*Our* Time
The setting is Ridgemont High. The year is 1982. History teacher, Mr. Hand, is working his way through a lesson on Cuba, when Jeff Spicoli has a pizza delivered in the middle of class:
Mr. Hand: Mr. Spicoli, you’re on dangerous ground here. You’re causing a major disturbance on my time.Spicoli: I’ve been thinking about this, Mr. Hand. If I’m here and you’re here, doesn’t that make it our time?
For some reason, this scene from Fast Times at Ridgemont High popped into my head when thinking about a few articles I’ve read recently.
The first was an interview with designer Marc Newson by The Wall Street Journal a couple weeks ago. The second was a profile of mathematician Terry Tao by The New York Times Magazine a month ago. The third was this post by entrepreneur Dina Kaplan about a year ago.
Each had a different, but related nugget I keyed in on. From the Newson interview:
My creative process begins with just thinking. I do a lot of thinking, a lot of pondering. I rarely watch films in airplanes; I just sort of sit there, looking at the ceiling. Day dreaming is the equivalent of doodling; it’s mental doodling.
From the Tao profile:
As he showed me around the house, his gait was a bit awkward, as if, at some level, he was just not that interested in walking. I asked to see his office, and he pointed out an unremarkable chamber off a back hallway. He doesn’t get as much done there as he used to, he said; recently, he has been most productive on flights, when he has a block of hours away from email and all the people who hope for an audience with him.
From Kaplan’s article:
But I took meetings I didn’t need to take: 90 wasted minutes each time. I answered emails I didn’t need to answer: hours wasted each day.
I created “busy” to avoid the thoughtful, strategic work that required more of me. There’s a word for this: busywork. I was busy with busywork. What an ironic thing to boast about!
Fittingly, I was on an airplane last night when I tied all three together. Were I not on that plane, I doubt I would have thought about those articles again. But like Newson, it’s seemingly only on planes these days where my mind can wander.
And like Tao, I find it easier to be productive on a plane. The usual distractions inhibiting me from writing aren’t around.
Which distractions? Many areas of the internet, but one stands out above all others. Like Kaplan and Tao, I spend hours each day on email.
Yes, I’m bitching about email again. But with the help of these three pieces, I think I can go a little deeper this time.
The reason I hate email isn’t about email itself. Sure, the technology behind it is old and cumbersome. But the real reason is what resides just beyond the surface: email is eating into my life and in the process, exposing that I’m not very good at managing my time.
That’s the thing, it’s not email that’s the problem, per se. It’s that I let it distract me from actually getting other things done. Things I both want to do and things I need to do. I readily play the game of Whack-a-Mole for hours each day when I should unplug the machine.
It’s pure insanity when you look at it from a distance. I spend hours of my day, each day, doing nothing more than responding to others’ requests of me. Either I’m the most magnanimous person on Earth, or I’m a chump.
I’m trading in my time for our time.
Obviously, there are many, many benefits of doing things for others. But in our always connected world, email makes it too easy to shift the balance almost entirely to our time. And that cannot be a healthy thing.
Each of us has but 24 hours each day to do as we please. When you set aside six to nine of those hours for sleep, you’re down to 15 to 18 hours. If you’re spending, in aggregate, two to three hours a day on email, as I do, that’s absolute lunacy. It’s literally taking time away from and off of your life.
The same, of course, is true with meetings — but arguably to an even greater extreme. Does that thirty minutes to an hour make your life better in some way? It’s fine to say that it will pay dividends in the long run — and it’s nice to do favors for someone else — but how often does that actually happen? Meanwhile, at the end of the day, those 24 hours remain 24 hours.
I offer no real solution here just yet, but it’s something I’m thinking about. I think the context of your time being both valuable and very finite is a good way to startle yourself into action. Maybe it means taking less meetings. Ideally, it means doing less email.
Perhaps it means doing these tasks for others in a more communal setting, like over lunch or beers. After all, as Spicoli goes on to say to Mr. Hand, “Certainly there’s nothing wrong with a little feast on our time.”
