifting my perception of time through constant motion of mind and body.  Now, without all that rushing around, my mind has finally caught up with my body, I'm sleeping better, and I feel great.

So here's what I'm contemplating as I sit at home:  in two weeks or two months or whenever the social distancing protocols begin to relax and "normal" life begins to restart, how far back to the old ways will I allow myself to get?  I can't, and don't want to, stay sequestered at home forever--monasticism is not for me, and I'm too young to retire.  But is there a point somewhere between sheltering in place and the restless rush of relentless motion that would find me contributing fully to my job, home, and community, while still allowing me to sleep very well at night?  I wonder.

More to Life than Work

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Emily Esfahani Smith tells about how her mom's advice to collect a boyfriend as well as a degree while at college proved to be the right advice.  While the assertion that meeting a partner while in college is easier than in the post-college yearsbis interesting to discuss, I thought Ms. Smith's more important point came somewhat later in the essay:

There is far more to happiness than career success.

Ms. Smith is blessed to have learned at a young age what many of us discover more slowly over a much longer time, often after it is too late to save a marriage, or participate in a child's milestones:  there is more to life than work.  A successful career can certainly be one important component of a happy life, but it is never the only component, and often not the most important one.

For women especially, Ms. Smith points out, a lifetime of being told you can achieve anything often translates into pressure that you should achieve "everything", whatever that means.  But in truth, says Ms. Smith:

Career success and relationships are both undoubtedly important to women's happiness, but many young and ambitious women value their personal lives more than their career aspirations. And that feeling intensifies over time.

I'm hardly qualified to explore the various feminist arguments for or against her point, but I'm glad she made it because I think it offers a worthy reminder for all of us, men and women, to not get stuck with a one-track life that never leaves the career track.  By all means be proud of your professional accomplishments, but never forget that a "personal life" is much more than just achievement--it is the people you choose to spend time with, and the relationships you develop with those people.

Restart

After several months of working on other projects, I have recently turned my thoughts back to Present Tense Living and the need for proper perspective about the time of our life.  Prompted partly by the hectic nature of my own family’s life—four school-aged children and all their activities can certainly fill up a schedule—and partly by lots of media attention on the issue of “balance” following the recent publication of books like Lean In, I have been reminded that a regular dose of perspective about how we use the time we have is still important.

I begin by reminding myself:  what exactly is present tense living?  At its most basic, “living in the present tense” means being thankful for the day you have in front of you—today—and making the most of it.  Do the task you have to do today with purpose; love the people you encounter today with abundance; appreciate the experiences you have today with gratitude.  Too often, much of our daily existence is taken up with lamenting the past or worrying about the future.  It is good to learn from the past, and to prepare for the future, but when those activities dominate our thinking, we can miss out on the pleasures of today.  This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it!

So as I look around my upper-middle-class American environment, do I see people living in the present tense?  Are we enjoying the people, places, and things that already surround us, or are we focused on the chase after more and different people, places, and things that might make us happy in the future?

Some of what I see is good.  Certainly many of us realize how fortunate we are to have come through the Great Recession with our jobs intact—especially in my field of banking.  The job we have may not be the perfect one, but compared to no job it is pretty good.  Some of the conspicuous consumption that drove so much spending before the recession has cooled off—we now realize that everything doesn’t have to be brand name all the time.

But the busyness of life, the speed at which we seem to be passing through our days, continues unabated and is probably still accelerating.  We continue striving to do more in less time; the mistake of multi-tasking is till rampant; the pressure to be “always-on” continues unabated; the temptation to upgrade and update is stronger than ever.  For example, I have a wired phone in my basement at home that is around 10 years old and works great, exactly like it always has.  By comparison, a 2-year-old cell phone (if you’re willing to be seen with one) seems quaintly outdated, and a 5-yr-old one probably doesn’t even work on a modern network.  We are encouraged to upgrade nearly every year, whether we need it or not.

None of the stuff we are pursuing is bad in itself.  The problem comes when we are running after it only because everyone else is, so that after awhile we can't remember why we started running, or how we ended up in this race.  Present Tense Living encourages us to pause to appreciate what we already have; maybe we don’t need to run quite so fast anymore to catch something we aren’t sure we want anyway.  Be deliberate about what you do; you want to follow the path you set, not the one your culture sets for you.  Money and stuff are nice, but they aren’t the point.  Relationships, experiences, memories—REM—will give you a much richer life.

As the recent excitement over books like Lean In shows, there is still a strong cultural push to “have it all” in America.  Our goal at PTL is not to tell you that you can’t have it all; our goal is to remind you (1) not to overlook the blessings of what you already have, and (2) to be deliberate about the “all” you are pursuing—it should be the “all” that you define, not the “all” that the world defines for you if you let it.

So ask yourself:  what am I so busy pursuing, and why?

The Day That I Die

I'm a big fan of the Zac Brown Band, and hours of listening has seared the bands' songs into my mind. Along with the catchy melodies, soothing harmonies, and impressive musicianship, I've come to appreciate the philosophy that runs like a thread through their work.  Much like this blog tries to do, many of the band's lyrics reflect a blend of Stoic acceptance of life as it is; an Epicurean appreciation of the pleasures of everyday living; a Christian acknowledgement of God as supreme over all of life; and a growing recognition that time is a precious resource that should not be taken for granted.

Take Day That I Die, from the band's latest album Uncaged, written by Zac Brown, Wyatt Durrette, and Nic Cowan.  After acknowledging the sometimes tough life of a musician on the road, the singer recognizes that the songs come from inside him; he has to sing:


'Cause I believe that I

Was born with a song inside of me.

Never question why, 

I just kept on chasing that melody.

And as time goes by, 

It's funny how time can make you realize, 

We're running out of it.

Anyone in middle age, musician or not, can relate to those last lines:  as time goes by, we begin to realize that time won't last forever.  Once we realize that time has a limit, its value increases.  And as its value increases, we start to think more deliberately about how to spend it.  And there you have the genesis of many a "mid-life crisis."

As the song continues, Zac reminds us that one answer to the realization that time is precious is to make sure we spend it doing something we love.  In his case, playing guitar:

On the day that I die, 

I wanna say that I 

Was a man who really lived and never compromised.

And when I've lived out my days

Until the very end, 

I hope they find me in my home,

A guitar in my hands.

A man who is driven to be a musician by the melodies that seemingly erupt from within him hopes to be playing music to the very end.

Which poses a question:  how do you want to spend the hypothetical day that you die?   When I look around me, it appears that most people want to be found with an iPhone in their hands.  Seriously?  Maybe they are all composing music on GarageBand.......

Time is precious; we don't have an unlimited supply.  Even more daunting, you can't know exactly how much you do have; people like Mike had much less than they expected.   Once you realize that your time has real value, the next step is to be deliberate about how you spend it.  Don't do things just because everyone else does them; examine yourself, taking into account your talents, motivations, responsibilities, desires, hopes, and prayers.  Then spend your valuable time on the things that matter to you, not on things that society says should matter to you.

For me that means trying to be rich in relationships, experiences, and memories.  Yes, I have to work for a living, but I continue to try to be as efficient as possible to free up time for what really matters to me:  talking to my wife, playing with my kids, reading, writing, eating; actually living.  On the day that I die, I hope they find me in my home, surrounded by my family, a book and a pen in my hand.

On the day that you die, how will we find you?

Uplifted by the Decline and Fall

In 2011 I undertook and completed a reading project that I had wanted to do for years:  I read Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in its entirety.  My Folio Society edition is eight volumes, with over 2,000 pages, though the original was published serially in six volumes from 1776-1788.  This work remained the definitive history of Rome and its empire until well into the 20th Century.

Although it has been eclipsed by more modern scholarship, and its interpretations are generally seen as antiquated now, Gibbon's History remains one of the great works of Enlightenment scholarship.  It is most compelling to a modern reader because of its narrative style:  this is not history presented as a dry list of events, dates, and people; this is a narrative of brave men (and a few women) making bold moves to expand, hold, and defend a great Empire, and build a great culture.

Taking the time to read a work like this seems slightly antiquated in the age of Google and Wikipedia, where any information you can think of is at your fingertips.  Want to know who the Emperor Julian was and what he did?  You can find it in seconds.  But putting individuals into their context, understanding what came before and after great events and great men in history, and seemingly moving through history with them provides a much richer perspective on the past than what one gets from simply cherry-picking facts from Google.

It certainly took time, and more than a bit of organization, to get through such a magnum opus in one year.  I basically broke the year into eight, 6 to 7-week milestones and set a goal for myself to finish one volume by each milestone.  In general, I'd say it worked out to about 15-20 minutes a day of reading, or roughly the same amount of time it takes to watch one sitcom on my DVR, skipping the commercials.  It would be interesting to debate the merits of reading Gibbon vs. watching The Big Bang Theory daily.  For me, it was certainly time well spent.

What did I learn from the books?  Well, I was introduced to Roman emperors whose names I had heard, but I didn't really know what they had done or how they fitted in to history, e.g. Augustus, Marcus Aurelius, Julian, Theodosius.  One volume covers the birth of Mohammed and the rise of Islam, subjects that were not covered in history when I was in school.  I came to realize that the first 1000 years following the time of Christ were a bloody mess of violence and death in everyday life, to a degree that would shock us today, even as jaded as we have become by foreign wars and senseless domestic shootings.  Life really was nasty, brutish, and short.

(One particularly grim episode:  a Roman general punished a wayward soldier by pulling together the tops of two adjacent pine trees, securing them with a rope; tying one arm and one leg of the poor soldier to each tree; then cutting the rope that held the trees together.  Ouch.)

But as different as life was from today, there are certain episodes and people that seem shockingly modern, or that provide inspiration all these years later.  For example:  here is how Gibbon describes the typical day of Alexander Severus, who was emperor from 222-235 A.D.:

The simple journal of his ordinary occupations exhibits a pleasing picture of an accomplished emperor, and....might well serve the imitation of modern princes.  Alexander rose early; the first moments of the day were consecrated to private devotion, and his domestic chapel was filled with the images of those heroes, who, by improving or reforming human life, had deserved the grateful reverence of posterity.  But, as he deemed the service of mankind the most acceptable worship of the gods, the greatest part of his morning hours was employed in his council, where he discussed public affairs, and determined private causes, with a patience and discretion above his years.  The dryness of business was relieved by the charms of literature:  and a portion of time was always set apart for his favorite studies of poetry, history, and philosophy.  The works of Virgil and Horace, the Republics of Plato and Cicero, formed his taste, enlarged his understanding, and gave him the noblest ideas of man and government.  The exercises of the body succeeded to those of the mind; and Alexander, who was tall, active, and robust, surpassed most of his equals in the gymnastic arts.  Refreshed by the use of the bath and a slight dinner, he resumed, with new vigor, the business of the day; and, till the hour of supper, the principal meal of the Romans, he was attended by his secretaries, with whom he read and answered the multitude of letters, memorials, and petitions, that must have been addressed to the master of the greatest part of the world. His table was served with the most frugal simplicity; and whenever he was at liberty to consult his own inclination, the company consisted of a few select friends, men of learning and virtue....The dress of Alexander was plain and modest, his demeanor courteous and affable.....

To summarize, Alexander Severus practiced morning devotions; spent time at work on public and private business; read literature to relax; took daily exercise and a daily bath; and ate simple meals with close friends.  Here we are 1800 years later, after innumerable advances in technology, medicine, psychiatry, and living standards, and yet still one could do a lot worse than follow this daily routine (which, as Gibbon observed, "might well serve the imitation of modern princes").    Talk about history coming alive!

How to Live?

I’ve been led into deep thoughts from recent random events.  First, the events:

• Two weeks ago I celebrated my birthday with my annual reading of Seneca’s On theShortness of Life.

• Yesterday I read of the death of Tim Stack, 60, CEO of Piedmont Healthcare, a prominent hospital system here in Atlanta.

• Today I saw the report of the death of Gore Vidal, 86, celebrated author.

Now, the deep thoughts:

I never met Tim Stack or Gore Vidal, but I couldn’t help thinking of each as a reference point for me: if I live to Mr. Stack’s age, I have 16 years left; if I live to Mr. Vidal’s age, I have 42 years left.  That’s a big difference.  What would I do differently today if I knew for certain that I have only 16 years left to live rather than 42?

Enter Seneca: 

“…all save a very few find life at an end just as they are getting ready to live.” 

I’ve known people for whom that is true; they look forward their entire working lives to retirement, so that they can really live, and then they die or become incapacitated and can’t do it.  It is tragic and sad when it happens.  I don’t want to do that, and if it comes to pass that I have only 16 years left, I need to get busy living.  But what if it turns out I have 42 years left?  How do I prepare for a long future life, which may not come, without passing up on too much life today, which I certainly have right now?

Getting this balance right is very difficult.  It is unrealistic for most of us to extract ourselves from common bourgeois existence to pursue leisure full time.  (I’m using “leisure” here in the classical sense, meaning activities that have intrinsic value in themselves, without regard for the ends they might achieve, like money.)   Yet at the same time, many of us realize that the hectic pace of modern American life, a treadmill of earn --> acquire --> earn more --> acquire more, with very little time devoted to leisure pursuits, probably isn’t the best way to live, either.  We know we should get off the treadmill at some point, hence the “When I retire, then….” dreams.  But should we really put off good living until then?  Do we run the risk of fulfilling Seneca’s prediction that we find life at an end just as we are getting ready to live?

Yet there seems to no good or easy time to get off the treadmill early.  We need to pay off the student loans; then we need the bigger house; then we need to put the kids through school; by then there is the beach house to take care of, too, and the wardrobe to keep current, and then electronic gadgets seem to need upgrading more frequently than ever…….

Enter Seneca again:

  …”very wretched , therefore, and not merely short, must the life of those be who work hard to gain what they must work harder to keep.  By great toil they attain what they wish, and with anxiety hold what they have attained; meanwhile they take no account of time that will never more return.”

And so it is that the treadmill remains attractive because our focus rests on the fruits of our labor:  the trinkets, tokens, and totems of success that our society has deemed valuable.  But the very real risk is that we overvalue the trinkets while we undervalue the time that it takes to earn them; we assume we have an unlimited store of time from which to draw; and when that turns out not to be true, we are surprised by the shortness of our lives.  The true value of our time suddenly comes into focus, just as we run out of it; and we find ourselves with no time to really live.

So how do we find the right balance?  How can we really live throughout our lives, and not save all the good stuff for the end that may get cut short?  There are no easy or obvious answers.  But it is certainly something to think about.

“Why do you delay?  Why are you idle?  Unless you seize the day, it flees.”

                                                                                                                -Seneca

Time Tracker

I work for a generally benign employer that overall treats its employees well. This year, however, has seen the introduction of an insidious new tool that all employees are required to use that I find highly offensive: Time Tracker.

Time Tracker is an online tool to track employees' time off, i.e., time away from work. As of this year, I am required to enter a "request" for not only my vacation days, but for holidays as well, measured down to the hour. A few moments after I enter my "request," I receive an email graciously informing that my request for time off has been approved. Thanks, benevolent employer! (To be fair, my company also provides two paid days off per year to every employee for community service activities, which is admirable.)

The mandatory use of Time Tracker bothers me in several ways. First, the implication is that all my time belongs to my employer, and they graciously will allow me to have a set number of hours a year to myself, subject to advance approval. This is a slave mentality more suited to nineteenth-century farm workers than to twenty-first century knowledge workers. In my mind, Time Tracker should be reversed: all my time belongs to me, and I am willing to grant some of it to my employer, subject to my prior approval.

Second, I am a knowledge worker, whose output cannot be measured in hourly increments like a factory worker and who therefore is not paid by the hour. I have agreed to perform certain responsibilities in return for a set salary. There is no meaningful way to measure my output in any given hour, and my work can be done in or out of an office. Consider: if I have an idea in the shower this morning, that I incorporate into a client presentation while on my computer at the coffee shop this afternoon, that enables us to win the client's business tomorrow, how many hours have I worked? What was my output per hour? Who knows? Who cares? The truth is, I do whatever work I need to do whenever I need to do it to fulfill the responsibilities I have committed to do. Time Tracker belittles that commitment.

Third, the introduction of Time Tracker sends me the message that my employer doesn't trust me. I have to account for my free time by the hour, but not my work time. Where was Time Tracker last week when I was at the office from 8:00 am to 8:30 pm trying to get a deal closed? If I take the afternoon off to play with my kids but field a call from a client during that time, am I working or not? Before Time Tracker, these conundrums didn't matter; I believed my employer trusted me to do the job when and where it made sense. Now, it seems my company is telling me, we don't trust you after all: you need to account for (and get prior approval for) every minute you are not working. It's silly.

Finally, the email from HR explaining why we are adopting Time Tracker is a model of corporate doublespeak. It says using Time Tracker "allows us to help team members make their work-life balance a top priority." (Really? It seems like trusting me to get the job done whenever and wherever I want to would be a lot more helpful for making work-life balance a top priority.) Using the tool also allows us to "accurately account for time." (Hint: buy a watch. It works for most of us.) And, for managers, incorrect time balances for their employees can "adversely affect your [department] budget." Time is money! Watch out for those lazy employees trying to steal it!

Time tyranny like this invites subtle forms of rebellion: long lunches, the occasional unrecorded afternoon off (horrors!). I decided to rebel by entering my annual allotted paid time off in the first days of the year. So, it looks to the system like I was gone for the whole month of January. Won't someone be surprised when they see my revenue results for January--how productive I was while not working! Maybe they'll encourage me to take more months off........

The WiFi Made Me Do It!

Overheard from the seats behind me this week as our plane taxied to the gate:

"Wifi on planes has killed my reading time. I used to really enjoy catching up on newspapers during flights. Now I just have to work."

I wasn't bold enough to turn around and ask the question that immediately entered my mind: Why? Yes, Wifi is available on many flights now, but it is not mandatory that you use it, or at least it hasn't been on any of the flights I've taken. You are still perfectly free to use plane time to catch up on your reading (as I do), or even to to be delightfully "unproductive" by watching the TV shows or movies on offer on many flights, or sleeping, or staring out the window. Perhaps the gentleman behind me works for a slave-driving boss who tracks when employees are on flights and expects them to maintain email access during airborne hours. If so, the gentleman needs a new job.

But before we cast too many stones at my hapless fellow traveler, we must recognize that his mistake in logic--"if I can work on a plane, I should work on a plane"--is a mistake that we have all made in general form to varying degrees. Just one example: for those of you old enough to have been in the work force before about 1999, think back to that time. Did you spend your evenings at home reflexively checking your Blackberry for emails from your boss? No way! And yet now, because we have can have email access 24/7, it has quickly become standard operating procedure that we should use that access.

Never mind that a high proportion--80%? 90%? 95%?--of our emails are either junk, or cc:'s that we don't need to see right away, or non-urgent administrivia that could easily wait until the next day or the next week. No matter--I email, therefore I am! I'm in the flow! I'm important--look at all this work!

If I may offer a gentle reminder: since those pre-1999 low-tech days, the number of hours in a day has stayed steady at 24. Therefore, all that time you now use to stay in the flow has come from somewhere else. What have you given up? Reading on planes? Exercise? Time with your spouse? Time with your kids? Hobbies?

Technology is a great tool. But its use is not without cost. You are still responsible for how you choose to spend your time; don't say the WiFi made you do it. Be deliberate and choose wisely, because each minute can be spent only once.

Snow Time

So life in Atlanta has returned to its normal frenetic pace following last week's snow induced shutdown. Beginning with heavy snowfall on Sunday night, followed by freezing rain and sleet all day Monday, and combined with public services ill-equipped to handle icy roads, and you had the U.S.'s eighth-largest metro area completely shut down for three days, and mostly shut down for a full work week. The kids loved the bonus week of winter vacation, and I confess to not being completely disappointed that my first business flight of the year was canceled.

It was interesting to observe that although my office was shut down for most of the week, no one seemed to notice. Our company did not melt down; clients from outside Atlanta did not call frantically wondering what was happening; the few truly important calls and memos got done from home. On a normal day we fret about being 15 minutes late to return from lunch.....yet it turns out we can miss a week and hardly anyone notices. I'm not sure what to make of that point yet, but I am certainly thinking about it.

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!

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.