“I’m desperate. I do not have time for anything. It seems that I am busy all the time, but at the same time I do not complete any of the cases on time. Rest is out of the question.” This can be heard from both a top manager and a housewife. How to get free time back?
Brigid Schulte, a staff writer for The Washington Post and a mother of two, found the answers to these questions, and what she learned in the process she wrote down in her book No Time.*
Too busy to live
Work has become the religion of our time, rest is a sin, and employment is a subject of competition. We constantly prove to friends, relatives, colleagues that we do so much every day. We are proud of the constantly buzzing smartphone, overflowing with mail. According to psychologists, the feeling of over-employment makes us feel our own importance and effectiveness. If you are not as busy as your acquaintances, then you risk being branded as a loser. Remember the common phrase – “sleep is for the weak.” So, in the environment of large cities and provinces, a cult of the “ideal worker” has developed. He is ready to come to the office even at night, his phone is always within reach. Meanwhile, psychologists are convinced that in fact the condition for success is such a “trifle” as happiness. Does the squirrel feel happy, mindlessly spinning the wheel every day? Finding free time means finding a way to a good life. The formula for success proposed in the book consists of three components: work, love, play (work for pleasure, peace and mutual understanding in the family, entertainment). Maintaining a balance between them gives harmony. Interestingly, not only employees of large companies and top managers are subject to overemployment – it turns out that housewives “get sick” with it no less often.
Mom is in control
The studies and opinion polls cited in the book show that there is no more time-limited person on earth than a working mother. Women are happy to devote themselves to their favorite work and have recently achieved great heights even in business and politics that were once closed to them. But everything changes when children appear in the family. The husband continues to rise through the ranks, and his lover either retires or combines official duties with the daily duty of mother, wife and mistress. Brigid Schulte knows for herself: “A house for a woman is a second workplace.” Unpaid. Regardless of what women do, they constantly keep in mind all the issues related to children, home, work, business and family.
The most curious thing is that they themselves are happy to support the cult of the “ideal mother”, who manages everything. With a husband, work or without both, the “ideal mother” will never ask for help, will not betray her weakness, but will hide it behind a tired smile. All-consuming motherhood is implicated in guilt, fear and double standards: “I devote too little time to my child”, “I am afraid that my husband will leave me”, “If my girlfriends understand that my son is rude to me, they will say that I am bad mother, ”saying this to herself every day, the woman continues to increase the momentum of her activity. As in the case of the “ideal worker”, one day the system fails.
back side
Overemployment suffers:
1. Personal relationships
Married couples devote time to work and children, not leaving a single minute for themselves. Over time, this can lead to the fact that the spouses will not only upset their sex life, but simply will not have those threads that previously connected them into one.
2. Friendly relations
The flow of incessant affairs, eternally frustrated plans force us to communicate with loved ones less and less. Because of this, sometimes we experience acute loneliness among people. Touching postcards for the holidays have replaced brief congratulations in social networks, and communication has been replaced by correspondence with quick messages. When was the last time you had a carefree coffee with a friend for three hours straight? Did you choose a noisy company in the forest?
3. Your children
Stress in children is often passed on to them from worried and anxious parents. Psychological instability can change their nervous and hormonal systems. Also, parents simply do not notice some difficult moments in the life of their schoolchildren because of their employment, although children at this time need their support.
4. Brain
Ronald Glaser, director of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at Ohio University, has shown that stress, which is often triggered by high employment, weakens the immune system, making the body predisposed to inflammation, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer’s disease, etc. d.
There is time
The book is full of stories about people who won back free time and now feel much happier. The example that Brigid Schultz cites regarding overworked mothers is a group of women from the American provinces. They call themselves “Just Moms”. No matter what happens around, once a week housewives meet for a cup of tea and talk about their lives, share problems, look for solutions together. Open. One day they reached a point in their attempts to achieve excellence in the management of the home and the upbringing of children and boldly admitted that the ideal was unattainable.
Many people with the “ideal worker” symptom have found a way out in flexible working hours. Michelle Flournoy was appointed U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Information Policy in 2009, the first woman to hold the position. At the appointment, she stated that she was the mother of three schoolchildren, and asked to reorganize the schedule so that she could be at home more often. Later, employees of two departments at the Pentagon switched to the same system. No matter how important a career is, a happy life is much more important.
Read more:
- give yourself time
Clearly formulate your goals, and after that, three questions will help get rid of eternal overemployment:
- What results will be enough?
- When will it be enough?
- How do I know?
time diary
American sociologist John Robinson explores the relationship between man and time and, imagine, claims that overtime, too busy days, exhausted children are a myth. If you say, “I don’t have time for this,” according to Robinson, it means “I’d rather do something else.” We watch TV more and more, communicate in social networks, sleep than we think.
Sometimes the question is not the number of minutes spent, but their quality. During a traffic jam, turn on an audio lesson of a foreign language in the car, doing exercises in the morning, concentrate on the sensations of your body at this moment, cleaning is an occasion to listen to a good audio book.
A good option is to start a time diary. Write down everything you do minute by minute throughout the day: work, activities with children, caring for loved ones, visiting your parents, reading the newspaper. And then emphasize those moments that were actually relaxing, only you didn’t notice it. Perhaps the result will surprise you no less than it surprised Brigid Schulte.
* B. Schulte “I have no time! In search of free time in an era of universal time pressure” (Mann, Ivanov and Ferber” 2014).