So Ian, when I sent you that voice note yesterday, I just wanted to let you in my head a little
bit.
Hello Ian, Alas.
I'm waiting at the bus stop and it seems it will never come.
Small glimpse into how anxious I am, just waiting for anything.
I don't know what to do.
Do I just start walking?
Do I give up?
I walk to the metro at this point who really knows.
It's been probably four minutes, oh.
There's only four minutes, Becca.
It's not very much time.
It's embarrassing and I'm standing there and while I'm waiting, I'm switching between
two modes of like, I should be making the most of this time.
Let me read that article, my friend sent me or check my emails or like, this is insane.
It's only been four minutes, I should be a bit more mindful, but I know that I don't want
to be wasting my time just standing there.
I'm Becca Rashid, producer of How to Keep Time and I'm here with my co-host Ian Bogost.
Hey Becca.
Hey Ian, a lot of your writing and reporting here at The Atlantic is about technology and
all the ways it's changed how we understand ourselves and the people around us, but I
also think about how much tech has changed our relationship with time.
Oh yeah, sure.
I mean, technology in general tends to make things faster, right?
Of course.
Trains and airplanes get you places faster, factories and their machines build things faster,
but communication technologies, telephones and the internet and whatnot, those allow us
to send and receive information faster and a lot more frequently too.
And all of those emails and texts and notifications keep us occupied at every given moment, it
gives us more stuff to do and it makes it easier to do something all the time, right?
Yeah, all the time.
And I think that's exactly what makes it harder to tolerate wasting time, just doing nothing
or being alone with your thoughts.
Mm-hmm.
Your laptop, your smartphone, all the stuff you bring with you.
They do make it easier to get more work done or more socializing or banking or whatever
it is that you're doing on your phone.
Right, right.
So for one part, we're more efficient, but we still continue to feel like there's just
not enough time in the day.
Right.
And you know, back in your last season, you talked about the difficulty of building meaningful
relationships.
And when it comes down to it, most people, they just need more time to do that.
But even when we do have more than enough time, we don't know how to lean into the moment
the way we used to.
We're either anxiously planning for the next task or we're being compulsively productive
because we're sort of nervous about free time in this new way.
Yeah, I mean, all this time stuff can just feel really slippery.
One moment you know what you want to do and you just can't find the time to do it.
But then the next moment you're just swimming in time, and then you don't know what to
do with.
Right.
So hopefully we can make sense of some of those problems this season.
This is how to keep time.
So Becca, when you're thinking about wasting time, what do you mean?
Like wasting time compared to what to doing more work?
Or like, you know, waiting to get back to your desk to do more work so that you can what
send more emails?
Isn't that just a waste of time too?
No, I know.
I know.
But I always have the thought in the back of my head that my time is limited.
There's actually something called chronophobia.
Chronoslo.
Phobia.
Where some people really worry about that experience of time passing or I can understand that impulse
to feel like time is withering away if you're not doing something productive with it.
Sure.
I don't know.
It makes me wonder how we got to this point of measuring our own time and other people's
time.
How do we actually spend less of our time measuring how much of it is being wasted?
When you think about it, isn't all your time always being put to use your there in your
body and your mind, you're living through your day and your life, no matter what you're
getting done?
And your time is finite.
Your years on earth are numbered.
And you're never going to be able to do everything you want to do or everything possible because
of that.
So maybe we, rather than chasing it, need to figure out how to be in time, being in time
rather than chasing time.
I was completely freaked out when I first did this calculation and figured out that the average
lifespan in the developed world is around 4,000 weeks.
Obviously, you don't know how many weeks you're going to get in any individual case.
So Ian, that's Oliver Berkman.
He's a journalist and an author.
He used to write a column for the Guardian where he wrote a lot about productivity hacks
and personal development.
This fact of it being finite is something that I think we obviously intellectually understand,
but we don't behave on a day-to-day basis as if time were finite.
And during our interview, he mentioned what he called a disillusionment with all the self-help
solutions.
Yeah, I feel that.
So I think an awful lot of that kind of conventional productivity advice is really based on keeping
this fantasy alive that very soon, next few weeks, next few months, at some point, you're
going to get to this place where you are on top of things, where you have got your arms
around everything, you're the sort of air traffic controller of your life, you know.
But then one day after years of being in the weeds of the lifestyle advice, he had a kind
of epiphany on a park bench during a really stressful week when he realized that none
of the time management hacks were working.
I was trying sort of increasingly frenetically and frantically and desperately to come up
with the set of techniques and scheduling tricks that would enable me to get through this
ridiculous quantity of stuff and just being hit by the thought, like, oh, it's impossible.
Oh, I see, right, it's impossible.
Oh boy, Becca, I mean, I have definitely also spent years chasing time.
I know that feeling, but maybe Berkman is right and that the trick is just to accept that
it's impossible.
Berkman wrote a book in 2021 called 4,000 Weeks Time Management for Mortals, where he walks
readers through his personal journey with trying to get on top of it all, on top of time,
and failing miserably.
We're constantly trying to reach a kind of godlike position over our time.
Okay, when you say a godlike position, I'm thinking like all forgiving, most merciful,
but when you say godlike position over time, what do you mean by that?
I think, and again, to some extent, this may just be the hang-ups and screw-ups of me and
some other people, but I think that a lot of what we're doing when we claim that we're
engaging in becoming more productive, more efficient, getting on top of things, getting
organized is really an attempt to kind of feel unlimited with respect to time, with respect
to the tasks, responsibilities, goals, ambitions we might have for using our time.
It's a way of not having to feel what it really feels like to be finite, to have to make
tough choices, to have to acknowledge that there are always going to be more things that
it would be meaningful to do with time than we're ever going to have the opportunity to
do.
It's interesting you say that.
I went through this phase in my early 20s where I realized if I wanted to be amazingly
accomplished at anything, I would have started when I was three years old, whether that's
like gymnastics or ice skating or what have you.
I was already decades behind, and it can be really hard to cope with the realization
that time is gone and you may not have ample time to get there in the future.
I think obviously it is possible in a very down-to-earth way to use one's time well for
some future goal, but I think that on a deeper level what a lot of us are doing when we're
trying to use time well in that sense when we're deeply committed as American cultures,
especially deeply committed to the idea that every moment must be used maximally well.
It's not only that that becomes a very sort of capitalistic idea where the only real benefit
is the profit motive.
It's also just the fact that it's focused on the future.
It's defining everything about now in terms of some more important moment coming later
when it's going to actually have its value, it's going to cash out, it's going to have
been worth doing.
What happens when you do this is that you end up missing your life, you end up missing
the present, or to speak to what you were saying, focused on regret that you didn't start
using your time in this rigorously instrumental way earlier in the past.
You get to this very strange conclusion, the only real way to use time really well to actually
find meaning in the present is by some definition of the term to waste it.
I think that in many ways, because of the world in which we live that is so completely committed
to the idea that time must be used for future benefits, everything we think of as wasting
time as pure idleness is really defined as that because it doesn't lead to something
in the future.
Right, and I'm even referencing my childhood as wasted time when I should have been training
to be a gymnast instead of just a childhood.
In adulthood, it's harder to see it that way because efficiency, time management and productivity
are all essential elements in how we make a living.
How can we approach this idea of wasting time and how we're conditioned to think about
it, not as something pulling us away from productivity, but just as a part of life?
It's something that takes a positive effort.
It feels like you shouldn't just be using your leisure time to go on a run.
You have to be training for a 10K or something, where you have to have fitness goals.
It's kind of a bit embarrassing in some way, maybe, to have a hobby these days, but it's
really not embarrassing to have a side hustle.
The only real difference is that one of those is, it's something you're trying to turn
into a business, whereas if what you like doing is collecting stamps from around the world,
that doesn't really work any more.
I'm not sure what happened to stamp collecting these days, but you know, it's like a non-productive
hobby for sheer enjoyment, but there's nothing materially valuable about that, maybe, with
the sense.
Right.
Well, the philosopher Keir and Satya, he uses the phrase atelic activities.
So, you know, activities that are not given their meaning by their tealos or where they
are headed.
If I make the attempt to be more fully present, it's not going to feel great at first,
because I'm sort of running against everything I've been conditioned to feel and to think.
And that's absolutely true in kind of listening, really listening to other people.
Incredibly hard.
It's really hard not to just spend a conversation thinking about what you plan to say next
when the noise coming from the other person's thesis for a bit, which is of course not really
listening, and so for me, a big part of this is just understanding that this does not
feel second nature to many of us.
I hear you.
I mean, even in this moment, I find myself thinking about what you're saying and also
ahead to all the questions that I have left to get through.
It's sort of like when someone asks me what my name is and then I tell them and they
tell me theirs, but all I can remember is my name that I said out loud.
So Becca, maybe it's a problem in our culture rather than in us.
Like we're just all like so wound up over making the most of every moment.
So much that we don't even really know anymore what making the most of a moment would even
mean.
I've even had friends tell me they're on dating apps almost as a way to productively use
their time instead of scrolling on Instagram, at least they're building towards a relationship.
Okay.
It's been a long time since I've dated and I never used dating apps.
Are you saying your friends are like, well, got some downtime.
I better get my dating in.
Yes.
Wow.
Definitely.
Dating is its own version of a productive hobby in my opinion.
I guess it makes sense in a certain way like dating as productivity or as like an investment
into your future partnership or whatever it is that you're after.
Like maybe that's where that idea comes from that it's, you know, I don't want to waste
my time if this isn't going anywhere like that sort of sentiment is about progress.
That a relationship is about moving forward and building into whatever comes next, you
know.
God forbid your relationship isn't going anywhere.
Right.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I feel like I'm happiest when I'm just wasting time with people.
So when I'm trying to make the most of my time with someone, anyone, romantic or otherwise,
I'm not at least trying to think about how much of my time they're taking up or the most
efficient way to be with them or whether it's going somewhere or whether it's productive.
If I am just sort of around the house with my son and my wife, it's very easy to sort
of fall into what needs doing next, you know, this chore that chore preparing for the next
day, I think if you can do anything to sort of put yourself in a position where you have,
you know, gone on a walk or gone to visit something or all watching the movie or whatever it
is.
You know, if there's a sort of a framework around that, it's a little bit easier to step
away from that instrumentalist mindset.
When I remember, I think also bringing attention to the senses as opposed to thought is really
important, you know, just literally paying attention to a site's sounds, touch, smell,
whatever is a way of reducing the power that otherwise naturally for people like me anyway
goes to kind of compulsive thought.
So how can I be both mindful and engaged with my time more generally without having to
go full zen mental shutdown mode?
Just to be clear, I find being in this mindset rather than the instrumental future focused
one really difficult.
And I think you can certainly get lost in thought and I'm not sure I want to condemn that
because I think sometimes that can be a perfectly meaningful thing to do, but understand
and expect that it's going to feel uncomfortable at the beginning.
A lot of people these days say they don't have time to read anymore.
And I think what they often really mean is that they don't like the experience of sitting
down with a book because their mind is so conditioned to moving fast that it feels unpleasant.
I've certainly had that experience.
All I can do and I find it extraordinarily effective, but it doesn't feel like an incredibly
great insight or anything, but all I do is I remind myself that this is how the first
couple of pages feel when you're wired for speed and you're just sitting down and you're
just beginning to read a novel and that's fine, but the discomfort does not kill you
and it lifts.
So all of our, most of our conversation has been about the necessary mindset shift that's
required to be more in tune with each moment.
And it makes me think about my friends with kids because they have to be super present
with their child in the moment, be present with themselves enough to be patient with their
kid and they also need to keep up with all the productive tasks and demands to keep up
with their own lives.
I mean, how do we balance these competing priorities when there is a sort of instrumental
goal, you know, in the case of raising a child and making them into a compassionate human
being in the future who can exist and thrive on their own and also be present with them
in the moment?
I find parenting to be an extraordinary crucible for all of this just because there is so
much pressure both internally and externally to treat all questions of what it means to
be a good parent as questions about what you need to do in order to create the most successful
future adult.
You know, my son's language played the piano a bit.
I'm trying very hard not to turn into a sort of tyrant form of parent insisting on so
much practice that it takes all the joy out of the experience and when instead he's banging
around on the piano and I'm banging around on the xylophone that we have in the house
and just making sort of not exactly, exactly.
Now, I don't think that there is any part of me in that moment that is thinking how can
we make this band really good so that we can start getting some ink from touring and
down loads, right? I mean, there is something about the letting go into those moments that
is absolutely fantastic, but where I would most naturally go would be like, okay, piano
practice.
This many minutes, have you gone through these exercises?
With parenting and life in general always feels like you're learning just too late, but
I am learning that there's value in the sort of ridiculousness of making those noises
in the present rather than where they might be leading.
So back the other day, I met a colleague of mine for a drink after work and we went to
this sort of weird pub in this hotel when there was no cell signal, no Wi-Fi network
and I was just sitting there waiting for him. So I just looked around and looked at people
coming in and I looked at the menu a few times and I realized this is so rare.
I finally couldn't do anything else and so I didn't feel like I should be doing something
else because there was nothing else I could really do.
Oh, interesting. I feel like if I was in your shoes, I would still feel like I should
be doing something else.
I probably did feel that way in truth, but that sensation that it's worse to do nothing
than to delete emails on your phone.
And you know, it wasn't always like this. I wrote a piece earlier this year about this.
What did people do before smartphones?
I don't mean like for work or for entertainment, but what did they do doing those off-times
when they were waiting for the dentist or whatever?
And it was terrible. We were super bored. You know, you would like, I remember being
a kid and you'd like look through the highlights magazine a hundred times before the doctor
finally called you or like reading anything you would find science on the wall, staring
at clocks. You know, in the past when you had the magazine or whatever, you would burn
through it. It would be expended. There was only so many pages and once you'd read them
or skimmed them, you were done. And your phone, your Instagram, whatever it is, is always
something new. Maybe it's not interesting to you, but it's new. And that feels like
a difference. So that discomfort associated with having nothing new to see in the moment
that's kind of gone away. Now there's always something new. And I think that makes it easier
for us to think, well, I should be doing something new at every moment.
Right. And that pressure to do something new at every moment. I've been at so many
dinners and we just sit down. It's a group of people. And if there's even a brief
lowland conversation, someone says, like, what are we doing next? Where are we going after
this? But we just got there. Like we're at the place. We're at the dinner.
You know, Becca, I wonder if it's hard to tolerate wasting time because we're always looking
forward like that. But you know, I mean, we didn't used to know that the bus was coming
in four minutes because you could look at your phone and see it. I mean, it would come
eventually, presumably, and you'd be just kind of forced to deal with the fact that the
bus isn't there for you. You're just one person in the world and you just have to wait.
Patients, patients, we're always being tested. Like right now, we'll be back right after
a quick break. The art historian, Jennifer Roberts, points out that patients these days
is actually a kind of really important form of control. It used to be that patients
were something that people rather condescendingly had recommended to people who didn't have
power, right? So in the days when women were much more likely to be sort of obliged to
remain at home doing domestic things while men were out working in the world, patients
was a virtue because it's the kind of thing that keeps people from complaining about their
situation. But as society has sped up, patients changes its role. Like now the default is
that we're all moving incredibly fast. And it becomes a form of agency to be able to
sit with a problem, sit with an experience, not need to bring things to the next stage
or figure out where they're headed.
As a little kid and even now sometimes just feeling like everything I wanted to do in
life needed to be done today, like the concept of more time tomorrow was never my default.
And I remember my parents would always say, you know, why are you rushing everything?
You're so young, you have so much time. Is it helpful to teach kids that time is limited
or unlimited? And which one leads to kids having a better relationship with time as they
get older?
Yeah, there is a way of interpreting all this talk about time being limited in life being
short, which is incredibly stressing using, right? Basically says like, there's no time
you've got to get moving now, you've got to fill your life with a million extraordinary
activities every day because otherwise will you really have lived? I mean, I think firstly,
kids in my experience have a very natural affinity for being more present and less sort
of fixated on maximizing efficiency. But then the message, obviously in an age appropriate
way, but like the message here is, yeah, time is finite, but that's not a reason to start
hurrying and fit the absolute maximum into a single day or a single lifetime. It's a
reason to cherish the time that you get and to really show up for it and to enjoy it.
I definitely had went through a significant period of early adulthood where I was deep
in the kind of time, maximization, efficiency, mindset, and maybe one has to go through
that to come out the other end with some kind of insight.
So all of our for families or people who do have serious time constraints, they don't
always have the luxury to choose when to spend time with their children or when they need
to be at work. Is there anything that can help make these choice restrictions a little
less painful?
I think a lot of this is easier for me to say than it will be for some and it's much
worse if for somebody if the decision they have to make is between keeping food on the
table and ever spending quality time with their kids, for example, they're just in a worse
position than me. They're in the identical position to me only in the sense that in every
hour they can do one thing with any moment realistically and all the other ones they have to
let go.
It doesn't mean that the choices, the options that you have open to you are good ones.
That depends on your situation in life and society absolutely, but it does mean that you can
let go to a significant extent of being haunted by indecision or by guilt or by the sense
that you ought to have been doing something else with it, right? Or that you somehow ought
to be doing more than you can do. Nobody should ever feel that they ought to do more than
they can do.
I feel that way more often than not, but how do I begin to step outside this productivity
mindset with my time?
You can decide to adopt a certain hobby or change how you apportion your time so as to
spend more time nurturing particular relationship or something, you're not committing to it for
the whole of the rest of your days. You just have to take a bit of your time now or very
soon to do something that matters to you. Even if it's only 10 minutes, even if you are
not confident that you're going to be able to do it every day for the next month or anything
like that, but to just do some of it.
I think actually this is a place where the focus on habit building can be quite counterproductive,
because if you tell yourself you're going to start meditating every day forever, that's
quite a burden and it's quite tempting to put it off for a few more weeks until your schedule
clears up. If you tell yourself you're going to do it for 10 minutes today, and that's
it, then that is the point at which things start changing interestingly in one's life, I
think. I think we all experience sometimes that sense of simply being in or simply being
the flow of time rather than having this kind of clock or calendar or whatever you visualize
it, how ending you or that you're constantly fighting it's just for itself. Well that's
obviously very close to a pretty deep sort of, I don't know, spiritual, Buddhist sounding,
Taoist sounding idea about how actually only the present is real and that you have to
sort of find value in it if you're going to find value anywhere. There's a real argument
that wasting time in the way we define that these days is something that is extremely important
for us to learn today. Oliver, thank you so much again for your time, I've learned so
much. It's been a pleasure. So back up, I think what Oliver is saying isn't that we should
try to capture the literal present moment, that's impossible. Now, always vanishes, it's
gone, it's gone, it's gone. But it's like a slightly bigger now, like a little chunk of
the moment that you can be in and that you can feel happening. I hear what Oliver is telling
us, being something more like when I'm off the clock and I'm at home, I don't need to
be rearranging my pantry immediately as my grandma would love to have me do. I need to
do that too. I'm just so conditioned to be productive and feel like when I have a minute
of downtime, if I'm not working towards one of those goals, that it is being wasted.
So Becca, our show is called How to Keep Time. So keeping time, like I was thinking about
that phrase, you know how you use it in music, like you keep time in music. Like with a
metronome. Yeah, like the rhythmic sense, so keeping time, like tapping your foot. You
can't capture the present, but you can kind of feel it moving from present to present
to present. And I guess that's the goal, right? I mean, it's something I'm definitely bad
at because I'm always thinking about maximizing my 4,000 weeks if I even got that much
time. And I think for me, I just need to start thinking of my time as my own, not something
that needs to be maximized or proven to other people as something that I'm using properly.
What does that even mean? Right. Because you're just using it properly or not. You know,
you might not be productive all the time. You might feel like you're wasting time, but
the time that you spend is still yours. It's still yours, even if you're not making
something of it. I mean, maybe we need to make that absence of productive satisfaction
okay.
Rob also composed some of our music. The executive producer of audio is Claudina Bade. The managing
editor of audio is Andrea Valdes. Hey, hey, back at they're finally making a movie
called Clocks. What? It's about time. Oh God. Yeah. Stay with us for next week's episode
where we explore why we pressure ourselves to look busy, even when we're not. That's
on our next episode of How to Keep Time.
