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.