🌲 On what it means to not have time

People mean different things by "I can't--" ; it's ok to say you shouldn't.

Recently, the Surgeon General put out a health advisory about parental stress. Among others, What To Expect covered it, and the main data point I found interesting was:

Almost half of parents (48%) say that their stress is completely overwhelming most days (compared to 26% among other adults), and stress among parents has been on the rise over the last decade.

…research from What to Expect found that more two-thirds of moms (68%) say they experience anxiety. Gen Z moms are even more likely to be struggling, with 79% saying they’re dealing with anxiety.

Now, it’s not entirely clear to me what “anxiety” means here, or what “overwhelming stress” is. Even 25% of non parents being “overwhelmingly stressed” seems wild — to me “overwhelmed” means “not able to function” not “golly I feel a bit out of my depth but I will cope after a few deep breaths.” This isn't “ever” or even “right now” — this is not “have you felt overwhelmingly stressed in the last six months” — this is most days.

I have been overwhelmed, of course — certainly I believe most of us have. I have moments where my brain seems to glitch and I repeat myself and I have to sort of sit down for a minute and not deal with any auditory inputs. My first year as a teacher, I would get so overstimulated at work that I had to lay down in a dark room, and if my (now husband) came to talk to me I was literally incapable of forming sentences.

But the statistics above really made me wonder how much of this might be driven by people who procrastinate until they feel overwhelmed, and use that feeling as the thing that helps them get things done. Like the classic college case where people will procrastinate up until the end of a deadline, then when they start to feel overwhelmed, they pound out all the papers with the help of adrenaline and maybe some uppers. I read a lot on Twitter about how people struggle to get through day-to-day functioning, because they never learned how to prioritize without that stress bump.

I also wonder how much of it is driven by “you can do it!” hustle culture articles.

You can wake up earlier,

Tim Denning

has an article about how you should be building your own thing for the first 2 hours of every day. He’s got two lines in there that kind of honestly just made me laugh:

The first 2 hours of every day are an opportunity most will piss all over.

Tell me you’re a morning person without telling me you’re a morning person. At various points of my life, I got my best work done in the wee hours of the night after everyone had gone to bed and I caught my second wind… or in the early afternoon after a nap. I don’t think I’ve ever felt productive first thing in the morning.

The first two hours of my day are generally things like getting dressed, getting clean, feeding my kids, feeding myself, and exercising. I don’t know if that counts as “pissing all over” the time — I imagine that’s referring to the sort of thing where someone might spend 45 minutes lazing around after their alarm, scrolling social media, or otherwise being unproductive… or just hitting snooze way too many times because something is wrong with how their sleep is being handled.

And, look. Tim’s not really talking to me — I’m pretty happy with my life and I’m not aspiring to the sorts of goals he’s trying to help people achieve. I like Tim, and Tim has kids, so I’m sure he’s aware that kids do, in fact, take up time and require attention. If nothing else, some are better sleepers than others — my eldest would sleep pretty steadily for 12 hours then take a really reliable 2 hour nap, and never really had any teething problems. My daughter? Not so much.

But man… sometimes I see advice like this and it gets to me, even if it’s not for me. I worry what it does to people to hear this sort of unfiltered tough-love style encouragement.

It sounds crazy the first time you think of it. But if you can wake up earlier for a week you’ll realize it’s 100% possible. You either find the time or let excuses like “I have kids dontcha know” hold you back.

If I wake up an hour earlier every day for a week I will be losing an hour of sleep and that… has… a cost? Sure, there probably are some people who lay around in bed more than they need to? I suppose Tim’s idea here is that if you go to bed earlier, you lose the fuzzy-brained useless zombie part of your night and replace it with fresh effective working time, but that’s not how it works for me. I go to bed as quickly as possible after my daughter goes to bed, I wake up when my daughter wakes up, and if I’m lucky that will add up to 8 hours. Some other workaround like “just let your husband handle both kids and put in earplugs so you can wake him up early” would be a big ask.

If I wake up an hour earlier, or go to bed an hour later, I’m not just costing myself sleep, I’m costing my husband sleep, because it would wake him up, inevitably, yes some people are light sleepers. I suppose if it were a big enough priority, we could sleep in separate bedrooms — as we do when one of us is ill or particularly exhausted — but that would also be a strain on our relationship.

So, yeah, it’s not literally impossible for me to wake up earlier. I inconvenience my husband, disrupt his sleep, force him to rely on coffee to get through his day, and then take a nap in the middle of the day to catch up on being functional… or I could move to a system where one of us sleeps on the couch, or gets a daybed in our office… it’s doable.

Sometimes when people say “I need to go to sleep” they mean “I should to go sleep” and sometimes they mean “I will actually die in three hours if I don’t sleep right now, because I have a long drive ahead of me and coffee is not an option” and sometimes they mean “even if you electrocute me I am so tired that I will fall asleep in the next minute, if only for a few seconds.” Figuring out the nuances of words like “can” and “need” can cause people a lot of grief if they come from different communication cultures, I’ve found.

Tim is right that if this were a big enough priority for me, I could get up at four in the morning every day and work in a quiet, locked office with no distractions. I might end up divorced, but I could do it if it was my #1 top priority.

The reality is that it’s not, and that’s okay.

You can skip coffee,

I know this point has been made endlessly in the millennial-vs-boomer corner of the culture wars, most famously in the case of avocado toast, but there’s a related anecdote that has stuck in my mind for twenty years I want to share.

Back when I still played video games using telnet, a terminal-style text-based protocol that let me check out my first MUD — Achaea, which, wow, still exists — I was young enough that my only real option was free or freemium gaming. I didn’t have a credit card, I don’t think PayPal existed yet, and even if it did I certainly didn’t have a bank account to hook it up to. My dad was adamant that I focus on school and not get a job. But the games I played (like Wurm, which also still exists) were a bit on the pay-to-win side, which I didn’t mind because I wasn’t really trying to win. Whenever somebody pointed out that the combat side of the game was unbalanced, or someone said they couldn’t afford to ‘get good,’ there was this one guy, quite good at the combat side of the game, who always used to beat the drum of “if you just give up one cup of coffee a week, you could afford to…”

and there was never any acknowledgement that there might be people playing the game who didn’t have a daily coffee habit, much less a Starbucks habit. The assumption was always that there was more efficiency that could be wrung from the life in order to fund the thing if you wanted it badly enough.

In some cases this is true! Some people say “I can’t afford to go on vacation” when what they mean is “If I go on vacation, it will negatively impact my savings, and I won’t have as much flex in the bank as I want” or “I want a new car more than I want a vacation. But sometimes other people mean “I literally do not have enough money, in cash or in credit, to travel anywhere because I can’t even buy gas, which is why I am currently walking to work.”

But sometimes it will not help.

I grew up in the kind of town where I saw a lot of people close to the financial edge. And yeah, maybe if some of them had “just” given up cigarettes and beer they would have had an easier time making rent. But maybe it’s unpopular to say, but they were never going to be able to eke out regular trips to Europe on their budget and given their skills and aptitudes.

It’s easy for white collar folks who spend a lot of time online to compartmentalize that sort of situation, but it’s not unique to my hometown bar friends or to financial management. There are limits to how much extra productivity you can eke out from a given situation. There are limits to how long someone can focus on “being productive.” Those limits will differ for different people, but even hyper-motivated people occasionally take some time to play video games. The most prolific writers I know have to take a step away from the grind and let their brains rest with a bike ride or a trashy movie.

Even I get headaches after reading emails for too long, no matter how much I prioritize the work. The marginal value of an extra dollar eventually stops being worth the sacrifice.

Either way, you should figure out what you want.

I don’t want to be rich and famous badly enough to sacrifice any more sleep or any more time with my family. I don’t want to be self-employed badly enough to sacrifice excellence in my day job, because unlike a lot of the guys in hustle culture, I really like my day job. What I want is to go through my day feeling like my family gets along, like my children are flourishing, like I’ve helped my colleagues, like I’ve done something useful for the world. The worst part of teaching, there toward the end when it got really bad, was drawing a paycheck but not believing the things I was being asked to do were actually helping students.

There are endless people out there who say things like “if you want it badly enough, you can do it” and with some quibbles about things like growth mindset and whether aptitude is in some senses innate, maybe you can. But too many people seem to hear “if you want it badly enough you can do it” and think “therefore I am the literal worst, an epic failure, the world’s biggest incompetent, if I don’t achieve every single thing I’ve ever vaguely expressed an interest in doing.”

Can some people be simultaneously be brilliant scientists and world-class entrepreneurs, hyper-engaged with their big families, and totally in tune with their mystical inner selves while also leading the free world into a golden age of art?

Sure, I guess. But it’s okay if you just pick one thing you really care about, and it’s okay if that thing is “being a good friend” instead of “maximizing your potential” or “journaling daily” or whatever. You can enjoy reading a book without trying to get rich doing TikTok book reviews. You can drink your expensive coffee and smile, secure in the knowledge that your life is pretty good actually, and you don’t have to be beholden to a list of things it would be cool if you did someday.

SMART goals and task lists are, at their best, tools to help you achieve your actual goals, not whips to flagellate yourself with. Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should.