How to Be Less Busy

Sure, you have the same number of hours in the day as, say, Beyoncé. But as Catherine Hong discovers, happiness doesn’t always come from a nished to-do list.

S A KID, I MUST HAVE READ

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster a dozen times, always lingering on Jules Feifer’s illustration of the Terrible Trivium, an elegantly dressed demon with a terrifyingly featureless face. When I recently revisited the book, the character once again stopped me in my tracks. A “demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted efort, and monster of habit,” he persuades the protagonists to do endless, pointless activities, such as moving individual grains of sand with tweezers. (After working for hours, one of them calculates the tasks would take another 837 years to finish.) “If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you’ll never have to worry about the important ones which are so diicult,” coos the villain. “You just won’t have the time. For there’s always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing.”

Reading these words now, as a 50-something grown-up, I’ve never found them so chilling. My desk is full of my own petty tasks: a dozen notes reminding me to call the dentist, find a driver’s ed class for my daughter, track down disability paperwork for my husband’s upcoming surgery, get our dog groomed, have the car inspected, deal with the perpetually regenerating mound of laundry, and meet all my work deadlines. Lots of us are champs at getting ourselves and our families through the tasks of the next day or week. But don’t we all have a Terrible Trivium whispering over our shoulder that we need to accomplish all this before we can get to the good stuf—lunches with friends, trips to the botanical garden with Mom, actually using the backyard hammock, or starting that elusive creative project?

It would seem the solution is to get more hours in the day so we have room for all our must-dos and want-to-dos. Yet “happiness is not really about the amount of free time we have. It depends on how you spend whatever time you have,” says Cassie Holmes, PhD, author of the new book Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most. A marketing and behavioral decision-making professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, where she created the popular class Applying the Science of Happiness to Life Design, she teaches business graduate students to think of time not money—as the most precious resource.

Recently, my life drove home my own priorities. My husband’s surgery was a serious one, involving a week’s stay in the hospital. Not long afterward, my father fell ill, and I spent another couple of days in yet another intensive care unit, supporting my mother. These events demanded all of me, and for the first time in my life I cast aside both major projects and trivial ones. I turned down assignments, begged of deadlines, canceled appointments, and told the kids I couldn’t give them a ride. I let everything on my to-do list go.

I’m happy to report that my husband and father made it through–and that whatever tasks I failed to accomplish during those days made not an ounce of diference. It was liberating, in a way, to focus on one thing and one thing only: being there for my most beloved people when they really needed me. It was also a good reminder that while our to-do lists will never end, our brief lives on this earth will—which is a pretty powerful reason to spend our time here doing what we value most (and not feeling bad about ignoring the dishes).

Here’s how to tame your Terrible Trivium and start treating your time as a chance to recharge and focus on what really matters to you.

Examine the root of your devotion to productivity. When you were growing up, did your relationship with your parents feel transactional, with their love, attention, or rewards doled out based on your performance rather than your inherent worth? Deep down, do you ever feel like breaks are for wimps, whiners, and entitled people who aren’t as tough or hardworking as you? Do you ever feel like you haven’t earned the right to take a break yet? Our life experiences, families, and culture can instill the desire to overachieve. Understanding where your toxic productivity comes from—and creating a new story for yourself, in which you deserve love and rest—can help you carve out time for yourself, unapologetically

Accept that your to-do list will never be done.

“Never,” Holmes says. We may feel good about ourselves when we get that gold star, but “checking of a series of small, routine stuf is rarely the path to life satisfaction,” she says. Stop trying to do everything on your list before you can have any time for what you truly want to do. (Nope, “optimizing” your workday with productivity strategies to “earn” more leisure time isn’t the answer.) Block out some time for to-dos and some time for leisure.

Craft your time. While the word “craft” may bring to mind ceramists sculpting overpriced bowls, Holmes uses it to convey the idea of active participation: Make more time for what you really want. One way to do that (again, it’s not by zipping through more work faster!) is to identify the insidious “sand traps” in your day, those chunks of time when you’re not productive and you’re doing something that doesn’t bring you any joy…like mindlessly scrolling social media or bingeing a show you don’t even like. Replace that time with small, joyful experiences—a one-on-one date at a cofee shop with your tween, 15 minutes alone with a book after dinner—and savor them. Turn them into rituals, and protect them in your schedule

Say no more often. “Will you serve on this committee?” “Can I pick your brain over a cup of cofee?”

“Can all my friends come over for dinner after soccer?” So often, we say yes and then regret it when it’s time to make good. (Who among us has not said, “Yes, I’ll join your book club,” and then prayed for a sudden bout of food poisoning when the time came to meet about the novel we didn’t read?) According to research, people, especially women, are reluctant to decline requests, Holmes says. We tend to agree to future events because we consistently believe we’ll have much more time available next month than we have today. News flash: You won’t! So try flexing your “no” muscle. “Only say yes to requests that you would be happy to spend the time on today,” Holmes says

Clear

Away Visual

distractions. Physically rearranging your work space can help you avoid the temptation of smaller tasks, the ones that, bundled, leave no room for the bigger projects that would fulfill you. Visual distractions could be as seemingly harmless as plants on your desk, if you’re the type who tends to prune dead leaves. Working from home can be especially challenging in this regard, as there’s always a dish to be washed or other menial household task calling your name. When you can’t resist the pull, try relocating to a library or cofee shop.

Break your focus time into larger blocks. To achieve what’s known as a “flow state”—when you’re so engaged, you lose track of the hours—you need uninterrupted time. Three hours in a row is not the same as three hours broken up by phone calls and school pickups, because constantly checking the time and coming in and out will make a flow state impossible. “Research shows that transitioning between tasks is costly because it keeps you from getting into g,, y the groove,” Holmes writes in her book. Of course, you can’t make every block of work time uninterrupted, but when possible, try to build long focus periods into your week.

Schedule around your worst impulses. Holmes ous ways is a big fan of “commitment devices”—vari goal. to lock yourself into following through on a edule If you’re a workaholic who struggles to sche ndable personal time, you could pay for a nonrefu ou vacation or sign up for a cooking class so yo have of com- to step away from work. For me, if I dream hday, pleting a book proposal before my next birth on my I could block of two hours every Thursday er to make calendar. That way I don’t have to rememb ad when time for it, and I won’t punt it down the ro things get too busy

Eat the marshmallow today! c psycho- In a classi he marsh- logical experiment from the 1970s, called t at a child’s mallow test, Stanford researchers found th he marsh- ability to delay gratification (i.e., to not eat t mallow in front of them in order to get two marshvement mallows later) correlated with higher achie n now to later in life. Good to power through the pai es says. see it pay of later, right? Not always, Holm ed flip side: Research has since shown the less-explor always “the tendency to be excessively farsighted, mes writes choosing the future over the present,” Holm ool system in her book. “In our highly competitive sch eat com- and professional environments, there’s a gre gs done pulsion to work rather than play, to get thin rather than relax.” ay for some Persistently sacrificing your pleasure tod urn down unknown future (in which you’ll probably t balance or the marshmallow again) is not a recipe for b whatever joy. Some days, just eat the marshmallow, w ppg that is—with happiness and without guilt.