Breakfasts for busy mornings. Dinners on the go. Five ways to make the most of your commute. An app to organize your commitments, and a podcast about slowing down to listen to on the way to the next one.
There is an astonishing amount of help available for being busy.
I’m starting to wonder how much of it helps us stay that way.
I like a breakfast I can pull out of the freezer. I have no objection to a useful shortcut. There are mornings when getting everyone fed and out the door is enough of an achievement without making something from scratch.
But somewhere between making a demanding day manageable and making every day demanding, I think we’ve lost track of what all this efficiency was supposed to give us.
What happens to the time we save?
Do we get to have it? Or does something else immediately move in?
Every decision makes sense
Maybe I wouldn’t need to rush through the morning if I went to bed on time. Maybe going to bed would be easier if I’d had an evening I didn’t feel cheated out of.
After a day of working and getting things done, I want some time that belongs to me. So I stay up. Read another chapter. Listen to another record. Keep the day open a little longer because so little of it felt like mine.
Then I’m tired in the morning. Breakfast becomes something I buy on the way. By dinner, I don’t want to make another decision, let alone a meal. Takeout it is. Again.
It costs more than I meant to spend. Which makes the income I’m exhausted from earning feel even more necessary.
Every decision makes sense in the moment. The whole arrangement is wearing me out.
And it’s easy to keep treating each part as a separate problem. A morning problem. A dinner problem. A spending problem. A bedtime problem.
There’s a product, a plan and a person with a discount code for every one of them.
Meanwhile, I’m wondering whether I need to change the day they all belong to.
Apparently, slowing down requires administrative work
Even the advice about doing less can become a considerable undertaking.
Set boundaries. Identify your priorities. Build a better evening routine. Schedule your rest. Learn to say no in a way that is firm but warm, clear but accommodating, and preferably doesn’t inconvenience anyone.
I understand the advice. Some of it is useful. But I’m tired of the suggestion that a less crowded life is waiting on the other side of me becoming exceptionally good at managing it.
Sometimes I have prioritized perfectly well. There is still too fucking much.
Work takes time. Looking after people takes time. Keeping a home functioning takes time. Those demands don’t disappear because I’ve written down my values in a nice notebook.
And an unreasonable workload doesn’t become reasonable because someone has encouraged me to practise better boundaries around it.
There are parts of this that require other people to change what they expect and what they contribute. I cannot personally organize my way out of every demand being placed on me.
There are also demands I keep adding myself. That part deserves an honest look, too.
Do you have enough?
And then there’s the anxiety. The feeling that whatever I’ve managed to do, buy, save or anticipate, I’ve probably missed something.
Lately, my Instagram feed seems very concerned about whether I’m prepared for the apocalypse. Do I have enough food? Enough supplies? Enough biscuit mix for three months?
No. I don’t have enough biscuit mix.
Five minutes ago, that wasn’t something I was worried about. Now, apparently, it’s another way I’m unprepared.
It would be funny if the feeling weren’t so familiar. Do you have enough savings? Have you planned far enough ahead? What happens if you lose your job? What if the power goes out? Have you thought about what happens next?
There are sensible reasons to prepare for difficult things. I understand that. But I’m trying to live an ordinary day, and every time I open my phone, someone has another emergency for me to mentally rehearse.
Why are we always being asked to prepare for the worst? And when do we get to feel adequately prepared to enjoy the life that’s happening?
Because there’s always another possibility to account for. Another gap in the plan. Another thing I could buy to feel a little safer, until the next warning tells me what I’m still missing.
There’s a product, a plan and a person with a discount code for that, too.
But even without the sale, the fear remains. I can put down the phone and still carry the feeling that sitting still is irresponsible. That I should be doing something to protect us from whatever might happen.
How much of my busyness comes from trying to quiet that feeling? Working a little more. Buying a little extra. Planning further ahead. Trying to reach the moment when I can finally say: everyone has what they need. I can sit down.
I want to be allowed to live a life, not spend all of it bracing for what might happen to it.
I’ll take reasonable precautions. I’ll do the work that needs doing. But there has to be a point where “enough” means I get to enjoy some of this. Where I can sit down without being reminded of seventeen things that could go wrong while I’m sitting.
I cannot make my life entirely safe by keeping myself entirely occupied.
Work gets the best of me
I wonder how differently I would experience work if there were more life around it.
If I saw my friends often enough to know what was happening beyond the highlights. If I made dinner while listening to music, with enough time to enjoy both. If I went to bed having done something I wanted to do, instead of falling asleep halfway through trying.
Work might still be difficult. But perhaps it wouldn’t feel quite so consuming if it weren’t getting nearly everything I had.
Friendship, food, sleep, pleasure: I keep asking them to fit into whatever is left. Then I’m surprised when a life built around leftovers doesn’t feel particularly nourishing.
I don’t want seeing a friend to require three weeks of negotiation and an apology about how terrible I am at keeping in touch. I want enough space in my life to actually keep in touch.
That means something else has to give. I know. That’s where this gets uncomfortable.
All of the stuff I have was once time
I went to work to earn the money to buy it.
Some of it I’m still going to work to pay for.
And now that I have it, it needs cleaning, storing, maintaining or finding a place for. There’s the time it cost to get it, and the time it keeps asking of me.
I love beautiful things. I love books and art and clothes and candles and objects someone took care to make. There are things in my home that I enjoy every single day. I’m happy to have worked for them.
But I want to be able to tell the difference between those things and the purchases I barely remember making. The things I thought I should have. The things I bought because I was tired, bored, hurried, or briefly convinced that a different version of my life was available at checkout.
Something can be lovely and still cost more of my life than I want to give it.
That is harder to admit once it’s already mine. Harder still when I’m paying it off.
There’s something painful about working to afford a home I rarely feel at ease in. Buying things for a life I don’t have time to live. Then paying for convenience to get through the days spent paying for it.
I don’t need to turn every purchase into a calculation of hours worked. That sounds exhausting, too. But I do want to remember that money has a relationship to my time. Especially when I’m committing money I haven’t earned yet.
How much of next month already belongs to something I bought last month?
Something has to stop fitting
I would love to discover that I can keep everything and simply arrange it better.
Every commitment. Every purchase. Every expectation. All the things I enjoy, all the things I feel obliged to do, and all the things I’ve somehow agreed to without remembering a moment when I chose them.
But if I want more time, some of those things will have to go.
A plan might get cancelled. Someone might be disappointed. I might buy less, or keep using something I’d planned to replace. I might have to admit that an activity I enjoy in theory is making my actual week worse.
I might also disappoint an imagined version of myself. The one who can afford everything, attend everything, keep up with everyone and still have a relaxed evening at home.
She seems expensive. And tired.
I’m interested in what I can afford with the money, time and energy I actually have. Including what I can afford to keep doing.
I also want to question the urgency before I agree to carry it. Is this something that needs my attention, or did someone just make me afraid to leave it alone? What would reasonable preparation look like? At what point am I allowed to be finished?
I won’t always have a neat answer. I still need to be able to stop.
There will still be busy mornings. There will still be takeout. A freezer breakfast can be a very good thing, and I intend to keep making them.
But I want the occasional shortcut to lead somewhere I actually want to be. Home in time to cook. Sitting with a friend. Reading without checking how much sleep it’s going to cost me. Enjoying the things I’ve already worked to bring into my life.
I don’t want to get better at fitting it all in.
I want to be able to admit when it doesn’t fit.
Including when I’m the one who keeps trying to put it there.