optimizing for presence over efficiency
my summer mantra
Most of my life, Monday to Friday, is run by deadlines, by schedules, by routines, by the ding of my Google Calendar reminding me it’s time to go to the next in my series of back-to-back meetings.
Schedules pretty much run my life, and I am always optimizing for efficiency, squeezing everything I can get out of even a few minutes. My daughter is used to me telling her how many minutes she has left because I’m always trying to get us to wherever we need to go next on time and efficiently — 5 minutes left at the playground till we have to go home and have dinner! 10 minutes of TV left until it’s time to get ready for bed! 10 more minutes till we have to leave for school! etc.
On a recent Saturday, we were at her school’s spring fling and she turned to me and asked, “Mom, how many minutes do I have left?” And for the first time I said, I don’t know, I’m not counting! Because it was a sunny spring Saturday and I had nowhere else to rush off to, so I didn’t really care how much longer she played. I had no deadline or schedule, and once I realized that, it felt… liberating. It felt freeing to just be in the moment and not be chained to a schedule or calendar. There are an infinite number of tasks on my to-do list that I could be doing right now instead of staying longer at this event with my kid. But why should I?
After reading Four Thousand Weeks, I started reading writer Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter, and one edition I enjoyed discussed the idea that you will never be done with everything on your to-do list, so the real skill is learning to deal with that uncomfortable feeling of leaving things undone:
How far you can check out of the culture of unproductive busywork depends on your situation, of course. But regardless of your situation, you can choose not to collaborate with it. You can abandon the delusion that if you just managed to squeeze in a bit more work, you’d finally reach the commanding status of feeling “in control” and “on top of everything” at last. The truly valuable skill here isn’t the capacity to push yourself harder, but to stop and recuperate despite the discomfort of knowing that work remains unfinished, emails unanswered, other people’s demands unfulfilled.
That’s the spirit embodied by one monk at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico, interviewed by the writer Jonathan Malesic for his forthcoming book The End of Burnout, which I’ve been enjoying. The monks’ daily work period lasts (can you guess?) three hours, ending at 12.40pm. Malesic writes: “I asked Fr Simeon, a monk who spoke with a confidence cultivated through the years he spent as a defence attorney, what you do when the 12:40 bell rings but you feel that your work is undone.
“’You get over it,’ he replied.”
This summer I’m working on getting over that discomfort and leaving my to-do list unfinished — so I can stay at the beach longer, linger at the park longer, hang out with my kid longer. I’m optimizing for presence over efficiency: that’s my summer mantra.
What I’m reading
(Somehow every link in this week’s edition is from a publication with “New York” in the name but they just all had a lot of great reads!)
When did white collar work start to look so bleak? The New Yorker.
The mirage of the gifted child, New York Magazine.
They tracked fitness, food, and sleep obsessively. Now they’re tuning out. The New York Times.
The mom who runs her household with a staff of AI agents, The Cut.
What if it all came out? New York Magazine.
We’ll never see anything quite like that again, New York Magazine. I don’t usually read a lot of sportswriting — but this piece by Will Leitch really was a great piece of writing.
Are dads getting better? The New Yorker.
Ballerina Farm is happy with her choices, Vulture.
What I’ve been watching
Two recent show recs I’ve really enjoyed:
Widow’s Bay: I just finished this show and keep recommending it to everyone I know IRL. Matthew Rhys as the mayor of a New England island that has a weird, sorta haunted and creepy past is just the perfect amount of scary (not too scary). Read more about it here.
Four Seasons season two: The second season of this Tina Fey comedy just came out, and it’s really such a delightful watch about a group of friends experiencing middle-aged life together. Read more about it here.