On Squandering Time
“Expending more energy in your leisure, can end up energizing you more.”
With six more sessions still to come, there is plenty of time to join the Mindset Shifts U consideration of Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks.
When you join today, you will receive immediate access to all 64 previous sessions at Mindset Shifts U. You won’t want to miss the upcoming Saturday Session 3 of About Time, in which we consider why people seek distractions rather than take ownership of their choices. I’ll offer suggestions, and like everything in Mindset Shifts U, this will be a practice, not a one-off cure for our time issues. The authors we consider are not selling snake oil.
In Chapter 2 of Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman introduced us to How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, an instructive 1910 book by the Englishman Arnold Bennett.
Influenced by the Stoic philosophers Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bennett concludes we fritter away much of our time.
Burkeman writes,
Bennett and his target audience, suburban professionals commuting by tram and train to office jobs in England’s increasingly prosperous cities, time was starting to feel like a container too small for all it was required to hold. He was writing, he explained, for his “companions in distress—that innumerable band of souls who are haunted, more or less painfully, by the feeling that the years slip by, and slip by, and slip by, and that they have not yet been able to get their lives into proper working order.”
Like Burkeman, Bennett exposes significant mindset errors as does Cal Newport, an author we will consider at Mindset Shifts U. In his book Digital Minimalism, Newport updates an observation Bennett made:
Bennett notes that the average London middle-class white-collar worker putting in an eight-hour day is left with sixteen additional hours during which he is as free as any gentleman to pursue virtuous activity. Bennett argues that the waking half of these hours could be dedicated to enriching and demanding leisure, but were instead too often wasted by frivolous time-killing pastimes, like smoking, pottering, caressing the piano (but not actually playing), and perhaps deciding to become “acquainted with a genuinely good whiskey.” After an evening of this mindless boredom busting (the Victorian equivalent of idling on your iPad), he notes, you fall exhausted into bed, with all the hours you were granted “gone like magic, unaccountably gone.”
Bennett gives us eyes for the many ways we squander time. Acknowledging a problem is the first step towards change. There were no social media platforms, smartphones, or streaming services in Bennett’s time, but there was no shortage of ways to waste time. Wasting time is a mindset; Bennett offers gentle pointers toward using our time more wisely.
In Bennett’s time, the workday was considered the “day.” How little has changed. We still say to our partner, “How was your day?” Such an attitude, Bennett writes, is “illogical and unhealthy.” We give “prominence to a patch of time and a bunch of activities which the man’s one idea is to ‘get through’ and have ‘done with.’”
If you find yourself squandering time, first, stop making excuses. Bennett asks, “Which of us is not saying to himself…: ‘I shall alter that when I have a little more time’? We never shall have any more time.”
Bennett instructs us that “endless effort” awaits. Bennett faced the reality of what Burkeman calls finitude:
If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal by ingeniously planning out a time-table with a pen on a piece of paper, you had better give up hope at once. If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions; if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin. Lie down again and resume the uneasy doze which you call your existence.
Do not expect a quick fix for the problem of time squandering. Yet, you can begin now, and remember, as Bennett observes, “There is no magic method of beginning”:
If a man standing on the edge of a swimming-bath and wanting to jump into the cold water should ask you, “How do I begin to jump?” you would merely reply, ‘Just jump. Take hold of your nerves, and jump.’ As I have previously said, the chief beauty about the constant supply of time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoilt, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your career. Which fact is very gratifying and reassuring. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose. Therefore no object is served in waiting till next week, or even until to-morrow. You may fancy that the water will be warmer next week. It won’t. It will be colder.
Here are some of Bennett’s and Newport’s ideas for “jumping in”:
1. Exercise Your Mind With Regularity
Realize that “mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep.” Thus, as a beginning, “employ an hour and a half every other evening in some important and consecutive cultivation of the mind.” Just as physical exercise enlivens your whole day, so does mental activity.
Bennett asks, “Why should you be astonished that an average of over an hour a day given to the mind should permanently and completely enliven the whole activity of the mind?”
Considering great ideas, as we do at Mindset Shifts U, is something Newport and Bennett would endorse.
2. Use Downtime Wisely
Bennett observed that most fellow commuters on the train were in a “mental coma.” Cal Newport advises,
We might tell ourselves there’s no greater reward after a hard day at the office than to have an evening entirely devoid of plans or commitments. But we then find ourselves, several hours of idle watching and screen tapping later, somehow more fatigued than when we began.
Newport introduces the Bennett Principle that “Expending more energy in your leisure, can end up energizing you more.”
Newport points us to a non-intuitive principle to be gleaned about leisure: “Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.”
3. Focus
Before books on mindfulness were commonplace, Bennett advocated disciplining the unruly mind simply by being more aware. The mind will often “skip away under [our] very eyes” and jump to “another subject.” Bennett observed modern technology has only made skipping away easier. A recent study found that the average attention span of humans has fallen from 12 seconds to eight seconds—shorter than that of a goldfish. We are all too tolerant of mind-wandering. Watch how your mind jumps from one fragmented thought to another.
It is easy to allow 24/7 news to hijack our minds and put us on perpetual high alert. Despite what it seems, wallowing in the political news may produce a perverse temporary rush, but it will not create a meaningful life.
This is not an argument for putting your head in the sand but a reminder to notice if you are addicted to “news.”
Around twenty years ago, a student in my MBA leadership class asked for help. She was addicted to the Drudge Report and found herself constantly refreshing Drudge’s page for a hit of something new and his famous, at the time, red siren. She was honest enough to notice her debilitating habit.
Her cure began with her awareness. She was not looking to be informed; she was addicted to distraction. A part of her mind wanted her day to be disrupted. This is no different than someone who disrupts their day by constantly snacking, allowing their mind to focus on anger, or constantly checking their phone.
When you check the “news” and stimulation or agitation is the result, the purpose of checking is to keep you distracted from a more important purpose for your time. We will consider this issue more deeply in Saturday’s Session 3 post.
4. Check Your Ego
Stop frittering away your time with useless mental activity centered around your ego’s narrative about you as the heroic victim in an uncaring world. A little bit of empathy goes a long way. Bennett shares this everyday example:
The next time you get cross with the waiter because your steak is over-cooked, ask reason to step into the cabinet-room of your mind, and consult her. She will probably tell you that the waiter did not cook the steak, and had no control over the cooking of the steak; and that even if he alone was to blame, you accomplished nothing good by getting cross; you merely lost your dignity, looked a fool in the eyes of sensible men, and soured the waiter, while producing no effect whatever on the steak.
You might be sure your grievances are not petty or wasting your time. Bennett would say you are deceiving yourself. Noticing your grievances without judgment is the beginning of change.
5. Know When It’s Bedtime
One indication of an evening well spent is that you are ready for bed without much preparation. Bennett encourages us to “fall out of that habit of muttering to yourself at 11.15 p.m., ‘Time to be thinking about going to bed.’ The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.” To that end, consider keeping electronic devices out of the bedroom.
Consider ending each day with a reminder of your true nature. My wife and I often end the day by listening to a short spiritual talk. A brief conversation about what we heard follows.
That practice and others work for me but you will come up with your own as you follow the still small voice within. The inspiration we seek finds as soon as our willingness makes an empty space to listen to its guidance.
Burkeman offers us a mixed message about Bennett’s work. He says it is “wonderfully stimulating book, full of practical suggestions that make it well worth reading today.” Then Burkeman points out the “dubious assumption” Bennett makes “that if you follow his advice, you’ll get enough of the genuinely important things done to feel at peace with time.”
Burkeman is right; Bennett’s advice won’t solve our existential FOMO mindset (see Session 2), but it will help make our days more meaningful.
…”the chief beauty about the constant supply of time is that you cannot waste it in advance.” How profound for me . Thank you! Best Regards, Mike