Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time

Busyness is now the social norm that people feel they must conform to, Burnett says, or risk being outcasts.

What if not just women, but both men and women, worked smart, more flexible schedules? What if the workplace itself was more fluid than the rigid and narrow ladder to success of the ideal worker? And what if both men and women became responsible for raising children and managing the home, sharing work, love, and play? Could everyone then live whole lives?

What often matters more than the activity we're doing at a moment in time is how we feel about it.

If we don’t feel like we have leisure, Robinson maintains, it’s entirely our own fault. “Time is a smokescreen. And it’s a convenient excuse,” he’d told me. “Saying, ‘I don’t have time,’ is just another way of saying, ‘I’d rather do something else.

The United States is the only advanced economy that doesn’t guarantee workers paid time off. Nearly one-quarter of all American workers get no paid vacation,

The World Health Organization found that Americans live in the richest country, but they are also the most anxious.2 The average high school kid today experiences the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient of the 1950s.

Researchers have found that the way people feel about the stress in their lives is a far more powerful predictor of their general health—whether they're more likely to be depressed, anxious, smoke cigarettes, or overeat—than any other measure.

the stuff of life never ends. That is life. You will never clear your plate so you can finally allow yourself to get to the good stuff. So you have to decide. What do you want to accomplish in this life?

In the Middle Ages, the sin of sloth had two forms,” he said. “One was paralysis, the inability to do anything—what we would see as lazy. But the other side was something called acedia—running about frantically. The sense that, ‘There’s no real place I’m going, but by God, I’m making great time getting there.

The brainless rushing about makes us feel time starved, which, he writes “does not result in death, but rather, as ancient Athenian philosophers observed, in never beginning to live.”6

As work weeks get longer and leisure time shrinks, people are becoming sicker, more distracted, absent, unproductive, and less innovative.

What this intensive mothering culture tells us is valuable is at discord with what really is valuable: Love your kids. Keep them safe. Accept them as they are. Then get out of their way.

We work to have leisure, on which happiness depends. —Aristotle

Grit isn’t something you’re born with, Carter says. It’s something you can learn and exercise, like a muscle. If you’re a parent, you can teach grit. How? Let your children struggle. A little challenge, a little anguish, even, is good for them. When children learn to resolve their own conflicts, without Mom or Dad swooping in to the rescue, they build grit, self-confidence, and the creative problem-solving skills that lead to higher academic achievement.14 Teach them to try new things, she says, to take risks, follow inklings, see if they turn into passions, work hard, maybe master something, maybe make mistakes, but love the journey itself, not the reward.

Time studies find that a mother, especially one who works outside the home for pay, is among the most time-poor humans on the planet, especially single mothers, weighed down not only by role overload but also what sociologists call “task density”—the intense responsibility she bears and the multitude of jobs she performs in each of those roles.6

Time-use researchers call it “contaminated time.” It is a product of both role overload—working and still bearing the primary responsibility for children and home—and task density. It’s mental pollution, one researcher explained. One’s brain is stuffed with all the demands of work along with the kids’ calendars, family logistics, and chores. Sure, mothers can delegate tasks on the to-do list, but even that takes up brain space—not simply the asking but also the checking to make sure the task has been done, and the biting of the tongue when it hasn’t been done as well or as quickly as you’d like. So it is perhaps not surprising that time researchers are finding that, while “free time” may help ease the feeling of time pressure for men, and in the 1970s helped women a little, by 1998 it was providing women no relief at all.15

Think about the farmer,” Akil tells me. “The farmer can’t control and predict very much either. So why is that any better or worse than being on Wall Street? As a farmer, if there was a freeze that destroyed your crops, that might’ve stressed you, but it wasn’t your fault. But as a knowledge worker, you’re expected to be in charge of everything. And when things go wrong, it is your fault. The thinking is, you could have planned more, or you should have anticipated what went wrong. That combination of having a lot coming at you and of shifting away from physical work—which does help cope with stress—and not even being able to say, ‘It’s not my fault, I surrender to higher forces,’ whether you believe it’s weather or God—that’s been taken away.” *

In his studies, he usually finds men do one and a half things at a time. Whereas women, particularly mothers, do about five things at once. And, at the same time, they are caught up in contaminated time, thinking about and planning two or three things more. So they are never fully experiencing their external or their internal worlds.

Our perception of time is indeed our reality.

But once I’m done, I can’t tell you what it was I did or why it seemed so important.

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. —Mary Oliver

Because this is how it feels to live my life: scattered, fragmented, and exhausting.

True, the United States boasts enviable rates of economic growth and total productivity, but that’s due in large part to the sheer amount of time Americans put in on the job, working long and extreme hours. Measuring productivity per hours worked, on the other hand, has in recent years put the United States behind such countries as France, Ireland, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, and Norway.64 When

The Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman argues that investing in high-quality early learning will yield a rate of return of 6 to 10 percent per year per child—higher than historic stock market returns—in higher academic achievement, greater productivity in the workforce, and fewer drains on society.74

Change is hard. Our very human nature pulls us back to the status quo, not because it’s better, but because it’s familiar. However, I learned a few things about change as I visited bright spots: The unspoken culture we operate in trumps any policy on the books or nice speech by the boss. We create that culture by the stories we tell ourselves. And change gets a little easier when it’s visible. When we see that somebody’s out there doing things differently, we begin to think that maybe we can, too. We start finding others like us and build networks to create our own bright spot in the darkness. So

The way you live your days is the way you live your life. —Annie Dillard

Were I Queen, my principal affirmative action plan would have three legs. First, it would promote equal educational opportunity, and effective job training for women, so they would not be reduced to dependency on a man or the state. Second, my plan would give men encouragement and incentives to share more evenly with women the joys, responsibilities, worries, upsets, and sometimes tedium of raising children from infancy to adulthood. (This, I admit, is the most challenging part of the plan to make concrete and implement.) Third, the plan would make quality day care available from infancy on. Children in my ideal world would not be women’s priorities, they would be human priorities. —Ruth Bader Ginsburg Two

research has found that, with the flick of the TV’s remote, our thinking brains shut off. Within thirty seconds, we lose our sense of self, and our alpha waves become no more active than if we were staring at a blank wall.

•Embrace the restorative power of vacation. Allow knowledge workers to daydream or noodle around with an idea without fear of failure. •