Brueghel left out the mobile device.
Lately, I’ve been pondering that horrible state of mind that happens when I turn on a computer. You all know the story. You check your email. Then Facebook. You respond to an urgent Twitter message. You send an invoice. Then, somehow, an hour later, you’ve fallen down some deep click bait hole, “This Dog Was Rescued from a Sewer Tunnel. Within Hours He Was Transformed.” You’re what our culture describes as “busy” and even “productive.”
And yet this “busyness” is actually a form of inactivity. It’s a way of looking like we’re doing things without actually doing anything. A remarkable book I’m in the middle of, Josef Pieper’s Leisure The Basis of Culture, paradoxically, connects this false busyness with sloth:
At the zenith of the Middle Ages, on the contrary, it was held that sloth and restlessness, ‘leisurelessness’, the incapacity to enjoy leisure, were all closely connected; sloth was held to be the source of restlessness, and the ultimate cause of ‘work for work’s sake’. It may well seem paradoxical to maintain that the restlessness at the bottom of a fanatical and suicidal activity should come from the lack of will to action; a surprising thought.
Bruegel, anticipating our addiction to mobile devices by several centuries, depicts this state of Acedia, or restlessness, in the engraving above.
It should be noted that Pieper calls “leisure” is not the same as “taking a break.” It’s a state of deep contemplation:
Leisure is not the attitude of mind of those who actively intervene, but of those who are open to everything; not of those who grab and grab hold, but of those who leave the reins loose and who are free and easy themselves — almost like a man falling asleep, for one can only fall asleep by ‘letting oneself go.’ Sleeplessness and the incapacity for leisure are really related to one another in a special sense, and a man at leisure is not unlike a man asleep. Heraclitus the Obscure observed of men who were asleep that they too “were busy and active in the happenings of the world.” When we really let our minds rest contemplatively on a rose in bud, on a child at play, on a divine mystery, we are rested and quickened as though by a dreamless sleep. Or as the Book of Job says, “God giveth songs in he night” (Job 35:10). Moreover, it has always been a pious belief that God sends his good gifts and his blessing in sleep. And in the same way his great, imperishable intuitions visit a man in his moments of leisure. It is in these silent and receptive moments that the soul of man is sometimes visited by an awareness of what holds the world together:
vas die Welt
Im innersten zusammenhältonly for a moment perhaps, and the lightning vision of his intuition has to be recaptured and rediscovered in hard work.
Fr. Mark Kowalewski, who tipped me off to Pieper’s book, describes this state of leisure as “profoundly counter-cultural.”
And yet I hear Gmail calling me. Time to update my Facebook profile and get out some tweets.
How do you deal with life’s distractions? How do you carve out some time for true leisure?
Some of this obviously may not work for everyone, but here’s how I keep (from being) busy. I don’t Facebook or Twitter (or Instagram/LinkedIn/whatever). If I want to stay in touch with you I know your phone and/or email.
I regularly prune my RSS feeds and I don’t feel guilty for not following every blog/site/whatever that I’m just supposed to. If I get something out of it, I keep it. Else, I move on. Often a blog may offer something for a time and after “getting it”, I’ve learned my lesson and can stop following yet still better off for having kept up for a time.
If I can answer an email quickly, I usually let it interrupt me, if my email is even open (which I would say, if you need to get something done, don’t look at your email). Else, I leave for the time being until I can get to it. When I do get to it, I move it to some folder so I don’t have to keep looking at it. I try to use my inbox as a pending items list, so if I’ve answered it, it gets filed somewhere until/unless it gets a followup. I should probably note here that I am not the greatest at following up myself when that is required. But often one response is all that is required anyway.
I don’t over commit. Most people underestimate how long it takes to do anything so they fill their schedules for the sake of being busy or even actually doing good things with their time. I just personally don’t like my schedule so packed that I can’t sit down and relax regularly. I probably too far UNDER commit, which probably has its own set of different consequences.
I use google calendar to schedule things that HAVE to happen at a certain time (bills to pay, appointments, etc) and a google docs for a rough to-do list that is more flexible. If things stay on the list too long, they just get deleted. I reckon them to not be so important after some time. I understand that I will always want to accomplish more than I ever can and try to be realistic about goals and timelines. The point of all this is that with this method I’m not sitting around trying to remember what I feel like I’m supposed to be doing, which I would do otherwise.
I try to keep only what I need and not buy useless stuff. If something saves you time, then that’s useful and helps you not be over busy. But if it takes you an hour to find something because you’ve got too much stuff, then you’re only going to be busier because now you’re an hour behind from what you started doing.
I also recommend this article: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/ which gives us this thought among others: “Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.” It may take some work to be okay with this.
Also, if you read this whole thing, you’re probably quite a bit further behind now than when you started.
Matt,
Many thanks for taking the time to write your thoughts on this issue. And thanks for that amazing article. You hit on a number of things I need to do–prune the RSS feed (thanks for keeping us in your feed, by the way!) and avoiding over-committing (something I’m really bad about).
It is really unfortunate, but I’ve noticed a trend where an increase in social media usuage is crucial for business, especially when it involves the increasingly social media savvy generations. I actually made it a goal of mine to get on more social media this year. I just started a twitter, and am looking into instagram and tumblr. I know of an artist who solely relies on social media to build up an audience and drum up business but I hear you on how much time gets sucked away. Thankfully some sites allow you to cross post on multiple platforms, but I imagine the time that disappears is still great. The only way to get away from it is to unplug. Do you use firefox? There is a plugin called leechblock. When I have urgent deadlines (sadly, for more work on the computer) I input all the websites I impulsively surf (including rootsimple 🙂 and the plugin will block it for the time frame that I set. You could set certain hours to allow for things like gmail and whatnot. It isn’t much of a solution as technology continues to encroach on our lives but it is at least an attempt to keep the internet blackhole of time at bay.
Mary, Thanks for the tip on Leechblock.
And, yeah, social media! When this blog started I didn’t have to pay much attention to it, but now as authors Kelly and I have to. I wouldn’t mind so much if it was about communicating with other people but the data harvesting really bothers me.
It’s hard, especially for those of us who are self-employed, we could be doing online promotion every single minute–but I’ve definitely noticed that my husband and I are both happier when we spend more time offline.
The thing that helps me the most is to actually turn off the whole computer and go do something else; accomplish a physical-world goal or take real time out and go for a hike, etc. Then when I am online, I’m more focused on what I need to be doing and less likely to just surf around. It also helps if I have concrete goals for my computer time, and something more fun to do once those are done, so I’m not tempted to spend more time plugged in.
I limit my random-internet time to a half hour in the morning, a 15 minute break at work, and half hour in the evening. I find that if I put on a TV show on Netflix, I am actually more likely to do things, because I hate to sit and stare at the TV not doing something, so I’ll get up and work on projects. I do not use a blog reader and I am subscribed to almost no blogs; mainly a few that post very irregularly to save myself checking in a lot and avoid missing a great post. My blogs are on a bookmark bar and I have room for about 6 to be visible, so once I have checked those, the internet is over. Time to go outside.
One technique I want to return to is using the commandline instead of a GUI on my machine (easier on Linux and Mac than on Windows). Most real productive tools have text-only equivalents, and time-eating websites are not immediately accessible.
Oddly enough I am reading Tom Hodgkinson’s book HOW TO BE IDLE and I plan to read his FREEDOM MANIFESTO after that. Very interesting. It is really making me rethink what I should spend my time on! Being busy all the time also seems to be an addiction related to our feelings of self worth. Just my two cents!
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