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I have been thinking about busyness since my Randi Zuckerberg post as well as Raven Rambling’s post about realizing why she overschedules herself.  She writes about how she overcommits in order to feel needed, and I realized reading it that I do the exact.same.thing:

It makes for a very busy life, but I like to be busy. Nothing makes me more content then getting shit done – even if I’m sick, I keep on trudging. It makes me feel useful, and I need to feel useful … I don’t actually enjoy being so busy…but I need to be busy for my own peace of mind. And I need to be busy because it makes me feel useful… and I need to feel useful because I usually feel like a useless, infertile, non-mothering woman.

That is me.  Except that I would say that I need to feel useful because it staves off this feeling that if I’m not useful, I’m without worth. If I’m super busy, it means I’m worth something, right?  It means people find value in me and my skills.  It turns me into the equivalent of a dollar.

You know, dollars: you put dollars in your wallet and would feel bummed if one fell on the ground and was lost to the wind.  Whereas if a penny dropped to the bottom of your purse or out of your pocket… oh well… not a big deal.  Being seen as a dollar is so commonplace that it’s totally attainable.  I’m not looking to be the best or the biggest or the brightest: just someone with some basic value.

Image: Moneyblognewz via Flickr

I mean, yes, hopefully to Josh and the twins and people like that, I am more than just a dollar.  Maybe I am a million dollars or priceless.  But to the rest of the world, the greater world, I want to be a dollar.

So I try to make myself feel valuable by saying yes a lot.  Sometimes it feels like I don’t stop from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep.  But I also know that’s how I want to see my life.

It’s the story I tell myself about my day.

*******

Because I’m not busy by Randi Zuckerberg’s definition of busy.  I can fit everything in.  I get some me-time.  If I want to grab dinner with a friend, I can make that happen.  I do a half hour of yoga every morning.  I have a lot of time with the kids.  I mean, we still have time to sit down and read books together in the afternoon, an activity that takes a shitload of time when you think about it.  Josh and I take two hours or so of downtime every night to watch television or read a book or… do other things.  And I work about 9 hours a day.

I go through busy periods, but I would never tweet about the Writer’s Dilemma.  Busy periods, like first-pass, are all limited in scope.  Two busy weeks where I have to buckle down and put in more hours, and then… back to normal life.  Which is apparently not busy.

And yet, Raven Rambling’s post spoken volumes to me because prior to reading Zuckerberg’s tweet, I would have said that was overcommitted.  But am I, really, if I can fit in many different facets of life?  Maybe not.

*******

I don’t think most people want to live with their life battery on empty.  Few people have the stamina of someone like Barack Obama whose every second is accounted for and squeezed for its possible usefulness.  I mean, the man can’t even change into his pyjama bottoms at 4 pm.  What sort of life is that — wearing real clothes until night time?

In a Daily Dot article on busyness, the author states,

Busyness has become a status symbol of sorts, one that we use to promote our worth to the rest of the world. “Almost everyone I know is busy,” wrote the New York Times’ Tim Kreider in 2012. “They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work.”

Yes, it’s a status symbol regardless of your job — everyone wants to appear as if their existence matters and their presence is needed.  Would people have sat up and listened if Randi Zuckerberg said, “Hey, people, I’m not busy at all right now.”  Nope.  She wouldn’t have sounded like she mattered.  I mean, if you’re a someone of value, you must be busy, right?  So the moment she says, “I am so busy,” we all nod and answer, “Me too.”  Because if not, aren’t we sort of saying that Randi Zuckerberg is more important than the rest of us?

Maybe she is?  I don’t know.  I’d sort of be okay with that.

*******

The point of that Zuckerberg post is that we all need to take a long, hard look at how we spend our time and be honest about it.  Can we really not spend time with our friends, or did we spend so much time on Facebook one afternoon that the day got away from us?  If we hadn’t checked into Facebook at all, could we have grabbed coffee with a friend for an hour?

I can say, with my life, the answer is almost always yes.

I loved Northern Star’s comment on the last post about the old Wall Street Journal article on busyness:

Instead of saying “I don’t have time” try saying “it’s not a priority,” and see how that feels. Often, that’s a perfectly adequate explanation. I have time to iron my sheets, I just don’t want to. But other things are harder. Try it: “I’m not going to edit your résumé, sweetie, because it’s not a priority.” “I don’t go to the doctor because my health is not a priority.” If these phrases don’t sit well, that’s the point.

There are times when I get busy and I can’t return a phone call or see a person.  I work during the day, so many of my hours are spoken for, and I live by the twins’ schedule in the hours after that.  But if the other person is flexible and the commitment isn’t time sensitive, I can shift things around and figure out how to work it all in.  All five of those things are a priority; it’s just that sometimes one thing on the list trumps other things on the list.  But yeah, if you look at my week overall, I get to all of my priorities.

(Remember, you may look at those six categories in the other post and say, “Feh, exercise is something I just don’t care about.”  So then you’d only have five priorities.  Or the six you come up with may look totally different from mine.)

Back to Randi.  Does Randi Zuckerberg really never have time to see friends?  Or does she look at the friends she has and think, “I can get more out of life right now going to a cool event for work than I can having yet another slice of pizza with Mary.”  Poor Mary.  But the point is that we all make decisions with our time, and sometimes I think those decisions are the kind I speak of above: to make ourselves feel busier than we actually are in order to stave off some other feeling.  And other times, it just feels yucky to think that we’re not making someone or something we love a priority, so it’s easier to say that we’re just too busy for it.

*******

You know how some restaurants tape their first dollar to the wall? (You know, the classy joints.) They do it to remind themselves of how far they’ve come.  From one dollar to a thriving business.  Maybe I need to do the same thing: tape a dollar bill over my desk because it’s all perception.

I know I am a dollar.  I know I do my job well.  I’m not the best or the biggest or the brightest, but if someone hires me to do a job, I complete the task and turn in a strong product.  I think I have value when it comes to my friends and family and community.  Sometimes I have a lot to do, sometimes I don’t.  Sometimes I’m in a period of time that is more thinking than accomplishing.  It’s all part of the process.

I don’t know if I’m busy or not.  I suspect that I’m not based on other people’s answers.  But I’m also okay with that.  I sort of like not being too busy.  It means that I get to do all the voices for Hunger Games while reading to the kids, and I do an awesome Effie Trinket.  It’s worth at least a dollar.

I just realized that I resent being told not to use my cell phone. I don’t mean in a doctor’s office, where privacy is of utmost importance and it’s easier to ban the phone vs. certain activities on the phone, or in the library where usage may bother other patrons. Actually, our library just tells people to put their phone on silent when they enter. But movie theaters or regular theaters or school buildings; truly, none of that bothers me.

But I resent mobile bans that are constructed to pass judgment.

The article that raised my hackles was about a bookstore that banned mobile devices. Not because they bothered other patrons or because they were worried about people taking photos of every page in the book instead of buying a copy. But because the store owner is overwhelmed by technology and therefore believes that everyone else is overwhelmed by technology, too. And therefore, because we cannot detach from our devices on our own accord, we need people like this bookstore owner to create mobile-free zones.

He states: “And there’s this growing awareness, quite mainstream now in this community, that being in front of your screen the whole time, being plugged into digital technology the whole time, isn’t great for your happiness or your creativity.”

I agree with him in the sense that doing anything all the time is not great for your happiness or creativity, and that includes reading books. Like the books he sells in his bookstore. Keeping your nose in a book and not experiencing the world around you is detrimental to your happiness and creativity. Unless it’s not, since you are probably a better judge of your own happiness and creativity.

I love this XKCD comic that depicts all the fears we’ve had over the ages about the ways people are ruining their lives. Whether it is books, newspapers, magazines, televisions, Walkmans, or phones, we’ve repeated the same argument over and over again. People are worried that other people are not focusing on the world around them enough.

But here is the real question: why are so we concerned about how other people are living their lives vs. focusing on ourselves and letting other people focus on obtaining their own happiness?

Listen, there are plenty of good reasons to ban mobile technology, especially when its usage affects the people around the user. But I don’t need to be told when to not use a phone just because someone else thinks it’s detrimental to my creativity. The bookstore sounds like a lovely place, and if I was ever seeking a mobile-free space, it sounds like the perfect place to go. But let’s just admit that his decision is marked by judgment: that distraction by book is good and distraction by phone is bad.  And I just can’t get behind that way of thinking.

You know that I like to find games that waste time… I mean… help me relax while I’m waiting in line.  I am currently obsessed with a game called Merged (here it is on Android), and it’s so good, though it has a bit of a learning curve.  Okay, so this is how you play.

You start off with a blank board and a single die at the bottom of the screen.  You can place it anywhere on the board.  I like to always begin at the lower right corner, but that’s just me.  In the example below, I randomly start out with an orange 2.

I place it in the lower right corner of the board.  Once I do that, I receive either another die or set of dice.  In this example, I get two dice.

The key is to get three die of the same colour to touch.  So, in this case, I could slide over the dice (they move together) so that they run purple, orange, orange at the bottom of the screen.  But that is NOT what I do.  Instead, I tap the purple/orange dice until they are stacked, purple on top and orange on the bottom.  I move that onto the board as seen below:

This is where it gets fun.  You can see that I get another die in the queue: an orange 2.  Perfect.  I place that to the right of the purple die on the board, and that connects three orange 2s in a row.  As long as they are touching, they are connected whether they’re in a straight line or an L shape.  Once you have 3 (or more) connected, they merge and become a single die, one number higher than the group that just merged.  So all those 2s will become a pink 3.

You’ll notice that the new die will be wherever you placed the last die (or dice) that kicked off the merge.  So those purple 1s (once they have 3 dice in a row) will form a 2.  Another group of 2s will form a 3.  And hey, those 3s will all merge to clear out a little bit of the board and form a 4.  The game keeps moving on, and you can place any new die anywhere on the board, so don’t feel as if you need to have the new ones touch the old ones unless they help with a merge.  And don’t forget that when the dice are in the queue, you can tap them so they shift around to fit a space better.

Be strategic.  You want to start growing your 1s pretty close to any 2s on the board because the 1s will eventually merge into 2s and therefore join along with the existing 2s.  Make sense?

What happens after you get 3 6s in a row?  Those yellow 6s merge together to form an M.  It’s just a big, white pulsating M, and when you get 3 Ms in a row, they go off like a bomb, clearing out a bunch of other dice around it and giving you major points.  My high score so far has been 896.  The game is over when the whole board is filled and you can’t move anymore.

Happy playing…

I read an interesting article last week from a Facebook link about how you can segment your life into 5 big sections: work, sleep, family, fitness, or friends.  According to Randi Zuckerberg’s 2011 tweet, entrepreneurs (and… um… I’d probably use a more inclusive “everyone” since entrepreneurs do not magically have a more limited time base than the rest of the world) can have 3 of the 5 at any given time, and it’s up to you to choose which 3 segments you want.

The entrepreneur’s dilemma:

Maintaining friendships. Building a great company. Spending time w/family. Staying fit. Getting sleep.

Pick 3.

— Randi Zuckerberg (@randizuckerberg) December 9, 2011

I would probably segment my life in a different way: work, sleep, family, friends, me-time. Fitness is sort of a no-brainer that takes place in the first half hour of the morning. If I want to do it, I wake up a half hour earlier. If I don’t want to do it, I wake up a half hour later.

But work, sleep, family, friends, and me-time are all in competition with each other for the minutes of my day. I give sleep about 7 hours. I give work about 9 hours. Which leaves about 8 hours. That’s actually quite a lot of time. I can give 4 hours to the kids and Josh and 2 hours to friends and still have 2 hours for myself. It doesn’t work out that way most of the time, but it’s completely feasible to actually have all 5 things + fitness for a total of 6 things in any given day.

Randi Zuckerberg may very well have a busier life than I do. Maybe she can only accomplish 3 out of 5 segments of her life on a given day. I guess I don’t see this as the entrepreneur’s dilemma or even the every-person’s dilemma. I see it as the Randi Zuckerberg dilemma and the rest of us are playing fuck, marry, kill with our time for the fun of it with her tweet.

I don’t know — time always feels strained, but when you look at the facts on paper, it doesn’t make sense at all.  7 hours of sleep.  9 hours of work. (Which is a totally respectable amount of work hours per day.)  8 hours are left.  Can we really not eat meals, clean the house, help the kids with homework, have sex, grab cup of coffee with a friend, and play a video game in 8 hours of time?  8 hours is a lot of time, right?

I don’t know why Zuckerberg’s tweet bubbled up to the top of everyone’s mind this month, but it’s certainly food for thought.

Do you agree or disagree that we only have time for 3 of Zuckerberg’s 5: work, sleep, family, fitness, or friends?  And which of these do you manage on a regular basis?

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t really know much about how the military works.  I do know that there are people not only putting their lives in danger to fulfill the decisions of the Americans in charge (from the President down to their troop leaders) but some are coming back from work injured while on the job.  I assumed that the government took care of those injured from a military job, and it sounds like from this Atlantic article that they mostly do.  But not when it comes to IVF.

If you’re on active duty, your medical care is covered by the Pentagon.  And those people do have (some?) fertility treatment coverage if they discover that they need help building their family.  But if you are injured in the line of duty and therefore need to retire from the military, your care is now part of the Department of Veteran Affairs.  And lawmakers have ruled to not cover IVF.  And lest you think that is the only hoop they’ve forced injured military personnel to jump through in order to treat their body and mind, think again.  For instance, I don’t know how any woman could easily receive counseling from a rape that occurred during active duty with this law.  Do we really make our veterans go through this many layers of permission before receiving something as basic as counseling stemming from a rape while on the job?

Infertility, by the way, is discussed under section 106.

The story of the couple in the Atlantic article made me so sad even though they ultimately had their community gather around them and help them raise the money so they could conceive their twins.  It is wonderful that they had other organizations reach out.  But what about all the veterans who now cannot build their family because they were injured on the job and who don’t have their community members holding lemonade stands to take care of them?  Why are we not taking care of the people who do these difficult jobs?  Again, I know so little about the military, but I find it unfathomable that we are creating laws that harm the people who are putting their lives at risk.

At the very least, shouldn’t there be a distinction made between veterans who need fertility coverage because they happen to be infertile and veterans who need fertility coverage because their fertility was removed due to injury on the job?  I think everyone should have access to fertility treatments, but if we need to limit it for financial reasons, can we at least take care of the people who lost the ability to form their family because they were taking care of us?

There is an election coming up.  Please think twice when you are voting and put lawmakers in office that will give a voice to people who clearly need a voice and act in the best interest of their constituents and NOT lead with their own personal opinions while in office.  Thom Tillis of North Carolina, I don’t really care how you feel about abortion.  I care about military families who already lose out on so much due to the job and sometimes make enormous sacrifices such as their ability to form a family all because of their line of work.