Stop Tossing “Time Confetti”
Fiesta by Ainsley Wagoner from The Noun Project
“In the Middle Ages,” said Ben Hennicutt, a leisure scholar at the University of Iowa, “the sin of sloth had two forms. One was paralysis, the inability to do anything — what we would see as lazy. But the other side was something called acedia — running about frantically. The sense that, ‘There’s no real place I’m going, but by God, I’m making great time getting there.’”
In her book, Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time, Schulte suggests that busyness is an epidemic and to some degree we’re all suffering from “time sickness.” She suggests that our culture, our technology and our employers are making it difficult to experience anything but “contaminated time.”
We are not only doing too many things in any given day but things are overlapping, conspiring to contaminate our time. As work weeks get longer and leisure time shrinks, people are becoming sicker, more distracted, absent, unproductive, and less innovative.
Schulte hones in on an the idea of “time confetti” – a fragmentation that impacts our health, quality of life, productivity and creativity. This fragmentation amounts to “contaminated time” that prevents pure enjoyment, relaxation, focus, and mindfulness:
I realized with a wave of sadness that this was what my time felt like: lots of little pieces, flitting from one thing to the next, not really finishing one thing before I go on to the next, always looking ahead and never being fully present where I am. . . Most of us live with a constant sense of worry and planning that really takes you out of the moment, so that even a moment of leisure doesn’t feel like leisure at all.
The lesson here is to break your time into blocks, so it doesn’t break into scattered minutes instead. A dedicated hour of sketching feels like more time than four quick, distracted 15-minute interactions in between other stuff.
