Take it easy

A friend of ours is vacationing for several weeks on an island this summer. Every few days, she emails me to update me on her trip. And she always begins with a description of how many hours she has spent working each day since the last update.

Understand, this isn’t “voluntourism.” Working isn’t an inherent part of the vacation scheme. She’s a freelance writer, like me, and could theoretically go away for a few weeks without sitting down at the desk at all. But it’s very important to her to impress upon me that that’s not the case. So she tells me how many hours she worked – and then she goes on to cover the various water sports and cultural excursions that the vacation has encompassed so far.

This has compelled me to contemplate why she feels the need to report on her work schedule. In his essay “The Busy Trap” in the New York Times last month, Tim Kreider implies that being busy has become a badge of honor, that we all have plenty of acquaintances –like the one I’m describing – who seem to believe that if they don’t remind us again and again of how busy they are, we might think that they’re, I don’t know, on vacation. Slacking, even.

I try hard to avoid this inclination in myself and not to talk about how much work I have in the abstract. I’m happy to tell anyone who is interested about specific assignments currently under way, either because they’re interesting or because they are particularly challenging, but either way, the discussion is about the specific assignment, not the mere fact that I have work to do.

So instead of referring to myself and my family as being busy, I now think of it as having a full day when all the activities are of our choosing -- whether that means recreational activities we specifically want to do or work we agreed to take on because it’s more desirable than other possible ways of making a living, even if we might rather not be working at all. I think of “busy” as meaning the sense of a treadmill: items on the schedule that are onerous, self-perpetuating and generally unfulfilling. Having a full day, on the other hand, means a lot of generally appealing options to pursue.

Thinking about this has underscored for me how much I admire those people who don't talk about being busy, and how wary I sometimes am of those who do. Several years ago, when I worked for a large international company, I was called to serve on an ad hoc committee with our CEO. “The first available meeting time she has is in six months,” the CEO’s assistant told the rest of us as we tried to set up a meeting. This gave me an uneasy feeling. Really? The CEO was busy for six months? So who was steering the ship?

Conversely, it reminds me of the first time I met the obstetrician who later delivered both my children. On my very first appointment with him, he did a physical exam and then told me to dress and meet him in his office. When I walked into his office five minutes later, he was reading the sports section of the daily paper. I loved the fact that he was so open about not being overscheduled that he was sitting there reading the paper. It assured me that he would have time for me – which as a new patient was just what I needed to know.

I began this summer with a commitment to ease up. It’s not that I actually planned to work less – as a freelancer, I need all the work I can get right now – I just didn’t want to think quite so much about work. I wanted to think about summertime.

Now, summer is about halfway over. If nothing else, I’ve thought a lot about the extent to which “busy” is a state of mind. I have a lot to do. But I’m not willing to use the “b” word because I’m happy to be doing all of it. Busy? Not really. Just happily occupied.

Keeping busy but feeling leisurely

Last week I wrote about wanting this summer to feel more like summers used to when I was in school. Rather than working daily and trying to fit in all the same things I try to fit in the rest of the year, I wanted somehow to have a real summer break – even while filing articles on deadline and maintaining the necessary workload that guarantees a paycheck.

Taking a moment to look back a week after making that resolution, I have to say it really seems to be working. At least in part. Not because I’ve been doing so much less in any particular area of my life but just because I’ve been thinking about work less and thinking about fun more. In the past week, we’ve taken part in our town’s Old Home Day celebration, attended the annual Crawfish Boil hosted by friends of ours, gone to a minor league baseball game, attended a niece’s graduation party, watched two of Tim’s baseball games, and spent 48 hours in Portland over the July 4th holiday. That’s way more fun than I fit into an ordinary work week, and I don’t feel one bit remiss in having done all of that.

I’ve also managed to keep up with work assignments, though in truth I have a little bit less work this summer than is typical.

And so far I’ve even kept the house up reasonably well and maintained a steady supply of groceries and homemade meals for my family.

So it actually doesn’t really feel like I’m kicking back or doing any less; it just feels like my attention has shifted. I’ve just made the fun parts more of a priority, while still fitting in work and domestic duties whenever time allows.

Tim Kreider’s well-circulated essay in last Sunday’s New York Times about what he calls “the ‘busy’ trap” was particularly timely, in my case, because it reminded me that being busy is often less about meeting obligations as about setting priorities. The past week has been busy because I didn’t want to cut back on work, housework, family obligations, or fun. I was busy because I was choosing to do all of that. But somehow it didn’t feel hectic, because I was doing what I wanted to do, both in terms of work and fun. It reminded me that when I fall into the trap that Kreider describes as being “crazy busy,” it’s usually because I’ve taken on obligations I don’t really want: community projects I feel a duty to help out with but am not adequately vested in the outcome of, or the rare work assignment that feels uninspiring and mismatched to my abilities.

So in reality, I might not find myself any less busy at all this summer from a time management perspective. Long uninterrupted days of lounging on the beach will probably not happen, at least not more than once or twice. But it’s all a matter of perspective. My time will probably continue to seem full, but I’ll keep sight of the fact that I’m doing just what I choose to do. And when that’s the case, I’m beginning to realize, being busy can seem like its own kind of leisure.

Work and non-work: Decompartmentalizing

It was probably the most trivial item on my entire To Do list this week, and yet it made such a difference in my sense of personal organization.

“Fix email folders,” I had jotted down on my tasks list. I wasn’t sure what exactly I needed to do; I just sensed that there was probably a way to re-organize my email folders that would be more visually satisfying to me.

As it was, I had one main folder called “Work,” under which were numerous subfolders for emails related to upcoming articles and those already in progress; and another main folder called “Personal,” in which were folders for volunteer activities, community events, family correspondences and vacation plans.

I hadn’t chosen the designations “Work” and “Personal”; they were the default folders assigned by Gmail, but they seemed logical enough to me when I set up my mailbox. Everything presumably related to one or the other: work or personal life, so surely this was as good a way as any to start the process of dividing one’s correspondences.

But somehow it just didn’t work for me on a psychological level. The work items didn’t necessary feel like work, and the personal items sometimes did feel like work. It made sense to put emails related to an event I was covering for the Globe into a work folder, but when I received tickets to the same event by email, the tickets didn’t seem like they should be classified as work. And organizing the faculty/staff luncheon at my kids’ school is a volunteer activity, which made it by definition personal; yet it certainly felt more like work than leisure as I sent out countless emails asking people for food contributions and reiterating once again the school kitchen’s nut-free policy.

So I simply removed the “work” and “personal” designations. It was such a trivial act, but it did so much to clear my mind, because on a symbolic level, it seemed so much more genuinely reflective of my life. I do a variety of different things every day, and since I’m self-employed and write from home, “work” assignments don’t always feel so different from “personal” assignments. In the course of a typical week day, I might research an article, interview a subject, vacuum the carpets, make up the next month’s schedule for school library volunteers, select a recipe for dinner, draw up an agenda for the adult ed class I teach, and respond to an email about an issue related to church. What’s work? What’s leisure? What’s personal? What’s domestic?

This isn’t a complaint. Not at all. It’s life the way I believe it should be lived. Yes, I need to keep the revenue-producing tasks on my radar as a priority; given the choice between taking on another volunteer role at the kids’ school and accepting an assignment from a magazine I haven’t previously written for, I’m likely to gravitate to the latter, both for practical and ideological reasons. Writing is still one of my greatest interests as well as what I get paid to do. But I also really value the fact that as a self-employed person, I’m able to integrate so many other aspects of my life into the so-called “work” day.

When I was in my early 20’s and still new to the professional realm, working full-time in a corporate role, I was a little stunned to realize just how much of every day most people spent at their jobs. Even as an entry-level employee not expected to take work home or put in extra hours, I was there from 8:30 to 5 every weekday. “That’s the whole day,” I marveled silently during my first week of employment, a little bit horrified to discover this secret of adulthood that I’d previously chosen to overlook.

I realize how lucky I am now to be self-employed now. It gives me time to do both what I get paid for and what I like to do, whether those two categories are discrete or overlapping. Dissolving the “work” and “personal” designations in my email box was a token gesture, but for me they held a lot of symbolism. It was useful to me to override the Gmail defaults and acknowledge that in my life, “work” and “personal” are often indistinguishable, and that’s one of many things about my life for which I am truly grateful.