You can carve out blocks of time for regular exercise, or for volunteer, religious, or artistic commitments during your 168 hours. But what about those small bits of free time that appear during our weeks? I’m talking about those 30-minute chunks when the car pool hasn’t brought your kids home from soccer practice yet, or while dinner is in the oven, or even while you’re on the train commuting to work. While you can combine some of these chunks into more meaningful blocks with good schedule control, that won’t get rid of all of them. One of the reasons smoking remains as popular as it does is that lighting up a cigarette provides a portable 10 minutes of pleasure and relaxation for less than fifty cents a pop.
Television, likewise, can be enjoyed in 23-minute TiVo’d increments at any point.
For more meaningful options, though, go back through your “List of 100 Dreams” and choose elements of a few to incorporate into your days. Make two lists: one of activities that take half an hour or less, and another of activities that take less than 10 minutes. Then, figure out ways you can make these two sets of activities as easy as lighting up a cigarette or turning on the TV any time a bit of leisure shows up on your schedule.
For instance, on the half-hour front, as noted in Chapter 1, Jill Starishevsky writes poems on her commute from Manhattan to the Bronx. For that, she needs to have a piece of paper and a pen in her briefcase.
What else can you do while going to or from work? If you’re taking mass transit like Starishevsky, you’re golden. When I used to ride the express bus from Bethesda, Maryland, to Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, in the mornings, I worked my way through a list of the top novels of the twentieth century as the bus worked its way through traffic. I almost—almost—missed that excuse to read when I started working from home in New York. If you’re driving, you can listen to audiobooks with a purpose: all the works of Shakespeare, perhaps, or a course on the history of the Bible. You can listen to the great symphonies or operas you’ve always meant to become familiar with. People waste incredible amounts of time commuting. Even if you’re just in the car half an hour every morning and evening 5 days a week, you could work through Wagner’s entire Ring Cycle in a month. Then listen to it all again and become familiar with the themes. But to do that, you have to plan. You have to get to the library or buy these CDs or mp3s.
You don’t want to get stuck listening to morning drivetime radio shock jocks when you meant to listen to Wagner just because you failed to take action.
Noncommuting time opens up more options. In less than half an hour, you can handwrite notes to three elderly relatives, if you have stationery, stamps, and their addresses on hand. You can take a bubble bath, if you’ve got the bubbles. If you’re artsy, carry your camera around with you and take some pictures, or bring a pencil and notebook and sketch the plants in your doctor’s waiting room. Keep a Kindle in your briefcase so you can read a few more pages in that Michael Crichton novel or jump over to Jane Austen if you’re looking for a change of pace. Pop in an instructional yoga DVD and learn some new poses. Go for a walk and really observe your surroundings. Maybe there’s inspiration there for a song, a poem, a blog post, or even a solution to a knotty work problem. Play hide-and-seek in the backyard with your kids.
Make collages with them. In 30 minutes you can practice a musical instrument, sing Christmas carols, or learn some folk songs. You can call a friend. You can nap. You can research your next vacation, or even plan a fantasy one for the no doubt distinct possibility that someone will call up and offer you a $25,000 voucher that can be used only for travel.
The 1-10-minute list is trickier, but there are still options beyond hauling out the Blackberry. Theresa Daytner from Chapter 1 reads Hardy Boys novels with her sons in 10-minute spurts before school opens.
While waiting for items to heat up in the microwave, I am now in the habit of dropping to the floor and holding a plank pose or doing push-ups instead of flipping through the Pottery Barn catalogue. Pay-offs include stronger arms and abs, and less desire for pricey throw pillows. You can pray while waiting for
the elevator, or write in your journal while waiting to pick up your kids from school. You can brainstorm new ideas for your “List of 100 Dreams.” You can read a poem or religious texts—if you have them handy. Keep a coffee-table art book somewhere in your office, and study a painting while you’re waiting for a colleague to join a conference call. Keep a folder of images that make you happy on your computer:
your kids as toddlers, pictures from your wedding or honeymoon, landscape photos of places you’d like to go. Send your spouse a romantic text message. Send your kids a funny one just to check in. Use the time to check your schedule and make a restaurant reservation somewhere your family has been hoping to try.
Or . . . you can watch TV. But make sure you control it, rather than it controlling you. Decide ahead of time how much television you want to watch during any given week. Seven hours—1 hour a day—is plenty. That includes movies or children’s videos; despite the popular belief among some parents, in an era in which marketers slap movie characters on every product imaginable, there is nothing more worthy or moral about a DVD than a television show. Choose the few programs you enjoy most, and TiVo or record them. Watch them at a time that is convenient for you. Fast-forward through the commercials, snuggle with your kids or partner while you’re watching, and turn the TV off as soon as your chosen program is done.
Getting in the habit of thinking through your leisure time takes some practice. It certainly isn’t easy for me to remember to stick leisure planning on my to-do list. I do OK with running because it’s a near-daily habit, and choir because it requires a commitment at the same time every week. But filling the free time of my evenings and weekends is a different matter. Indeed, ironic as it sounds, I got so busy this week cranking out this 9,000-word chapter on how to master one’s leisure time that I forgot until late Thursday that the calendar was about to smack into Memorial Day weekend. Three-day summer weekends are a rare and precious thing. A quick glance at the weather revealed that it was going to be a glorious string of May days. I was determined not to lose the weekend to chores, TV, and inefficient bouts of work. So what were we going to do?
Figuring that late was better than never, my husband and I used Friday morning to mash together a plan.
Here’s what it wound up looking like. On Friday, Jasper had to be picked up early from day care, so rather than go home and plop him in front of Elmo, I decided to bring him to our apartment-complex pool, a place I’d been meaning to take more advantage of as soon as the weather got warm. Instead of watching TV after Jasper went to bed, I made a point of sitting on the balcony and reading Mrs. Dalloway for a blissful, uninterrupted hour. We extended Michael’s work car rental, and on Saturday drove to Ocean Grove, New Jersey, a cute little seaside town 75 minutes from New York, where we’d rented a cottage for a week three years before. We hadn’t even known we were expecting Jasper the last time we were there. This time we got to watch our toddler play in the sand, eat fries at Nagle’s, and attempt to spoon rapidly melting soft-serve ice cream into his mouth. We drove back that night, then got everyone to church on Sunday morning. We made it to the Central Park petting zoo early enough that the peacocks were still strutting about with a boldness that is possible in the midst of ten slobbering toddlers, but not in the midst of a hundred. Jasper had a clear shot at feeding the lambs. I went for a run during Jasper’s nap. Having done enough at that point to make the weekend feel “full,” I let things go more free form, except that I tried, consciously, to fill open spaces by reading Bel Canto instead of People magazine’s write-up on Bristol Palin’s baby (OK, I read that, too). I tried to practice the principle of alignment by scheduling a playground play date for Jasper on Monday with a friend whose parents were expecting a second baby at the same time we were.
I did work some in concentrated bursts when I wouldn’t be interrupted—1 hour very early on Sunday morning, 1.5 hours on Sunday night, two hours on Monday afternoon while Jasper slept, and another 2.5 after he went to bed. Yes, I know that working on weekends and vacation days is a work-life-balance faux pas, but to me, work-life balance means actually balancing the two; a day lacking contact with the printed
word feels as strange as a day of working around the clock. As the famed-opera-singer-turned-hostage Roxanne Cross says in Bel Canto, “I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m not singing. I don’t have any talent for vacations.” Still, all in all, I felt reasonably rejuvenated by the end of Memorial Day weekend. I felt motivated to tackle another tough workload, or at least to spend 15 minutes thinking through my next patch of leisure time. That way I wouldn’t sit around as lost as the Bel Canto captives, with my fingers drumming incessantly on the arms of chairs.