Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Time flies. Time is money. Time waits for no one. We are so conditioned to obsess over how to get the most out of time. Or else we feel guilty. But in this new year, maybe we should reclaim our relationship with time. That’s what co-hosts Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost argue in The Atlantic’s How to Keep Time podcast. And they talked with KQED Forum’s Grace Won about how to optimize free time and why we struggle so much to comfortably do nothing. So today we’re going to share that conversation with you. Stay with us.
Grace Won: Welcome to Forum and Happy New Year. I’m Grace Won in for Mina Kim. We’re joined by the co-hosts of a new Atlantic podcast, How to Keep Time. We’re joined by Becca Rashid, a producer for The Atlantic. Hi, Becca.
Becca Rashid: Hi, Grace. Thanks for having me.
Grace Won: Great to have you here. And Ian Bogost, he’s a contributing editor for The Atlantic and a professor of arts and sciences at Washington University in Saint Louis. Hi Ian.
Ian Bogost: Hey, Grace.
Grace Won: Welcome to forum to the both of you and I. When I started listening to your podcast, I thought of this soap opera which begins, you know, like Sands and the hourglass, these are the days of our lives. And that’s kind of what you guys are examining, how we are dealing with time on a day to day basis. And, Becca, I thought it was kind of fascinating that essentially the first episode of the podcast is about wasting time. Are you comfortable with wasting time, or is that thought of of not using your time productively? Like, does it make your skin crawl?
Becca Rashid: It not only makes my skin crawl, I’m so conditioned to think of every moment not being used productively as wasted time. So we start that episode with sort of my daily routine, my morning commute. If I’m not reading something on my phone or, you know, getting in touch with my family, staying on top of something, it feels like that is just an hour of the day wasted. And a lot of what Oliver Burkeman talks about in that episode is we’re so conditioned to sort of instrumentalized every moment and every minute of the day in that way, that free time or time that might be going to just, you know, reading a book or doing something that doesn’t have a future focused reward feels like a waste when thinking about it that way is sort of the key problem we all have.
Grace Won: Well, you mentioned Oliver Burkeman, and this is a, uh, thinker and a writer who is deep into the world of being productive and had a column in The Guardian about it. And then he had an epiphany about all that productivity and the hacking time, things that he was doing. What did he discover?
Becca Rashid: So I’m sure we’ve all gone through phases where we’re trying to use the Pomodoro technique or, you know, set a million alarms on our phone to make sure that we’re, you know, getting to all of the tasks that Ian says. I would also argue Ian can juggle tasks much better than he’s letting on.
Becca Rashid: But his epiphany was basically that at the end of the day, none of these time management hacks were really getting him to this feeling of getting on top of everything, getting to check off on every box on the To-Do list, and ultimately, that might that desire to get on top of time might be coming from this fantasy that we can be limitless in a way that we don’t have to make tough decisions about what we choose to spend our time on. Because with every choice we make on what to spend our time on, we are forgoing something else we could have been doing right. So sort of that tradeoff in what we decide to do with our time is inevitable.
Becca Rashid: There’s no way that there is one thing that you would do without giving up something else. So when he realized that there is no sort of limitless place that you could get to, where you’re always on top of time, you’ve controlled the day. You’ve managed every minute of the day. He sort of gave it all up. And the epiphany was that. You know, the time is withering away whether or not we want to admit it. And that sounds bleak. And a lot of what Ian and I explore on the podcast is managing that sort of sense of existential dread that comes from realizing that. But that was the epiphany he came to.
Grace Won: So you can’t control time. I mean, if time is our most precious commodity in, uh, shouldn’t we be averse to wasting it?
Ian Bogost: When you think about it though, you can’t really waste your time. It’s it’s not like food, you know, like if you. We just had the holidays. Right. And, you know, we made a bunch of food at home and we didn’t eat at all. And we put some of it in the fridge. And inevitably we threw some of it away because nobody wanted to go back to it. But with time, with your time, you can never really waste it. You are always there in time, in your body and mind, and things are happening to you and around you. And so when we talk about wasting time, what we’re really talking about is that that forward looking,.
Ian Bogost: Future looking desire that that the sense of wasting time comes from not yearning to use our time in a way that gets us somewhere we’re not, that gets us to the next promotion, or even just to the end of the day, so that we can go to sleep and do it all over again, whether it’s a short or a long time frame. We’re always looking forward when we think about wasting time, but the the moment you give that up that I it’s very hard to give up and realize, well, here I am, the time is going to pass. The same amount of it will pass for me no matter what I do. Then you have new choices and you can choose to try to experience that that now ness in a way that you might not be familiar with and that you might be missing out on.
Grace Won: Well, Oliver Burkeman talks about the average person having, you know, approximately 4000 weeks of time, which when I read that and heard that, I was a little startled and kind of depressed. Um, so, Ian, when you think about that, you know, having only 4000 weeks of time, what does that make you do? Does it make you feel more productive, less productive?
Ian Bogost: I think the the key to this innovation in an Oliver Burkeman’s book, which is called 4000 weeks, right, is that it’s like a familiarization tactic. So you’re used to thinking about your time on Earth, your finite time on Earth, maybe in terms of years, like maybe I’ll live to 77 or whatever the average age is, or maybe longer to 85 or something like that. And I know what my age is now and where I am on that path, and that’s sort of our normal and ordinary sense of it. But if you think about a week, which is, you know, which just fly by, right?
Ian Bogost: We just had one, we’re going to have a, you know, we’re already in the middle almost of a new week or the first week of 2024, and it’s almost half over. We didn’t even notice. So 4000 weeks feels like a very small number of these. Very easily spent a units of time. So it’s that it’s really the idea of like de familiarizing you from to. It’s the same amount of time as you were going to have when you lived 70 or 80 years. Right. But you’re now forced to look at it in a different way. So at first I was very frightened and quite shocked, in the same way that I think many readers of his book were like, wow, that’s that’s it.
Ian Bogost: I just I just burned up a week doing absolutely nothing, and I now I only have however many of them left. But but if you if you recognize well, you know, that means that they are burning up right. So now I have to start thinking more deliberately about what it is I’m doing with each of those weeks. And I think the week is also really like an interesting unit of time. It’s not like, well, someday, you know, I’m going to get the job I really want or have the partner I really want to the family or, you know, the house, whatever it is, those sort of long term goals.
Ian Bogost: So there’s only so much you can get done in a week, which breaks down into a day, which breaks back down into an hour. And I think one of the things Berkman is trying to do is to get us to look at those weeks and days and hours in a new way, to see value in just being in them, not necessarily in using them to write more emails or whatever it is we think is valuable as a stepping stone to the next great thing.
Grace Won: Well, I wanted to talk about this concept that you bring up, which is busyness. And Becca, uh, you or you encountered a friend who missed a party because they were too busy. They had to go to Crate and Barrel, apparently. Um, and setting aside whether that is an Emily Post appropriate reason to miss a party, what struck you about this person’s availability? Their busyness?
Becca Rashid: Yeah, I mean, that example is so relatable. I’ve had so many appointments of my own or sort of friend dates canceled last minute because someone had to run to Home Depot or Target or whatever it may be. And I sort of had to accept the fact that I was secondary to their scheduled, whatever it may be. Um, but in this episode, why it was so interesting to realize that busyness is not just something that happens or something that we do to sort of fill up our day to day to do lists.
Becca Rashid: It actually can be leveraged as a status symbol, sort of knowingly or unknowingly, you know, think about your friend who you can never pin down for dinner. You know, you assume that that friend has a burgeoning social life. You know, they have a lot of professional commitments. Maybe they’re busy with family. They’re juggling a bunch of things. You know, that person inevitably just has a certain level of. Availability or lack thereof, that makes us perceive them as more important or, you know, more socially valued.
Becca Rashid: And that was so interesting that in an American context, the less available someone is, the more we assume that they’re valuable and that they are. You know, their time is so scarce that to get one hour of their time for dinner or coffee is, you know, because it’s so highly valued and it’s so hard to pin them down, they must be really important and hence must have a more important role in society or in our social circle. But that’s not how it is in every country around the world.
Becca Rashid: So, you know, in Italy there is a different sense of social status where actually if you’re more occupied or you’re working longer hours, there’s an assumption that you’re having to put more hours towards labor. Hence you have less free time, and people actually have a lesser social value on that. It’s almost like a oh, I feel so bad for you that you have to work more. Whereas here, if you have to work more, you’re probably a more important person. You know, you have more responsibilities. And hence in our American, you know, capitalistic, work centric society, you must be more valued.
Grace Won: I mean, Ian is being busy away to fend off the existential dread that time is slipping away. It’s is it a cop out from being.
Ian Bogost: Oh, sure, it definitely is. And and I think we know it and we’re where we’re concerned about and we kind of don’t know what to do about it. So when you find yourself saying or hearing someone say, I’m really busy, you know, they’re panicking. Um, it’s like a signal that they don’t know why they’re doing the things they do they’re doing, or they might not know why they know what they’re doing. I have to send all these emails. I have to get this report done. I have to go, you know, to the event that I promised, I have to to pick on my kids. I have to cook dinner.
Ian Bogost: I have all these things that I have to do what they mean, why I’m pursuing them instead of something else, what their value is to me or to society at large. Those questions can go unanswered when you just kind of bundle it up in this sense of generic general busyness, which of course has enough cultural, you know, cultural meaning, shared cultural value that people will just kind of kind of nod, um, and then you get to the end of the day and, you know, if you stop yourself and you look back at it and you say, what did I accomplish and why?
Ian Bogost: Um, whether it’s in relation to your goals or just in the sense of kind of being being in your, in your head and body and life and community and family and all of this thing, you may think, well, I don’t like the way, uh, that I, that I spent that time even though it was even though it was full. But it’s still difficult to make those changes because there’s just so much to do. How do you start? How do you even begin to kind of unravel the spaces where you would find time to just be in time? That’s a really a challenge, especially in America.
Ian Bogost: There’s a terror in it. Um, this, that, that when you don’t fill your time with some activity, whatever it is, then you’re left to, you know, just kind of be alone with the world in your thoughts, uh, within it. And it’s so easy to find something to do, even. It’s just picking up your phone and scrolling through social media that we’ve gotten out of the habit of, of feeling that sense of of care, even even the fact that I’m describing it as a sense of it doesn’t need to be that way, but it’s become such because it’s so easy to find just something to do, something new to see that that protects us from having to feel like, okay, well, here I am. What does that mean? What do I make of things?
Grace Won: Well, we have a couple more comments coming in. Uh, Julia writes I always have to be moving, doing and keeping busy. I wake up, exercise, and then if I’m not going off to work, I’m cleaning or organizing, doing, doing, doing. I find it very difficult to relax or do nothing. Am I wasting my time? Is Julia wasting her time Ian?
Ian Bogost: She’s not. I mean, you need some of this time where you’re doing nothing so you can feel as I take a breather from the doing. Otherwise you don’t know what it means to do. You’re just doing all the time. Uh, but, you know, in our in our in our last episode, uh, we also talked about, uh, what it means to rest. And rest doesn’t mean sitting around, necessarily. It’s not like napping, although that’s a part of it. You also, you know, hobbies, other kinds of activities, doing something that keeps you busy.
Ian Bogost: But it is different from your work life or your family life or your short life. That’s an important way of resting as as well. So when you when you hear this drive to use, you know less of your time productively, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should spend all of it or more even more of it, uh, just sitting around, take some naps, you know, do get to get a good night’s sleep, relax in order that you can feel what it’s like to be in your own head and be comfortable with that. But finding activities that are kind of off the books that are different from the rest of your life, that can help too.
Grace Won: Well, I mean, is that bad writing? Um, because you you can’t. The concept of bad writing shows up in the podcast, and I literally laughed out loud when I heard it. I’ll tell our listeners what that is.
Becca Rashid: Uh, the self-care trend on TikTok among teenagers. Um, bed rotting, is basically laying in bed all weekend and sort of passively scrolling on your phone or, um, whether it’s sort of an active statement against being overworked or overly productive. It made me laugh, too, because I really admired the way that young people were sort of making leisure this thing that they deserve, and not something that they need to be conditioned out of.
Becca Rashid: Or, you know, the way that previous generations are maybe more conditioned into productivity or making the most of every minute. They’re like, no, we’re going to change the narrative on this. We can reclaim our leisure time because it’s something we deserve. It’s something that people are entitled to. And cultural influence is such a big part of this. And why, you know, being present in the moment or using our leisure time in the way that we wish.
Becca Rashid: I mean, even if you are having lunch with a coworker, both of you are sort of checking your phones and wanting to get back to the office, right? Or at anything related to busyness or everything we’ve talked about there, sort of the other person that you’re dealing with, and you’re hoping that you both support each other in using your leisure time, but there are all of these ways that we’re conditioned to make sure that we are busy and occupied.
Grace Won: Well, Jane writes, all of the peak experiences of my life involve losing all sense of time. We’ve been talking about the new Atlantic podcast, How to Keep Time. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts. It’s something to put on your your playlist. Thanks, Becca, for being here.
Becca Rashid: Thank you so much, Grace.
Grace Won: And Ian. Thank you.
Ian Bogost: Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.
Grace Won: We’ve been talking to Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost, the co-hosts of How to Keep Time. You’ve been listening to Forum. I’m Grace Won in for Mina Kim.
