Posted on by

Time confetti

So I’m on annual leave this week.

Part of me wondered, “What’s the point of taking leave during a pandemic? We can’t go anywhere. We can’t even do most of the things that would normally constitute rest or leisure.” But I haven’t had leave since late January. I could feel myself burning out. Our pandemic weekly timetable had taken a toll. My body was tired. So after we finished working on a major event for work, I asked for a week, and my boss (who is wonderful) granted it.

Leave, for me, is a funny thing: I’m on leave for one job, yes, but not from my others. Thankfully the girls are back at school, so I’m no longer supervising home learning. But I’m still doing the morning routine, packing lunches, doing drop-off and pick up, supervising homework, nagging them to do their guitar practice and managing their Zoom music lessons. I’m still in charge of the household admin, buying groceries, meal planning, cooking, cleaning, the endless wiping.

And strangely enough, even though I’m not writing (I promised myself I would take a break from the novel), I’m still dealing with things related to my writing life. This week, seemingly out of nowhere, I was asked to quote for running an online workshop during school holidays, and a friend who runs a bookshop got in touch to order more copies of Kinds of Blue. So while my general attitude towards leave is that it’s supposed to be for rest, I’m also doing a heap of things that aren’t actually restful. (I know some of you will be reading this will be thinking, “Duh: what did you expect? You’re a parent!”, but I think it’s still worth acknowledging the reality.)

I also have the feeling I’m doing the rest of these things semi-poorly because I’m low in energy at the moment. But I also think it’s because of post-adrenaline crash—that slump you feel after periods of high stress. I was more or less expecting that to happen: an author friend of mine who had a pretty sweet work setup—in which he was paid for four days of work per week, but worked five and then took something like two months of annual leave all at once (during which he’d write)—anyway, he told me once that it would take him a week or so to change gears, and during that week, he’d be cranky and irritable, and that it was all because of post-adrenaline crash or something similar. So I vaguely knew that I’d be like this and find it hard, even though I’d been looking forward to leave for a while. (I also don’t really have the luxury of being cranky for an entire week.)

But another factor has to do with the limitations on my rest time: the “leave” part of annual leave is only really taking place between school hours and then in the evenings after the girls are in bed, because during all other times, I’m “on duty”. (Side note: As many parents will tell you, the school day goes absurdly fast. It’s not really six hours; it’s more like five and a half, once you take into account travel and preparation time. And in the middle there, you have lunch, which also takes time to prepare and eat. So it’s really more like four to five hours. And trust me: it goes really fast. What’s interesting is that it feels different if the same amount of time was shifted to another part of the day: I remember back when my eldest was a toddler: she and I would do some sort of activity together in the morning, and then I would drop her off at Occasional Care where she would eat lunch and spend the afternoon, and I would go home, eat my lunch, and then either crash (because I was so tired from parenting a toddler) or write. (I was working on the script of Eternal Life during that period.) I think it has something to do with the interruption of a meal: without it, the same period feels longer.

And because the time is limited, I have this massive fear that I won’t use it well—that I’ll get to the end of it and feel like it wasn’t time well spent, and then feel that sense of despair because it’s not like I’ll ever get that time back.

(Side note: I think unlimited time is one of the great blessings that the gift of eternal life brings. Vampire novels [like Anne Rice’s] and even The Good Place often portray eternal life as being this thing that we will eventually tire of, but that’s because they assume the presence of earthly decay and human iniquity—things that have no place in the new creation of Revelation 21.)

I cope with this ever-present anxiety by making lists—to keep myself focused but also to remind myself of the things I really do want to do (versus the things that I feel like I have to do; I may have free time at the moment, but I’m highly unlikely to spend it on decluttering). It might look like this:

Or sometimes it’s less specific. (I do have a daily checklist that includes

  • Bible reading
  • Fiction reading
  • Work on novel
  • Duo Lingo
  • Twitter
  • Exercise

I rarely do all of those in one day. But the list remains in my WorkFlowy daily schedule to remind me.)

All the same, even if I get through my totally made up To Do lists during the 4-5 hours I have child-free, aside from ticking boxes, I wonder if it’s actually having the desired effect—that is, engineering rest. Restoring me. Helping me to be ready for the next sprint of work.

Pocket watch sinks into the sand

Today I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts at the moment: The Happiness Lab with Dr Laurie Santos. Santos is a professor at Yale who, after becoming concerned about the pervasiveness of low mood that she observed among her students, started running a course called “Psychology and the Good Life”. It became the most popular course in the history of Yale—so much so that they now offer it online for free as “The science of well-being” on Coursera. Now she’s taken that same content and put it in a podcast.

I love it because in it, Santos delves into a lot of the science into what makes human beings happy and comes up with a lot of things that seem contrary to what our minds may often tell us about what will make us happy. For example, the idea of striking up conversations with strangers often seems horrifying to most of us, but according to the research, it actually helps boost mood, and its positive effects persist for longer than you think.

The episode I listened to today was about time and how we use it (“For whom the alarm clock tolls”) and I felt it like a gut punch. Like Santos, sometimes I struggle with packing my schedule too full with different things—to the detriment of certain other aspects of my life (like sleep). Like Santos, I often feel time poor, instead of time affluent. Like Santos, I was somewhat horrified to discover how feelings of time famine can affect how I treat others. (The study of seminary students who were asked to preach a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan and who ran into a Good Samaritan situation on their way to preach that very sermon was particularly damning—as well as an excellent illustration of total depravity at work.) And like Santos, I found some of the solutions that Tom Hodgkinson (author of “How to be Idle”) profferred (late and lazy starts, focused work time, afternoon siestas, carving out time to walk in nature and discuss philosophy with friends) weren’t very practical, though she (and I) did take his larger point about the importance of making time for activities that would actually reduce stress, because time spent not working or cramming other things in is beneficial to our mental health.

In comparison, Ashley Whillans’ research felt very helpful: she points out that even though our feelings of time stress are going up (and are actually affecting us even more negatively than, say, being unemployed), we actually have more time available to us now than at any other point throughout history, and what we need to do is reclaim it and use it well. The problem is, the surplus time that we have is broken up into little bits—what she calls “time confetti” (I love that term!) That’s partly due to technology (which lets us multitask and communicate with one another instantly at all hours of the day) and partly because we value the wrong things (e.g. money over time, which may lead us to do things like take jobs that take up more time in exchange for more money, which doesn’t actually make us happier). Whillans advocates making choices that will actually claw back time, thus promoting happiness for you—for example, outsourcing jobs that you don’t like (like cleaning to a cleaning service or cooking to a restaurant that does takeaway). Granted, not everyone has the discretionary income to do that, but all of us usually have a little we can play with to grant ourselves some time windfall.

Even so, the key thing here is to use the time we have well. Santos closes out the episode by remarking,

The idea of being more deliberate with how we think about our time is critical. Remember, time affluence isn’t the objective amount of free time you have—the actual number of open boxes in your calendar; it’s your subjective sense that you have some free time. And that means you can do a lot to boost your sense of time affluence—even if, in reality, you can’t really open up that much actual free time. It’s just the sense of giving yourself a bit of a break that makes all the difference, even if the amount of time you actual gain is small.

My take-away from all of this is that the things I’m doing during this rather odd bit of annual leave are probably being helpful to me in some way, even though I don’t think I’m feeling the effects of them all at yet. (I do, however, think I am starting to; the fact that I feel like blogging again and I’ve carved out some time today to do it is a good indicator.) Furthermore, I need to keep working at prioritising little bits of non-work time even when I’m not on leave. I dare say that will go a long way towards combatting some of the time stress I feel.

Reading is probably a good way to do it: I’ve been trying hard to do as Guan suggests and aim for a bit of guilt-free reading on most days—at least a chapter a day, if not more. It’s hard for me because of my almost total lack of self-control around fiction (which is probably a subject for a whole other post I should probably write about reading) and my reluctance to leave a world once the book is over (which makes starting new books rather painful, even when I know they’re good). But I do know it’s worth it—and after writing this post, it’s worth it in more ways than one.