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Busyness 101: Why are we SO BUSY in Modern Life? (7 Hypotheses)

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Sloww Busyness 101

This is the first post in a 3-part series. You can jump to the next two posts here:

It wasn’t too long ago that keeping up with the Joneses was all about things — the big house, sports car, and designer clothing.

Don’t get me wrong, materialism and lifestyle inflation are still all around us. But, things are being challenged by something “new” — time.

I personally lived through extreme busyness and long work hours at my last job. While I tried to diagnose the reason behind the busyness in real-time, I don’t think I ever really found the root cause. Months after leaving that job, this curiosity led me down a deep path to better understand why we are so busy today.

If you’ve spent any time on this site, you may have read the 3-part series on slow living. Consider this 3-part series on busyness a prequel to the slow living series.

After all, a how-to guide about slow living is only going to be effective if we all understand the why-to around busyness. So, as usual, I went deep into research and reading in an attempt to understand the past, present, and future of busyness and exactly why we are so busy — or at least feel we are so busy — in the modern world today.

 

An Introduction to Busyness (not that you really need one…)

You may have heard of some of the following terms: time-starved, time-poor, time scarcity, time poverty, time famine, time pressure, leisure gap, cult of busyness, harried, overwork culture, and overscheduled.

We feel like we’re “pressed for time,” that there’s “not enough time in the day,” and that we are “running out of time.”

But, our amount of time hasn’t changed. We still get 24 hours each day. Many modern conveniences (e.g. washer/dryer, dishwasher, etc) have significantly shaved off hours of weekly household chores. And, as we’ll see later, the average amount of time we spend working each week hasn’t increased in decades (if you’re surprised, I was too).

So, what’s really going on? Are we actually busier than ever before? Or, do we just feel busier? Has our relationship with time changed?

I know what it’s like to be and feel busy. What I didn’t initially realize in the midst of my busy life was that there can be several factors at play to cause busyness. Based on my research, I’ve come up with seven hypotheses…

 

7 Hypotheses for Why we are So Busy Today

  1. Busyness as a badge of honor and trendy status symbol — or the glorification of busy — to show our importance, value, or self-worth in our fast-paced society
  2. Busyness as job security — an outward sign of productivity and company loyalty
  3. Busyness as FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) — spending is shifting from buying things (“have it all”) to experiences (“do it all”), packing our calendars (and social media feeds with the “highlight reel of life”)
  4. Busyness as a byproduct of the digital age — our 24/7 connected culture is blurring the line between life and work; promoting multitasking and never turning “off”
  5. Busyness as a time filler — in the age of abundance of choice, we have infinite ways to fill time (online and off) instead of leaving idle moments as restorative white space
  6. Busyness as necessity — working multiple jobs to make ends meet while also caring for children at home
  7. Busyness as escapism — from idleness and slowing down to face the tough questions in life (e.g. Maybe past emotional pain or deep questions like, “What is the meaning of life?” or “What is my purpose?”)

I believe all of these hypotheses are correct to some extent. Depending on your own unique experiences, a couple may resonate with you more than others.

My personal poison of busyness was a cocktail of #2, #4, #5, and a dash of #1. How about you? Let me know your busyness cocktail in the comments.

For me, I’ve always wanted to do my best work. And, in the past, I’ve been completely willing to sacrifice my life to do my best work. I put in crazy hours at work because I was a workaholic who was afraid to let things go and not do my best work for fear of failure or disappointment. But, at the same time, I was completely against busyness and trying to stop the madness. So, I participated in the busyness culture, but I was also a voice against it. Quite the dichotomy.

 

A Deeper Look into each Busyness Hypothesis

What’s really going on when you study the published research and trends over time? Are some of these hypotheses truer than others?

Reading through the research was fascinating and eye-opening. My hope is to give you the highlights so you can become aware of busyness, understand the root causes, and make changes for the better in your own life.

1. Busyness as a badge of honor and trendy status symbol — or the glorification of busy — to show our importance, value, or self-worth in our fast-paced society

“The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.” — Lily Tomlin

I’m kicking things off with this hypothesis because it’s actually backed by research that I previously summarized in the following two posts:

The big research takeaway is: “A busy and overworked lifestyle, rather than a leisurely lifestyle, has become an aspirational status symbol in America.”

This research has been covered in some big publications with supporting context:

  • “As we compete to be productive, busyness is as much a status symbol as anything else.” — Johns Hopkins¹
  • “So if leisureliness was once a badge of honour among the well-off of the 19th century…then busyness—and even stressful feelings of time scarcity—has become that badge now.” — The Economist²
  • “In our rush to make more money and to have the American Dream as it’s been defined to us, we ended up crowding out our opportunity to have more time. Any social system wants to maintain itself—whether it’s a religion or an economic system—and under corporate capitalism, we’re required to maintain certain beliefs. It’s important to work hard, to demonstrate success, to make money. Not only is there a lack of laws that support vacation and family leave, but there’s a continual message encouraging people to work hard and spend more. We internalize those messages, and busyness becomes a badge of honor.” — Johns Hopkins¹
  • “What has changed so dramatically in one century? We think that the shift from leisure-as-status to busyness-as-status may be linked to the development of knowledge-intensive economies. In such economies, individuals who possess the human capital characteristics that employers or clients value (e.g., competence and ambition) are expected to be in high demand and short supply on the job market. Thus, by telling others that we are busy and working all the time, we are implicitly suggesting that we are sought after, which enhances our perceived status.” — Harvard Business Review³
  • “Individualistic cultures, which emphasise achievement over affiliation, help cultivate this time-is-money mindset…When people see their time in terms of money, they often grow stingy with the former to maximise the latter.” — The Economist²
  • “‘In America the consequences of not being at the top are so dramatic that the rat race is exacerbated,’ says Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winning economist. ‘In a winner-takes-all society you would expect this time crunch.'” — The Economist²

When you think about it, this probably isn’t too shocking to you. But, it goes even deeper when you look at our attitude toward work in the U.S. and how it’s a big part of our perceived identity:

  • “In America, we are defined by what we do. Our careers. What we produce. It’s the first question asked at parties, and often the first tidbit of information we share with strangers. The implication is that if I am not busy doing something, I am somehow less than. Not worthy. Or at least worth less than those who are producing something…So I fill my Facebook feed and my calendar with self-important busyness to avoid just being.” — Huffington Post4
  • “In modern society, people not only want to be engaged, they want to be viewed as productive, so we don’t just engage ourselves in conversations, puzzles, or hobbies, but rather in work and activities that have a goal…That cultural orientation arises from a belief that what you accomplish is a signal of your value.” — SELF5
2. Busyness as job security — an outward sign of productivity and company loyalty

“Just because you’re doing a lot more doesn’t mean you’re getting a lot more done. Don’t confuse movement with progress.” — Denzel Washington

Is work today too subjective? In the case of knowledge work, I would say it is. In lieu of objective measurement, perception unfortunately becomes reality.

  • “Because knowledge workers have few metrics for output, the time people spend at their desks is often seen as a sign of productivity and loyalty.” — The Economist²
  • “Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.” — Cal Newport
3. Busyness as FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) — spending is shifting from buying things (“have it all”) to experiences (“do it all”), packing our calendars (and social media feeds with the “highlight reel of life”)

“Life is what happens to us while we are (busy) making other plans.” — Allen Saunders

This hypothesis is probably one of the most visible and discussed — experiences vs things and trying to do everything (e.g. all the life hacks):

  • “Keynes predicted that the age of abundance would make us all relax, because it would be easier to get everything we need, like food, clothes, and entertainment. But maybe knowing that there are 10 great TV shows you should watch, nine important books to read, eight bourgeois skills your child hasn’t mastered, seven ways you’re exercising wrong, six ways you haven’t sufficiently taken advantage of the city, etc., fosters a kind of metastasized paradox of choice, a perma-FOMO. Knowing exactly what we’re missing out makes us feel guilty or anxious about the limits of our time and our capacity to use it effectively.” — The Atlantic6
4. Busyness as a byproduct of the digital age — our 24/7 connected culture is blurring the line between life and work; promoting multitasking and never turning “off”

“When everything feels urgent and important, everything seems equal. We become active and busy, but this doesn’t actually move us any closer to success. Activity is often unrelated to productivity, and busyness rarely takes care of business.” — Gary Keller

Technology should give us time back, not waste it. People are beginning to look for solutions in digital decluttering and digital minimalism.

  • “New technologies such as e-mail and smartphones exacerbate this impatience and anxiety. E-mail etiquette often necessitates a response within 24 hours, with the general understanding that sooner is better. Managing this constant and mounting demand often involves switching tasks or multi-tasking, and the job never quite feels done…Multi-tasking is what makes us feel pressed for time.” — The Economist²
  • “The idea that work begins and ends at the office is intuitively wrong. We laugh at animal pictures on our work computers, and we answer emails on our couches in front of the TV. On the one hand, flexibility is nice. On the other, blending work and leisure creates an always-on expectation that makes it hard for white-collar workers to escape the shadow of work responsibilities.” — The Atlantic6
  • “If work is your life, then how do you disconnect? If you are challenged to let go even when you ‘aren’t at work,’ perhaps it’s time to explore why.” — SmartBrief7
  • “The reasons for not disconnecting matter…Is your inability to disconnect fueled by the need for gaining the by-products of your busyness: power and control, money and social status?” — SmartBrief7
5. Busyness as a time filler — in the age of abundance of choice, we have infinite ways to fill time (online and off) instead of leaving idle moments as restorative white space

“Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.” — Goethe

This hypothesis may be one of the most simple yet most overlooked in terms of its affects on modern life. I think it may actually be one of the biggest reasons why we always feel busy today. We’ve never lived in an age of such abundance of choice. Instead of using our leisure time in restorative ways, we do things that continue to drain our energy (mindless passive leisure):

  • “We think we don’t have free time when we actually do. We’re simply frittering it away with mindless versions of passive leisure that don’t register as restorative. (According to the latest American Time Use Survey, the average adult spends nearly three hours a day watching TV.)” — Johns Hopkins¹
  • “Today you will consume the equivalent of 174 newspapers worth of content (five times as much as you would have done in 1986.” — Personnel Today8
6. Busyness as necessity — working multiple jobs to make ends meet while also caring for children at home

“People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom.” — Naval

This one was eye-opening for me. For most of us, there’s actually been an increase in leisure time. In comparison to history, we are living in an age of “time affluence.”

  • “And while we may legitimately feel busy, Americans’ working hours have steadily decreased over the last seven decades. In 1948, when the government started keeping track, Americans worked an average of 42.8 hours a week. Today we average 38.7, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey.” — NBC9

Research from Gallup shows that the people who are most strapped for time (the truly busy) are people working multiple jobs and caring for children at home. The wealthy are actually voluntarily trading their time for even more money, leading to feelings of busyness:

  • “The more cash-rich working Americans are, the more time-poor they feel and that those working adults who report being time-poor are less satisfied with their personal lives.” — Gallup10

I’m going to do a follow-up post after this series on the difference between being busy and feeling busy that will cover this research a bit more.

7. Busyness as escapism — from idleness and slowing down to face the tough questions in life (e.g. Maybe past emotional pain or deep questions like, “What is the meaning of life?” or “What is my purpose?”)

“We stay so busy that the truth of our lives can’t catch up.” — Brené Brown

With 100% certainty, I can say busyness is what caused my existential crisis. While I wasn’t intentionally running away from anything at the time, it helped me acknowledge my busyness and eventually create my purpose.

  • “Busyness becomes our existential comfort pill, the refuge from existential angst.” — Thrive Global11
  • “We throw ourselves into frenetic activity and give ourselves the perfect excuse for not doing the big-thinking stuff. In being busy we get to feel productive while procrastinating!” — Personnel Today8

Continue reading the next posts in the series:

Sloww Haemin Sunim Busy Quote

Sources:

  1. https://www.johnshopkinshealthreview.com/issues/spring-summer-2016/articles/the-cult-of-busy
  2. https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2014/12/20/why-is-everyone-so-busy
  3. https://hbr.org/2016/12/research-why-americans-are-so-impressed-by-busyness
  4. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-dannemiller/busy-is-a-sickness_b_6761264.html
  5. https://www.self.com/story/confessions-of-a-busy-holic
  6. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-myth-that-americans-are-busier-than-ever/371350/
  7. http://www.smartbrief.com/original/2018/08/take-break-busyness
  8. https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/five-reasons-everyone-busy-tony-crabbe/
  9. https://www.nbcnews.com/better/careers/busy-trap-how-keeping-busy-became-status-symbol-n742051
  10. http://www.gallup.com/poll/148583/working-adults-strapped-time.aspx
  11. https://www.thriveglobal.com/stories/16451-on-busyness

Busyness 201: A Brief History of Work & BUSY in America

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Sloww Busyness 201

This is the second post in the 3-part series on busyness. You can read the other two posts here:

The first post took a look at the current state of busyness. But, how did we get here?

How did we get to the point that other countries call our busyness and long working hours “the American disease”¹?

The Atlantic summed up “the conundrum” as follows:

  • “Writers and economists from half a century ago and longer anticipated that the future would buy more leisure time for wealthy workers in America. Instead, it just bought them more work. Meanwhile, overall leisure has increased, but it’s the less-skilled poor who are soaking up all the free time, even though they would have the most to gain from working. Why?” — The Atlantic²

 

A Brief History of Work & Busyness in America

But first, let’s go way, way back (before America) to try and understand work and busyness:

  • “We speculate that the concurrent desires for busyness and for justification are rooted in evolution. In their strife for survival, human ancestors had to conserve energy to compete for scarce resources; expending energy without purpose could have jeopardized survival. With modern means of production, however, most people today no longer expend much energy on basic survival needs, so they have excessive energy, which they like to release through action. Yet the long-formed tendency to conserve energy lingers, making people wary of expending effort without purpose.” — Idleness Aversion and the Need for Justifiable Busyness³

Even in the 1st century, Seneca the Younger observed how wealthy people rushed through life: 

  • “Writing in the first century, Seneca was startled by how little people seemed to value their lives as they were living them—how busy, terribly busy, everyone seemed to be, mortal in their fears, immortal in their desires and wasteful of their time. He noticed how even wealthy people hustled their lives along, ruing their fortune, anticipating a time in the future when they would rest. ‘People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy,’ he observed in ‘On the Shortness of Life’, perhaps the very first time-management self-help book. Time on Earth may be uncertain and fleeting, but nearly everyone has enough of it to take some deep breaths, think deep thoughts and smell some roses, deeply. ‘Life is long if you know how to use it,’ he counselled.” — The Economist4

Fast-forward thousands of years. In the 18th century, time began being used to coordinate work:

  • “The problem, then, is less how much time people have than how they see it. Ever since a clock was first used to synchronise labour in the 18th century, time has been understood in relation to money. Once hours are financially quantified, people worry more about wasting, saving or using them profitably. When economies grow and incomes rise, everyone’s time becomes more valuable. And the more valuable something becomes, the scarcer it seems.” — The Economist4

With the Industrial Revolution (1760-1840), time became money: 

  • “With the Industrial Revolution, minutes and seconds became a pervasive measurement of time for the common person. The rise of manufacturing regimented time with worker output. Productivity was king, and time translated to money…When time became money, our relationship to relaxation also changed. It used to be that the mark of accumulated wealth was leisure—restorative moments away from the toils of labor to enjoy other pursuits. Today, productivity is our top priority. Even the wealthiest among us toil away, packing schedules and squeezing every ounce of value from every second.” — Johns Hopkins5
  • “During the Industrial Revolution, 10-to-16-hour days were normal. Ford was the first company to experiment with an eight-hour day – and found its workers were more productive not only per hour, but overall. Within two years, their profit margins doubled.” — BBC6

In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville, a French diplomat, political scientist and historian, released Democracy in America:

  • “Americans are ‘always in a hurry,’ observed Alexis de Tocqueville more than 150 years ago.” — The Economist4

The Theory of the Leisure Class, written by Thorstein Veblen in 1899, acknowledges leisure-as-status:

  • “In his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class, the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen wrote that ‘conspicuous abstention from labor … becomes the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement.’ In other words, the richer one gets, the less one works and the more likely one is to try to show off one’s ample leisure time.” — The Atlantic7

Over the last 100 years alone, leading economists, political scientists, and business billionaires have predicted shorter workweeks:

1965: Gary S. Becker observes “time is used more carefully today”:

  • “The relationship between time, money and anxiety is something Gary S. Becker noticed in America’s post-war boom years. Though economic progress and higher wages had raised everyone’s standard of living, the hours of ‘free’ time Americans had been promised had come to nought. ‘If anything, time is used more carefully today than a century ago,’ he noted in 1965. He found that when people are paid more to work, they tend to work longer hours, because working becomes a more profitable use of time. So the rising value of work time puts pressure on all time. Leisure time starts to seem more stressful, as people feel compelled to use it wisely or not at all.” — The Economist4

1970: Staffan B. Linder, a Swedish economist, coins the phrase “the harried leisure class”:

  • “Linder, who coined the term ‘harried leisure class,’ says that rich people feel more anxious because they feel more compelled to maximize their free time.” — The Atlantic8
  • “The unexpected product of economic progress, according to Linder, was a ‘harried leisure class’.” — The Economist4

1971: Wayne Oates, an American psychologist, coins the term “workaholic.”

The evolution of work in a nutshell:

  • “There’s definitely been a transition, if you look at the composition of the economy and the fact that most of the work that we’re doing right now is in services. These are jobs that require our intellectual capital, which require more thinking than the type of economies that Veblen was writing about, in which the primary sectors were agriculture or industry. Those used to be the larger part of the economy.” — The Atlantic7

Roughly 2,000 years after Seneca’s observations, we seem to still be in the same place. Peter Drucker, known as the “father of modern management” said:

  • “One cannot buy, rent or hire more time. The supply of time is totally inelastic. No matter how high the demand, the supply will not go up. There is no price for it. Time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday’s time is gone forever, and will never come back. Time is always in short supply. There is no substitute for time. Everything requires time. All work takes place in, and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable and necessary resource.” — Peter Drucker

Continue the the last post in the series:

Sloww Busy Socrates Quote

Sources:

  1. https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2014/12/20/why-is-everyone-so-busy
  2. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/the-free-time-paradox-in-america/499826/
  3. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/af5b/5c708a986b4822a37147918d86bb47db1c8a.pdf?_ga=2.260545162.661802267.1536440951-1400585481.1536440951
  4. https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2014/12/20/why-is-everyone-so-busy
  5. https://www.johnshopkinshealthreview.com/issues/spring-summer-2016/articles/the-cult-of-busy
  6. http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20171204-the-compelling-case-for-working-a-lot-less
  7. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/03/busyness-status-symbol/518178/
  8. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-myth-that-americans-are-busier-than-ever/371350/

Busyness 301: The Future of BUSY, Work & Leisure

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Sloww Busyness 301

This is the third post in the 3-part series on busyness. You can read the other two posts here:

Status symbols have evolved from leisure time to stuff to busyness. But, if busyness is the current status symbol, that means it won’t be trendy forever. So, what’s that mean for the future of busyness, and what’s the next status symbol?

 

The Future of Busyness

No matter which hypothesis you believe for why we are (or at least feel) so busy today, you’ve likely seen busyness affecting not only work but also your entire life:

  • “The consumption of free time is increasingly ‘harried’ and characterized by an acceleration of the pace at which leisure is enjoyed.” — Semantic Scholar¹

This will probably continue for awhile as people shift spending to experiences over things to avoid FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). Just like materialism meant the more things the better, experiencism (Or experientialism? Are either of those words yet?) means packing your calendar with experiences.

But, a jam-packed and rushed life is not sustainable. The health impacts of 24/7 busyness are starting to catch up with us:

  • “It is interesting that people find the busy lifestyle so aspirational and associate it with status given that the downsides of this lifestyle are often acknowledged and discussed (e.g., the negative impact on happiness, wellbeing, and health).” — Semantic Scholar¹

The glorification of busy will (hopefully) come to an end when people get “sick and tired of being sick and tired” and/or busyness becomes so common that it’s no longer aspirational. The latter is already starting:

  • “Of course, the more people brag about how busy they are, the more common it becomes, and as that happens, particularly in workaholic cultures, status symbols, just like fashions, are likely to change…It becomes mainstream…For signals of status to operate, they need to be visible and they need to be costly. And visibility is compromised if everyone else is doing it too.” — Washington Post²
  • “In Silicon Valley, apparently, I’ve heard that actually it’s not very fashionable to show that you’re working all the time, even if you are. So maybe there, just because they’re entrepreneurs working all the time, it’s taken for granted that you’re working all the time. It’s actually that if you have time to go for a hike or on a bike ride, you’re cooler.” — The Atlantic³

We’ve already covered the possibility of shorter workweeks in previous posts. The most recent, modern prediction I’ve seen is from Jack Ma, billionaire founder of Alibaba, who predicts a 16-hour workweek by 2047.

Whether shorter workweeks become a reality or not, busyness as a work and life status symbol will likely turn into some form of leisure as a status symbol once again as more people shift focus from money wealth to time wealth (“time affluence”):
  • “Time affluence means becoming affluent from a time perspective, rather than from a money perspective. When we’re time affluent, it allows us to pursue values and activities like personal growth, personal connections, and our relationship to our broader community. These values, in turn, do a good job of satisfying our psychological needs and promoting higher levels of well-being.” — Johns Hopkins4

If the saying “more money, more problems” has validity, does “more time, more problems” ring true too?

 

Let’s talk about Idleness — What does it have to do with the Future of Busyness?

Apparently, a lot.

Defining Idleness:

  • “Importantly, idleness is distinct from recuperation and active leisure. We theorize recuperation as the oft necessary break that people voluntarily take between engagement with tasks, during which they use the non-occupied time to rest, refresh, and re-energize to engage more fully in upcoming goal pursuits. Thus, recuperation can be an instrumental use of time to maximize the experience of subsequent busyness. Distinct from both idleness and recuperation, active leisure is the voluntary use of time on entertainment and relaxation. In this sense, our definition of idleness is akin to what is often referred to as passive leisure, whereas active leisure is a type of busyness.” — Idleness versus Busyness5

Definition Cheat Sheet:

Idleness: Passive leisure

Recuperation: Voluntary breaks of non-occupied time between tasks to rest, refresh, re-energize

Active Leisure: Voluntary use of time on entertainment and relaxation (a type of busyness)

Why do people do anything at all? One study suggests that (through evolution) modern humans have excessive energy that we need to release through purposeful action:

  • “We speculate that the concurrent desires for busyness and for justification are rooted in evolution. In their strife for survival, human ancestors had to conserve energy to compete for scarce resources; expending energy without purpose could have jeopardized survival. With modern means of production, however, most people today no longer expend much energy on basic survival needs, so they have excessive energy, which they like to release through action. Yet the long-formed tendency to conserve energy lingers, making people wary of expending effort without purpose.” — Idleness Aversion and the Need for Justifiable Busyness6
  • “There are many apparent reasons why people engage in activity, such as to earn money, to become famous, or to advance science. In this report, however, we suggest a potentially deeper reason: People dread idleness, yet they need a reason to be busy.” — Idleness Aversion and the Need for Justifiable Busyness6

People generally try to avoid idleness and wasting time, and they want meaning in life:

  • “We propose that the desire to avoid an unproductive use of time and the ceaseless pursuit of meaning in life may underlie many human activities.” — Idleness versus Busyness5
  • “Specifically, we propose that people have two concurrent, yet paradoxical and conflicting, desires: They (a) dread idleness and desire busyness, but (b) need reasons for their busyness and will not voluntarily choose busyness without some justification.” — Idleness Aversion and the Need for Justifiable Busyness6

Consider this — Engaging in activity and avoiding idleness drive everything else we do:

  • “In particular, while it has been long presumed that people engage in activities in order to pursue goals, we posit a reverse causality: people pursue goals in order to engage in activities.” — Idleness versus Busyness5
  • “People often say they work hard so that they can be idle. Increasing empirical evidence suggests an alternative interpretation — we work hard to avoid being idle. Unlike other resources, time is non-stoppable, non-transferrable, and non-renewable. An individual’s consumption of time is essentially the individual’s use of life. In idleness, time breeds misery. In busyness, time generates happiness, as long as it is used toward a purpose, even a feebly justifiable one.” — Idleness versus Busyness5
  • “Most people dread idleness and enjoy at least a moderate level of busyness. Yet busyness perse does not guarantee an efficient use of time because purposeless busyness merely fills time by using up energy and other resources. Thus, people desire busyness that is purposeful, or that at least seems purposeful.We hence propose that, while it has been long presumed that people engage in busyness in order to pursue goals, it is possible that people pursue goals in order to engage in busyness.” — Idleness versus Busyness5

Use of time will change with future advancements, but the eternal pursuit of purpose will remain:

  • “A sound understanding of idleness and busyness is particularly relevant for the development of future human societies in which technological advances will pose increasing challenges on the constructive uses of time and the pursuit of purposefulness for individual existence. In the recent past of human history when productivity was low, people had to work hard to survive. Idleness was a luxury for the rich. Modernization has elongated people’s lifespan, freed many from devoting most of their time for survival needs, and increased their freedom over the discretionary use of time and the pursuit of purposefulness. As technologies advance further, more of us will be made somewhat useless by AI doctors, driverless cars, and robotic waiters, among others. The day that most of us will not have to work is approaching. Nonetheless, the eternal search for a productive and purposeful life will not cease in future human societies. With progressively less need to work, how can people use their abundance of time purposefully? Engaging in sports and games, self-development, scientific research, hobbies, or destructive behaviors? As we move forward, it ought to be understood that the relative affluence of time does not guarantee the ultimate freedom of human existence, but rather escalates the need for purposeful busyness.” — Idleness versus Busyness5

 

How I Interpret the Future of Busyness

Let’s quickly recap:

  • We are no longer using most of our time and activity just to survive. Relatively, we now have an abundance of time for discretionary use (“time affluence”).
  • We have excessive energy, and people will continue to engage in activity to fill their time. But, time use will look different in the future due to technological advancements.
  • People will still desire purposeful action in the future.

We’ve seen the past essays from John Maynard Keynes or Bertrand Russell. And, we’ve seen the current predictions from people like Duane Elgin who believes humanity is currently in a teenage stage of development and will evolve through simplicity.

I believe in a future of simplicity with a focus on time and purpose. That’s why Sloww exists.

Everyone wants a full life, not a busy life. A life where you can better manage your mental bandwidth. After all, your entire life is only 1% of recorded history.

Just like there’s been push back with simple living and minimalism on the stuff side, I believe there’s going to be push back with slow living on the time side.

Ready to slow down and become unbusy? Here’s your how-to guide:

Sloww Gary Keller Busyness Quote

Sources:

  1. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/454d/041ddb0eacd1e8fa94460c11d8311154f17d.pdf
  2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2016/12/20/how-busyness-became-a-bona-fide-status-symbol/?utm_term=.c2da2efb13fa
  3. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/03/busyness-status-symbol/518178/
  4. https://www.johnshopkinshealthreview.com/issues/spring-summer-2016/articles/the-cult-of-busy
  5. http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/christopher.hsee/vita/papers/IdlenessBusyness.pdf
  6. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/af5b/5c708a986b4822a37147918d86bb47db1c8a.pdf?_ga=2.260545162.661802267.1536440951-1400585481.1536440951

5 Themes from “In Praise of Idleness” by Bertrand Russell (Essay Summary)

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Sloww In Praise of Idleness Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate.¹

In 1932, at 60 years old, he wrote In Praise of Idleness — you can view the full essay for free on Harper’s Magazine or download a PDF here.

After reading the essay, I feel like a more appropriate title would have been In Praise of Wise Leisure. And, now 86 years later, I can’t help but wonder…is today’s knowledge work the equivalent of his era’s manual labor?

 

5 Themes from “In Praise of Idleness” by Bertrand Russell

Before we jump in, let’s cover how Bertrand Russell defines work:

  • “First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.”

Throughout the essay, he generally discusses the evolution of work as he sees it:

  • “From the beginning of civilization until the industrial revolution a man could, as a rule, produce by hard work little more than was required for the subsistence of himself and his family, although his wife worked at least as hard and his children added their labor as soon as they were old enough to do so. The small surplus above bare necessaries was not left to those who produced it, but was appropriated by priests and warriors.”
  • “In the West we have various ways of dealing with this problem. We have no attempt at economic justice, so that a large proportion of the total produce goes to a small minority of the population, many of whom do no work at all. Owing to the absence of any central control over production, we produce hosts of things that are not wanted. We keep a large percentage of the working population idle because we can dispense with their labor by making others overwork. When all these methods prove inadequate we have a war: we cause a number of people to manufacture high explosives, and a number of others to explode them, as if we were children who had just discovered fireworks. By a combination of all these devices we manage, though with difficulty, to keep alive the notion that a great deal of manual work must be the lot of the average man.”
  • “Much that we take for granted about the desirability of work is derived from this system and, being pre-industrial, is not adapted to the modern world. Modern technic has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.”

Here’s his take on the current perception of work during his time:

  • “Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying ‘Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.’ Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution.”
  • “If you ask him what he thinks the best part of his life, he is not likely to say, ‘I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man’s noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs.’”
  • “They consider work, as it should be considered, as a necessary means to a livelihood, and it is from their leisure hours that they derive whatever happiness they may enjoy.”

Now, let’s get into the 5 themes…

1. The belief that work is virtuous does more harm than good
  • “The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life.”
  • “I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.”
  • “I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.”
2. Modern advancements should mean less work
  • “What will happen when the point has been reached where everybody could be comfortable without working long hours?”
  • “Modern technic has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor necessary to produce the necessaries of life for every one.”
  • “Let us take an illustration. Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?”
3. A 4-hour workday should be enough for everybody
  • “If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day there would be enough for everybody, and no unemployment — assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization.”
  • “When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours’ work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried farther than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently.”
  • “It will be said that while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours’ work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.”
4. The wise use of leisure leads to the best things in life
  • “A man who has worked long hours all his life will be bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things.”
  • “The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education.”
  • “In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and the capacity.”
5. The future is full of good nature, originality, happiness, and joy of life
  • “Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least one per cent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly pundits. But it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages of leisure will appear. Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen instead to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines. In this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.”

Sloww Bertrand Russell Quote

Sources:

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell
  2. https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

Mental Bandwidth Management is the New Time Management

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Sloww Mental Bandwidth

I’ve always believed that all 40-hour workweeks are not created equal.

On the surface, the quantity of hours is the same. But, a 40-hour workweek that allows you to think, breathe, and do your best work is not the same as a 40-hour workweek that’s glorifying busy where you feel like you’re drowning in work.

We’ve all heard of time management—countless books and time management experts exist. But, managing your time is only as effective as managing your energy during that time.

As an introvert (INTJ),  I struggle to shut off the inner dialogue in my head. And, not just the inner dialogue, but the inner compulsion to constantly consume, digest, and analyze information. This means that no matter what I’m physically doing, I’m often mentally preoccupied with something else.

But, even good things like learning have limits (you can’t do all the life hacks). Everything takes practice, and I’m training my brain to stop and take breaks.

What happens when we never slow down and stop to take a break? A paper published by Harvard says that psychiatrists are reporting an increase in acute stress from people “stretched to their limits and beyond, with no margin, no room in their lives for rest, relaxation and reflection.”

In other words, no margin leads to no mental bandwidth. Managing your time also means managing your bandwidth.

 

What is Mental Bandwidth (or Cognitive Bandwidth)?

Here were the top descriptions I found to describe mental bandwidth or cognitive bandwidth:

  • “By bandwidth I mean basic cognitive resources…that we use in nearly every activity. Bandwidth is what allows us to reason, to focus, to learn new ideas, to make creative leaps and to resist our immediate impulses.” — TIME1
  • “Bandwidth refers to our cognitive capacity and our ability to pay attention, make good decisions, stick with our plans and resist temptations.” — Harvard2
  • “(Bandwidth is) the capacity of the brain’s ability to perform basic functions that underlie both higher-order behavior and decision-making.” — Wharton3
  • “Cognitive bandwidth is the maximum amount of thinking that’s available per unit of time.” — The Dot on the Ceiling4

You can break it down one step further:

  • “We use the term ‘bandwidth’ to refer to two broad, related components of mental function:
    • 1) Cognitive capacity: the psychological mechanisms that underlie our ability to solve problems, retain information, engage in logical reasoning,..the ability to think and reason abstractly and solve problems.
    • 2) Executive control: our ability to manage our cognitive activities, including planning, attention, and initiating and inhibiting actions.” — Harvard2

 

How Time Scarcity affects Mental Bandwidth

In their 2013 book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, authors Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir take a deep dive into scarcity.

Daniel Kahneman called their work “the finest combination of heart and head that I have seen in our field.” That’s an incredible testimonial from a winner of the Nobel Prize and author of the best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

The Guardian sums up the scarcity hypothesis as:

  • “Do the stressed-out time-poor of the west have common cause with the actual dollar-a-day poor of the developing world? If they do, it is Mullainathan and Shafir’s contention that the link between these two states is ‘scarcity’.” — The Guardian5

Mullainathan and Shafir have written about their research on TIME and Harvard. Here are some highlights to better understand the affects of scarcity on our mental bandwidth:

  • “Scarcity creates a powerful goal—dealing with pressing needs—that inhibits other considerations. We argue that by constantly drawing us back to that urgent unmet goal, scarcity taxes our bandwidth and our most fundamental capacities.” — Harvard2
  • “We think we need to manage time, but we also need to manage bandwidth…Busy people all make the same mistake: they assume they are short on time, which of course they are. But time is not their only scarce resource. They are also short on bandwidth.” — TIME1
  • “Although the room seems quiet, it is full of disruptions—ones that come from within. Such internal disruptions stem from scarcity. An unrealized need can capture our attention and impede our ability to focus on other things. Scarcity in one walk of life means we have less attention, ‘less mind,’ in the rest of life. The concept of less mind is well studied by psychologists. Although careful research in psychology employs several fine distinctions to capture this idea, we use the single umbrella term ‘bandwidth’ to cover them all.” — Harvard2

The impacts of scarcity on mental bandwidth can be a vicious cycle:

  • “Feelings of scarcity, whether money or time, prey on the mind, thereby impairing decision-making. When you’re busy, you’re more likely to make poor time-management choices – taking on commitments you can’t handle, or prioritising trifling tasks over crucial ones. A vicious spiral kicks in: your feelings of busyness leave you even busier than before.” — Lifehacker6
  • “This scarcity mindset consumes what Shafir calls ‘mental bandwidth’ — brainpower that would otherwise go to less pressing concerns, planning ahead and problem-solving. This deprivation can lead to a life absorbed by preoccupations that impose ongoing cognitive deficits and reinforce self-defeating actions…When you focus heavily on one thing, there is just less mind to devote to other things. We call it tunneling — as you devote more and more to dealing with scarcity you have less and less for other things in your life.” — American Psychological Association7

 

Bonus: A Cognitive Bandwidth Formula

I’m a big fan of simple formulas and equations because they are memorable (see an equation for happiness here). I stumbled across a blog called The Dot on the Ceiling that took a slightly different approach to cognitive bandwidth by creating a formula that we can all use to find mental balance:

(Cognitive Throughput + Cognitive Overhead) ≤ Cognitive Bandwidth
  • Throughput: “The actual amount of thinking done per unit of time…the throughput depends on the complexity of the stuff I am working on.”
  • Overhead: “Overhead is the cost of doing stuff where I have to care about organization, task switching, etc, and is paid against the bandwidth limit.”
  • Bandwidth: “The bandwidth is fixed at some level which I can barely change.”

The idea is to try and always make sure your throughput and overhead don’t exceed your perceived total bandwidth. If you know your overhead is going to be high one day, try to plan for a reduced throughput (and vice versa).

Give it a try and let me know what you think in the comments!

Sloww Miles Davis Time Quote

Sources:

  1. http://ideas.time.com/2013/09/09/the-mistake-busy-people-make/
  2. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sendhil/files/scientificamericanmind0114-58.pdf
  3. http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/bandwidth-explain-psychology-behind-poverty/
  4. https://tdotc.eu/2018/01/19/cognitive-bandwidth/
  5. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/07/scarcity-sendhil-mullainathan-shafir-review
  6. https://lifehacker.com/if-you-feel-like-youre-constantly-busy-clear-up-your-1786706897
  7. http://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/02/scarcity.aspx

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