If we want to have free time, we need to organise it, protect it and defend it
Iwas recently approached by a kind young person offering their services as a personal assistant. For a moment I thought, wow, I’ve really made it! That is until I realised I can’t afford a personal assistant. But on reflection, I wasn’t sure I wanted one. I’m a subscriber to the doctrine of if you need a personal assistant you’re probably doing too much. I’m not talking about an administrative secretary but one of those life assistants who will feed your cat, buy your husband a birthday present and decide what you’re going to eat for dinner because you’re too busy working to do it yourself.
But I’ve never been very good at delegating. I don’t even like doing my grocery shopping online because it means I can’t choose which broccoli crown I want, so a personal assistant probably wouldn’t be for me, even if I could afford one.
I am trying to get better at time management however, because these days time is not only money, but it’s also freedom, power and choice. In some companies it seems time is becoming actual currency.
A friend who works at a giant corporation is being incentivised to stay there not through huge pay increases – any corporation can offer wheelbarrows of cash
– but rather by being offered lengthy paid holidays. The powers that be at her job understand that time off in a world where time is our most scarce resource is as good as, if not better, than offering more money.
In a recent case in Germany, train drivers settled an industrial action wage dispute not by being offered more money but being appeased with fewer working hours.
We seem to have lost the ability to protect our time from the hour-gobbling demons of work, streaming platforms, social media and our phones. I was thinking of this last week when I read about a German court ruling – I swear I don’t have a fixation on German news – that decreed even robots deserve a day off.
The Germans are great for coining a phrase. Schadenfreude, the art of delighting in others’ misfortunes, is one. Torschlusspanik, that feeling of panic you get when your window of opportunity is closing, is another. Another still, Sonntagsruhe, the idea of Sunday rest, is enshrined in their constitution, which means that very few shops are legally allowed to open on a Sunday. A supermarket chain that also operates some robot-manned mini-shops recently came a cropper on this law and was told to shut its automated stores on Sundays in order to protect the Sonntagsruhe.
There’s a part of me that really admires this ruling, in the same way that I admire the French hardline on the 35-hour working week.
The fact is we all need a certain amount of down-time if we are to be productive, creative and industrious in our working time but as a culture, we’ve become particularly bad at protecting that quiet time. Every week my own phone delivers the bad news of how much time I’ve wasted on it. On average it lands somewhere between three and four hours a day, which is usually more time than I’ve spent doing the things I really want to do, like writing my novel, hanging out with my husband and kids, reading a book or staring into space.
I could really do with an extra three to four hours in my day but I haven’t managed to claw them back from my phone yet.
We live in a world where we can spend all day answering work emails, texts or on Zoom calls without even touching the edges of our actual work. Weekends used to be a natural break from the working week but for many of us they are just the beginning of a sort of second shift where we try to catch up on the things we didn’t get around to in the actual working week. T
he proliferation of mindfulness books and podcasts along with the rising popularity of meditation can be explained by an increasingly desperate need to switch off. Last month Gwyneth Paltrow launched her Moments of Space app, an ‘eyes-open meditation’ app that allows you to meditate while whipping up a guacamole. Was this multi-tasking meditation, I wondered? A way to be productive and meditate at the same time, tick two things off the neverending to-do list at once? Wasn’t that defeating the whole purpose?
Okay, so I’m being facetious and, in fairness to Gwyneth, she is only meeting people where they are at – time chaos – and trying to offer a solution. But still, the idea of a meditation practise that also allows you to get stuff done brought a wry smile.
How we spend our time is important. When is the last time you had nothing to do? When is the last time you stared into space for an hour. When is the last time you had an actual day off that wasn’t spent catching up on work?
If we want to have free time, we need to organise it, protect it and defend it. If Germans think it’s important that robots have a day off, it’s probably more important than ever to ring fence a little free time for ourselves too.