Get it all done and still be human : a personal time-management workshop [Rev. ed.] 0932086217, 9876543210

Citation preview

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A PERSONAL TIME

MANAGEMENT WORKSHOP

ITALL

DONE AND STILL

BE HUMAN TONY & ROBBIE FANNING

Digitized by the Internet Archive in

2014

https://archive.org/details/getitalldonestilOOtony

Get

Done and

It All

Still will help

Human

Be

you manage your time,

decide what's important to you,

and in

the process, improve the quality of your life.

Reactions to the First Edition: "One of the

best features of this time-manageis its immediate impetus to action Detailed strategies for coping with the major demands on one's time intriguingly practical and adaptable." Publishers Weekly

ment how-to .

.

.

.

.

.

"The Fannings' message: do the

satisfying things leave routine until last and get it out of the way as quickly as possible through careful planning strategy ... Its humorous, imaginative approach will make it appeal to a wide readership." Library Journal first,

Winner, Medical Self-Care Book Award:

"A fascinating, genuinely useful guide to getting your act together without letting it make you uptight. Suggests you plan for satisfaction not productivity, then provides a number of most useful planning tools." Medical Self-Care

Dedication To Mark Twain, who really understood the evil effect Ben Franklin has had on our lives

Acknowledgments to Jane Warnick, for introducing us to Tony Buzan's Use Both Sides of Your Brain, from which we learned the patterning technique; Cate Keller, for standing by the day we left for our cross-country bike trip; the staff of the Atherton (CA) Library, for patiently finding all the books we needed; Marilyn Green, for years of great tips; Oscar Patterson, for identifying But First the precursor of Butt First; the example, both positive and negative, of some close friends; and all the readers who have taken the time to write us with reactions, tips, and suggestions.

Thanks

,

Revised Edition, Copyright

©

1990 by Tony and Robbie Fanning

ISBN 0-932086-21-7 Library of Congress Catalog Card

Number 89-092123

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

No pan

of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publishers, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in review. For information, write Kali House, c/o Open Chain in writing

Publishing

Inc.,

PO Box 2634-B,

Menlo

Park,

CA

94026.

Designed by Tony Fanning Cover design by Rob Pawlak Drawings by Tony Fanning Proofreading by Fanning

K

Kali 1

House

is

an imprint of Open Chain Publishing

234567890 9876543210

Inc.

Get It All Done and Still Be

Human

A Personal Time-Management Workshop

Tony and Robbie Fanning

m Kali

House

•

Menlo

Park,

CA

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

Contents Preface to the Second Edition Preface

Sketch a picture of your life as it is right now using quick and simple new

—

,.^t little

^

.

-„

,.

thing to relieve

How to use Part

1

Before you go further Step 1: Lay out your Life Pattern

5

Make your Wish List Add y° ur wish List to y° ur Life Pattern

7 9

2:

List uppers

3:

Do it now!

and downers

A modest start, a little payoff Pick a dream

The

basic tools of time

If you

management

meet resistance

Cheap

trick

Write your your Presume What to put in your Presume How to start your Presume What to do after you finish it

Step

4:

What to do with it in six months What your Presume does for you Presume: remembering the future

on

it.

materials you have to

11 15 15

16 16 18 19

20 21

22 24 24 25 26

ran z: ryi u ^ rj What you've accomplished

A perilous juncture

Now pause to

consider the raw

2 2 3

Patterning

Step Step

your frustration and get back on track.

You have taken stock ofyour life and acted

ix

rani.A^n uiy

tools—to see why you often feel that you aren >t getting things done. Then do one

viii

Can your body take it? Your body needs exercise Nutrition

work with: your body and your mind.

Like body,

like

mind

Body contact Is

your head screwed up? Like mind, like body Exercise works here, too Breathe easy

28 29 29 30 32 33 34 34 35 36 36

The wrongest approach Write

it

out, talk

it

out

Are you irrational enough? Laughter Sleeping/dreaming Arts, crafts, and your hands To enjoy yourself, prepare yourself

Reading List

Part 3:

36 37 37 39 40 41

43 45

TEN TIME-GOBBLERS

How to use Part 3

48 starve ... 49 how to them time-gobblers and Ten 49 Synchronizing 50 What is a "waste of time" for you? Efficiency experts don't cut it any more .... 50 52 1. Telephone 56 2. Television 59 3. Car Trips / 62 4. Trivia 71 5. Shopping 76 6. Clutter, mental and physical 7. Drop-in Visits 81 84 8. Meetings 9. Waiting 86 10. Mental Blocks 89

—

Everybody needs a bag of tricks for dealing with time-

These tricks designed to reare

scarcity.

lieve the

most

pain ofyour

common

time-

wasters.

.

Part 4:

TEN HUMAN TOOLS

Human tools for human beings 1.

Aim

to feel good, not to

do more

2.

Remember: you're

3.

Defend your peak periods

4.

Make time to make more time

5.

Pattern your

6.

Pile

7.

Unload; say "NO!" Do it now!

8.

and

in charge

lists

file

Say "YES!" to life 10. Stretch and stay flexible How to keep your tools sharp 9.

95 96 97 99 103 104 107 110 113 113 115 116

Your bag of tricks should do more than overcome common time-wasters. These ten tools

work in

many different make

situations to

the time you need to get

it

all

done.

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

Every bag of timetricks should have

some devices for making better use of the time you actually have available

Part 5: 1.

Cooperation

2.

Public libraries Access to resources

3.

6.

Get up earlier/stay up later Children's books Some machines

7.

Children

8.

Communities

9.

Mail-order guides

4. 5.

to

you. These ten time-stretchers will

workforyou.

TEN STRETCHERS

.

10. Serendipity

You don't have conquer time

to

all

by

Part

6:

1.

Conquer lateness

4.

Learn to live as a couple Give your time to others Watch your time language

5.

Respect others' time

3.

improving how you interact with others.

You

aren't the only

one who

suffers from

time-scarcity.

Our

common

OTHER PEOPLE

2.

yourself Make more time for yourself by

Part

7:

132 134 136 137 138

PERSPECTIVE

A tack in the sole of your foot

A little light, please Did you think you invented

frantic?

view of time can make us

Our pictures

about the way we use time. Put this

Key aspects of our time picture

frantic

into perspective

be

less frantic.

and

.

118 119 120 121 122 123 .124 126 126 128

of time

There are other images of time Linearity

Segmentation Future orientation

The down side The work/free time

Work Work

time time

vs.

split

free time

Workaholics Free time We don't have time for Body maintenance Our Things

Making

decisions

Enjoying the family

140 142 142 143 145 146 147 148 149 149 150 150 151

152 it

153 155 155 157 159 160

Making love

161

Why we feel we have no time In

summary

Stop the world! Another way

Ten

relaxed rules for managing time

....

163 164 166 167 168

APPENDIX One-week calendar

Bibliography

169 170 171 172 174

Index

178

About the authors

181 182 182 182

One-year calendar Maintenance checklist Resource list

An afterword

A whimsical offer And

a suggestion

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

Preface to the Revised Edition In the ten years since the

first

publication of Get

Done and Still Be Human, technological changes have made our lives both saner and more frantic.

It All

We can time-shift via VCRs, phone-answering machines, and voice mail. But we've also experienced a general speeding up and compressing of our lives: 15-second TV commercials, music videos, fax machines, cellular phones; even the decade's drug of choice, cocaine, is hyperactive. The

net effect has been:

varieties of guilt,

more jumpiness, more

more ways

by lack of time, more

to feel

overwhelmed

stress.

a causative factor in disease. In consequence, the medical profession has de-

Stress, of course,

is

cided to add to our stress by telling us that everything (eating, drinking, sex, excreting, breathing) is far more dangerous than we previously believed. And "time sickness" has now become an accepted medical term.

We know that the message of this book is more needed today than it was originally. Revising it has been a pleasure. We've layered the book with updated information; tips from friends and readers; and another decade of experience.

We hope

it

helps you live a saner,

life.

Tony and Robbie Fanning

Menlo

via

Park,

CA

more

satisfying

Preface Why is it that a decent person like you is plagued by the feeling that you'll never get it all done? When you aren't sighing, "If only I had more time all

.

.

.,"

you're apologizing, "I've got to get

it

together."

Do you think you invented Frantic? You're not alone. There are millions like you, feeling harried, fractured, and short on time. Guess what? It's not all your fault. There are real,

not imagined, reasons

why we

all

share this

feeling of time-scarcity.

And there get

it all

are tricks you can learn to help you

done and

The modest aim little

easier

on

still

be human.

of this

book

yourself. This

is is

to help

a private, per-

sonal, do-it-for-yourself workshop

helping you that

you be a

approach to

manage your personal time

you can improve the quality of your

better so life.

Personal time is all we have. Many people start our workshops saying, "My personal life's in order it's my work life I'd like to organize." Most of these leave with the realization that they were dead wrong on both counts, and that, in fact, there is no solid wall between work time and personal time. •

—

We've organized this book so it won't be timeconsuming, and you can use it in short sessions. First you'll do something to break the cycle of hurry and frenzy, and begin to feel better about yourself. Then you'll use whatever tricks you need to keep the cycle from reestablishing itself.

ix

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

Only then will you

try to put your personal experience into a larger perspective.

Time management is not a goal

in itself.

Your ob-

managing your time is to get on with the Good Life, whatever that is for you; so you're the only one who can be the time-management expert for your life. We cannot be "time-management experts" for you, nor do we want to be. But it helps to learn from others, so we've included examples from our own experiences and those of our friends and students.

jective in

remember, as you become your own personal time-management expert, that your life is

Just

not a series of little boxes to be checked off as you complete tasks. Life is rough, sweet, sticky, hot and cold, even messy. And enjoyable. There's no time-management system that can handle all that. So don't try to freeze the simple tricks you learn in this book into a rigid system. You deserve better of yourself.

Tony and Robbie Fanning

Menlo Park,

x

California

ACTION

Sketch a picture ofyour life as it is right now using quick and

—

simple

new tools

—

to see

why you

often feel that you aren 't getting

Then do one little thing to relieve your frustration and get back on track. things done.

GET ITALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

Part

1:

ACTION

HOW TO USE PARTI You've got problems finding time for everything right now, so this is not meant to be another drain on your time. You can read it in little sessions, and each time read only as much as you can act on. Please act on each step in Part 1: Action. Follow the step-by-step directions. It will take you very

time and book for you. little

it

will

personalize the rest of the

who have done

are surprised how little time it takes, but you shouldn't be. The subject is something you know the most about and are most interested in: yourself.

People

this

BEFORE YOU GO FURTHER 1: Action consists of four small steps. Half can be completed in your first 20-minute period, half at another time or another day in a second 20-minute period.

Part

Some private places the midst of noise: the bathroom

your car the public library a park

your bed the zoo cafeterias

2

in

Stop. Free 20 minutes for yourself. Go to a private place where you can write. Take some sheets of paper, this book, and pens or pencils (more than one color, if possible).

You

don't need to be alone for privacy; you simply don't want someone peeking over your shoul

der.

PARTI: ACTION

STEP 1: LAY OUT YOUR LIFE PA TTERN In order to rearrange your life to get what you want done, you need a clear picture of your life as it is today. Here is a simple and surprisingly fast way to lay out that picture in a compact form.

The

object

is

to put

sheet of paper.

your

life

—

all

of

Then you can scan

it

it

—on one

at a glance.

In the center of a blank piece of paper, write the

word "Life" and draw a

Think of the many

circle

around

it:

you play each day. As they occur to you, print them on spokes radiating from the center. roles

Think about how you spent today or yesterday; think of holidays,

weekends, work days. Turn this into a porcupine of roles. Print, so you can read it more eas ily. Write only as much as you need to, leaving room for more.

You can

turn the paper around when you write.

Do

it

can.

as quickly as you

As each new

suggests

role

down

two words. You can always come back and add more later.

one

These roles name the different faces we wear, and our relationships with other people and the

itself, Jot

or

outside world: father, mother, child, lover, businessperson, friend, shopper, cook, artist, writer, student.

What

roles in your life?

so put

are the most important

No one else is going to see this,

down whatever

is

important Xoyou.

3

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

Once you are

your major roles are in the pattern, branch out from the roles. satisfied that

Start by naming the persons or objects connected with the role, or by naming the activities involved whatever pops into your mind. in those roles

—

No one is looking over your shoulder. Can you hear the voice of your sixth-grade teacher tellyou to line things up? It's your imagination—you can lay this out any way you like. ing

Don't analyze! You can

do

that later.

Keep

turning your paper around; the pattern will quickly begin to bristle with branches.

Don't hesitate to start if you run out of

over,

room.

If

your

life is

com-

plex, write smaller the

second time or use a

big-

ger piece of paper (or tape two pieces together^

You're aiming for a broad and general pattern. Try not to get

bogged down

in details.

Keep branching away from the center. The more you list, the more you'll think of. If you think of another spoke from the center. When an activity pops into your mind, insert it as another branch. By the time you're done, another

role,

put

in

the whole pattern will be ringed with activities.

Are you done? Don't read any more until you've finished your own Life Pattern. When you are satisfied with it, you are done for now.

4

PARTI: ACTION

PATTERNING Patterning (which

is

what you've been doing)

is

based on the way your brain generates ideas. You can think of it as a fancy way of outlining, but it isn't. Remember how you studied in grade school by making an outline of your subject? The Past A. When: 87 years ago B: Who: our ancestors C: What: started a

new

country

Now A.

We have this Civil War going

Patterning is merely another way to organize your thoughts. There is nothing magical about patterning: it is merely useful and fast. It does seem to mirror the way

—

human mind works.

The

the

something you're creating until you're done creating. Outlining breaks down; patterning builds up. Can you imagine Lincoln outlining his speech on the back of an envelope like

first,

trouble with outlines is that they're best for analyzing something that's already done. You can't outline

You may will

start slowly at but then the ideas

come so fast and

thick you'll barely be able to write them fast

enough.

this?

Patterning mirrors the way your brain creates ideas. The whole point of patterning is to capture information and ideas as they're generated without trying to organize them first. Applying patterning to your life allows you to see all the facets without first bogging down in setting priorities or making plans for what you want to do. It's also hard to moralize in a pattern but depressingly easy in an outline. All this explains why it's

This patterning technique doing a Life Pattern externalizes the way you worry. The ac-

— —

tivities

which show up

can't help being the ones that are closest to you, because this

method

of patterning brings out, via association, your most urgent and important activities.

so easy to get the hang of patterning.

Patterns are as unique as fingerprints. Each Life Pattern, however, is only interesting to the per-

5

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

son

who drew it.

someone

In fact,

it's

annoying to look at

else's Life Pattern.

reason we won't clutter this book and your brain with more examples of other people's Life Patterns. Unless you saw the pattern grow before your eyes, and unless you knew that person well, you wouldn't understand their thinking pattern, just as they wouldn't understand yours.

For

this

This patterning technique, incidentally, is useful any time you want to examine or organize information: what's discussed at meetings, something you're studying (kids quickly take to the patterning technique), lists of errands. It is

an

effective, fast

way to gather your

thoughts.

PARTI: ACTION

MAKE YOUR WISH LIST In your Life Pattern, you have created an overall view of your life as it is today. But some things

away in that small uncomback of your mind are all those things you've never finished and the things you've never started: your wishes and regrets. are missing. Nagging

fortable corner at the

Now is the time to sort them out. What is missing

Regrets are only wishes about the past, right?

from your life? What are you not doing that you wish you were doing or had done? Put it in your Wish List Before you write out your own wishes and regrets, look at some of the more mundane ones others have wished. .

Wish Unfinished

s

List

Unstarted

The Wish

List is not a

of unfinished chores or "must-do's." It's for list

remodel kitchen sewing pile

weight lifting wandering, time alone sewing for myself

disorganized

workbench, garage

make for

birthday present

Mom

finish

ride bike

across

United States

my degree

help at school, kids'

windows

write/answer letters

groups, library repair

plans for vacation

learn serigraphy

gardening

take business class

,

run every day

Don't think that all unfinished activities are chore-type ones, or that all unstarted ones must be creative ones.

spend time with kids meet new people

tennis lessons

hang rope swing

things you wish you were doing or had done.

for

read for pleasure

kids painting, drawing, sail

around the world

diet start

a journal

7

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

Now you do it. Write your Wish List.

Like your Life Pattern,

be

this will

for

your eyes

only, so be honest with yourself.

Set aside another 20 minutes, find a retreat, and on a blank piece of paper or at the bottom of

your Life Pattern, write:

Wish

When you make your Wish

List,

getting

it

if

you're not

done and

bothers you,

list

worry about how seems. List

it;

only.

If

it's

it.

feel

Don't it

eyes

bad

about not using dental floss every day, list it. The purpose of this exercise is to expose the nagging voices. Later,

you can

still

Unstarted

it

trivial

for your

you

List

Unfinished

and start listing. Don't go any further Wish List is completed.

until

your

them.

Some

people have trouble with the "unfinished" half. They can't think of items to put on it. A helpful viewpoint is that nothing is finished unless you're satisfied with it. So if you built a rocking horse for your kids and they've been using it for a couple of years, but it bothers you that the face hasn't been

Sail

MtRE

oPrei)

freer

Szg

0Lt>

(pgoCLf

fR/zVPS Mo fi>fl

ouly__

abbt UBW fiM er

Put your Upper/Downer Pattern with your Life Pattern and your Wish List. You'll use it again.

PARTI: ACTION

STEP 3: DO IT NOW! Look back

at

what you've done. So

far

you have:

Examined and sorted out your important roles and activities by drawing up your Life

•

Pattern.

Expanded your

•

Wish List

—

Life Pattern

—through your

into your areas of uneasiness:

WISH LIST Unfinished

Unstarted

those unfinished and unstarted activities that nag at you.

•

Put a that

like or dislike

fill

value on the activities

your time (the Upper/Downer Pattern), Uppers

you have

far

•

Used much

•

Planned, scheduled, set up time slots, or attached numbers to dreams and fantasies.

•

Holding

Zone

So

not:

time.

Downers

Done

anything other than think and write words on paper.

A MODEST START, A LITTLE PAYOFF Now it's time to do

something.

much what you choose

It

doesn't matter

to do, as long as

it

satis-

Take out your Life Pattern and your Upper/Downer Pattern. What would you really enjoy doing? Chances are it's there in one of the patterns, either imported from your Wish List to your Life Pattern or an Upper from your Upper/Downer pattern. If not, now's the time to fies

add

you.

it.

75

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

Once again, it's up to you. You are the who can choose what will satisfy you.

only one

—

work on for easy reference, we'll call it your dream. Your dream doesn't have to be a smarmy fantasy; getting the kids off to school without a hassle is as good a dream as any So pick one

to

PICK A DREAM you are harried, frazzled, fragmented, or uneasy about your personal time, it's not only because you have too much to do. Hell, we all have too much to do! Time weighs so heavily on you because you're not satisfied with most of what you do. This exercise provides you with a modest satisfaction: starting to make a dream real. If

So pick a dream to work on. It might come from your Wish List add-ons to your Life Pattern, or from your Upper/Downer Pattern. It may be as simple as picking the first item on your Wish List, or repeating an Upper. But let's not get mawkishly positive here. Never forget that some of the greatest pleasures come from the end of pain. Why not snuff a Downer? Pick a dream.

THE BASIC TOOLS OF TIME MANAGEMENT

Now you've picked a dream to work on.

It

probs

new one, but rather one that's been percolating for some time. How do you start rea

bly isn't a izing a

dream?

PARTl:ACTION

—

a modest dream and can be done in one swoop go do it! What follows is only for those dreams that can't be fulfilled in their entirety in one sweep. If it's

—

fell

BREAK IT DOWN Whatever your dream several steps.

It's likely

these steps, but

pattern

them

if

you

making it real will take that you already know

is,

don't, take the time

now

to

out.

Done?

Now pick the starting steps

(for example, calling maps, above). Remember that prying loose the first olive from the jar allows you to re-

to get

move

all

the others, that freeing the

first

log loos

The gods for the Leif

send thread

web

begun."

Smith

ens the whole jam, and

DO IT NOW! READ NO FURTHER UNTIL YOU HAVE STARTED.

17

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

IF YOU MEET RESISTANCE

why haven't you done it yet? Doesn't it seem odd to you that this exercise could be so hard, when all it says is, "Go do something that

All right,

you want to do?"

There are standard reasons why some resist this exercise the first time through, and there is a cheap trick that can help you past the resistance. •

You don Y really want to do what you said you did. If so,

pick something else. There's cer-

worse than adding another Downer to your life. tainly nothing

•

The dream still seems too big. So break it down! The object of this exercise is to start something, not necessarily to finish it now.

•

Now isn

*t

the time to start.

Then

set

it

up so

you can start next Tuesday, after lunch, but arrange it so you have no outs. Write it on your calendar. That's a first step, as good that

as any.

•

Your time is really spoken for. You don't have even a free 20 minutes to take a first step. Aw, come on now! If you've boxed yourself ir that much, you can unbox yourself. It's not necessary, as some people seem to feel, to gc on vacation, or become violently ill, or have i heart attack in order to free some breathing time. You have to make time, and preferablj before you're forced to take one of these drastic routes out.

So start again. Pick a time-consuming Downer from your Upper/ Downer Pattern, declare war on it for a day or a week, legislate it out of your

PARTI: ACTION

Surely you can find a way to put a moratorium on something you hate doing, at least for long enough to start something you like to do. Maybe the real reason you haven't life,

start to snuff

started

•

it!

is:

You're afraid to try this

cheap

start.

Well then, admit

it

and

trick:

CHEAP TRICK

A friend of ours who never seems to be frazzled by time scarcity (and who always seems to get everything done anyhow), has a trick he's played on himself since he was* seven years old. He found himself standing petrified with fear on a diving board during swimming lessons. He told himself: "I am going to count to three, slowly. When I say

have to jump. Otherwise I'll never be my whole life." He counted and jumped. It got him off the board and into the cold water. 'three,' I

able to do anything again in

Even

today,

some

thirty years later,

whenever he

has to do something that makes him clutch up, he still runs through his "1-2-3" drill. It still works. And he still believes that his backbone is

made

of marshmallow.

He still laughs when

one mentions willpower. But he does have cheap trick, and it works. Try it yourself. Let's try

once more:

DO IT NOW!

any-

this

a

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

STEP 4: WRITE YOUR PRESUME When you were setting down your activities in the Life Pattern and judging your feelings about those activities in the Upper/Downer Pattern, you were examining your present and past. In a

you wrote your autobiography's latest chapters. Now you will look to the future. But we don't want you to set goals for yourself, and we don't want you to plai your life. We want you to write a fantasy future autobiography spanning the next six months Presume (pronounced prez-zoo-may). highly compressed form,

—

In a moment we'll tell you exactly how to start, but we want to say a few words about the name we've given it. There doesn't seem to be a word to describe it, so we've coined this one. It's a form of the personal resume that you might wril six months from now if your fantasies all came true. Most of us have a work-oriented resume summarizing our past work history.

—

We could do the same for our personal lives in the past.

The Presume

is

such a resume, but

we

months from today and write it as if v> were summarizing the previous six months. The Presume tells what we want to happen over tha date

it

six

period.

PARTI: ACTION

WHAT TO PUTIN YOUR PRESUME Three rules govern anything that goes into your Presume: •

It

has to be something you want to happen.

•

It

has to be possible.

•

You have

to

be as specific about

it

as possible.

For example, you feel that your life is insufferably dull. You've read a magazine article about skydiving sounded good. Would you put skydiving into the Presume?

—

•

Do you want to do it? If it gives you the collywobbles even imagining it, you may not. But intrigues you) put not something you're not planning to do it. if it

•

Is it possible

for

it

in.

Remember,

listing as

you? Maybe

it's

a goal; you're

perhaps factors are high. Or you not:

your coronary risk suffer from paralyzing vertigo. Or high altitudes give you a nosebleed. Or your depth perception is faulty. Then you shouldn't put skydiving into your Presume; it's out of the question for you.

•

Suppose that skydiving can pass through your wanted/possible filter. When are you going to do it? Where? Do you want someone else to go with you? How do you find out about it? By the time you enter the skydiving fantasy into your Presume, put enough specifics into the description so that it sounds real: "In June, Mike and I went skydiving from the Livermore Airport. After the first jump, I liked it so much, I invited my mother to try

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

it." An entry in your Presume doesn't have be a far-fetched as that one it probably won't be (even though the example is one

—

to

that actually did happen).

HOW TO START YOUR PRESUME You'll need pencil, paper, and privacy for 20 utes.

Decide what form you want to

use,

min the one

you're most comfortable with. The following examples will help you get started.

^

l>euiA

t^ktf

>

a faMtvd ^{xA^xt^ij $ Hurt

riMLj mqmXU

tknijk -h

trf&K nuj

{p

mm

do

slurp

cw m- wl MoJzmbu

Presume

of

a dental technician

vocu

•

fh&Mt

'fyyk

j|i^dUu^i

in

paragraph form

PARTI: ACTION

The patterned Presume

of

hell

^-funnier

-*-

a harried homemaker

lusty

*

best -fnewf io ili

*

qmA, incidentally) rich

The brochure Presume

of

an electronics engineer

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

well- net lea Peach

The fantasy business-card Presume

of

banv

an accountant

Once

the form is decided, go to it! If you need a little push to get started, look back at your Life Pattern or your Wish list. The most favorable outcome, the most fantastic positive resolution, the most satisfying ending these are what go into your Presume. And if you grin or even laugh

—

while you're doing

it,

all

the better!

NOW DO IT.

Be sure

to read the note

WHAT TO DO AFTER YOU FINISH IT

on page 182, "A Whimsical Suggestion."

Read

Fold it up neatly. Stick it in the back oi this book. Put a note on your calendar to read six months from today. Forget it for now. it.

it

WHAT TO DO WITH IT IN SIX MONTHS Read

it,

noting with

amazement

that

many

of

t

formerly unthinkable fantasies have unaccount ably become real or almost real. Write another Presume, covering the next six months.

24

PARTI .ACTION

WHAT YOUR PRESUME DOES FOR YOU Your Presume

of self-fulfilling fantasies. During the six months between the time you bury it (in the back of this book) and the time you exhume it, the Presume acts on you in a subtle and is

a

list

almost magical manner.

You must have had

this

experience.

One day as

you are reading, your eye fastens on a word: "threnody," for example. You don't know what it means. It bothers you, so you ask someone else or look it up in the dictionary, and in the next 24 hours you come across the word "threnody" at least three more times. How does that work? You may have skipped over "threnody" dozens of times before, pronouncing it "thrrrp" or "bzzzt" to yourself; it* never made an impression on you. But now you have enabled conscious recognition of the word, by making the effort to learn its meaning. You have sensitized yourself to it.

Your Presume operates on you in the same way. By taking the time to commit them to paper, you ;

sensitize yourself to

the months, you

your fantasies. Then, over

make

a series of micro-choices,

each of which brings you closer to realizing the .

fantasies.

Whenever

you pivot

in the direction of the fantasy,

a small turning point occurs,

and

these turning points seem to occur often, because you are sensitized to them.

OK, OK. Hypnopaedia

means

So there sies;

no need to threnodize over your fantasimply lay them out in your Presume (you'll

find that

is

it's

very

much

like

hypnopaedia).

"sleep-learning"

Now watch how many times you run across that word in the next week.

25

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

PRESUM& REMEMBERING THE FUTURE In T.H. White's classic novel about King Arthur': childhood, The Sword in the Stone, Merlyn the Magician can foretell the future by remembering it. He lives backward in time, so that what would

appear to be ahead for us would be in his past. Merlyn's power of prophecy depends on his memory, though he does not often use it consciously.

The self-fulfilling aspect of the Presume feels much like that. By treating your fantasies as if they had already become real, by sitting down six months from now (in your imagination) and writ you put yourself into the position oi Merlyn the Magician. When you reach a choosing point, you take the opportunity to turn toward realizing your fantasy, and it feels like a dim memory of something that has already happened a deja vu. You may even forget about the Presume for a half a year, but it will keep working on you and for you. You can count on it ing a review,

—

PAUSE

You have taken stock ofyour life and acted on it. Now pause to consider the raw materials you have to work with: your body and your mind.

27

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

Part 2:

PAUSE

WHAT YOU'VE ACCOMPLISHED You

need to do something about your conviction that you don't have enough time.

time to draw up your Life Pattern, expanded it by including your Wish List, an< in your Upper/Downer Pattern quickly assessed how you like your present use of time. Along with a broad picture of how you spend your time you judged how much satisfaction you get out of

You used a little

WISH LIST Unfinished

started out with a

Unstarted

it.

Uppers

Holding

Zone

Then you picked a dream and started to make it come true. The modest payoff in satisfaction proved to you that how you feel about what you dc is more important than how much you get done.

Downers

And PRESUME

xx/xxlxx

along the way you learned a few useful

tricks, like patterning.

Then you

cast a

your Presume.

magic gesture

at the future wit

You put your dreams and

fanta-

on paper, externalizing them; then you set them aside to work on you over the next six sies

months. If

you have

faithfully

yourself over

•

done these

now. You

things,

check

should notice

a slight relief from the harried, breathless,

hassled feeling; and

•

28

modest confidence that you can do what yo want to.

PART 2: PAUSE

A PERILOUS JUNCTURE You may still feel

never get

done, but at least you've made a start on the important things. You do know better where you're heading.

cut

as

if

you'll

it

all

You know some of the activities you need down on or eliminate to get there. You've

to

learned a few tricks to keep yourself on track.

Don't

let

your expectations grow too big

yet.

Be-

where angels fear to tread, examine the raw material you have to work with: your body and mind. Unless you want to lay yourself open to more frustrations which will add to your sense of time-scarcity, answer for yourself: fore charging in

•

Can your body take

•

Are your emotions and mental in the way?

•

Are you

it?

states getting

sufficiently irrational?

CAN YOUR BODY TAKE IT? Your body can absorb amazing amounts of punishment, but not a steady diet of it. You cannot go all night and all day without bad effects on your body. You can't even lead a reasonably

go, go,

active ter

life

unless you tend to your body.

how much

planning or

listing

No mat-

or patterning

you do, no matter how much you intend to accomplish, if your body isn't healthy you won't have the energy to realize your desires.

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

YOUR BODY NEEDS EXERCISE All the muscles of the body, including the heart,

Many people scoff at through their twenties and thirties. "I don't believe in exercise," we've heard people sneer. "I think that putting a clown suit on and running deteriorate unless used.

this

down

the street

and

never exercise and look at me, I'm fine."

I

is

ridiculous.

I

drink and

I

smoke

clairvoyance to foretell their future; look at their counterparts now in their forties and fifties, with their string of infirmities bad It

takes

little

—

backs, ulcers, insomnia, constipation, and the Big

One, heart trouble. One senses a feeling of betrayal in them, as

down, and Former President Richard Nixon was in the

it's

if the universe has too late to remedy.

let

them

No matter what your mouth says, your body does knows what

not

listen. It

habit of chuckling for

get

it, it

news cameras, "When feel the urge to exercise, lie down until

Certainly by now, with the

it

needs;

when

it

doesn't

protests.

the

!

I

it

passes."

developed didn't

When

he

phlebitis,

later

Former baseball great Mickey Mantle probably it

best:

"If

I'da

known my body had last this long, I'da

better care of

it."

third decade, you know that your body needs endurance or "aerobic" exercise.

its

it

sound nearly as

funny.

said

Body Boom entering

to

took

Look around at active people you admire. Most of them could not accomplish what they do without exercise running, walking, bicycling, swimming. They make time to exercise because it gives them the energy to do everything else.

—

When you

are in shape (meaning you are not overweight, you are fairly strong, moderately flexible, and your body can process oxygen effi-

you can count on better endurance. That means you can work all day and still come home ready to do whatever's on your Wish List. There are many other predictable benefits of regular exercise, too: sound sleep, an increased feelciently),

30

PART 2: PAUSE

ing of well-being

from

and

sexiness, regularity, relief

tension, strong attractive muscles, lowered

blood pressure and heart rate, and much more. Not only can you increase your energy for getting things done, but you can increase your satisfaction in being alive, which is every bit as important.

So you must attend to your body. But how much exercise is enough for you? And what if you've tried to exercise in the past and failed to keep it up? Don't despair. Start over, but start right. have a thorough physical to ensure that isn't something wrong with you either something holding you back (like anemia) or something dangerous (like "silent" heart problems). Then be kind to yourself in the beginning. Don't declare, for example, "I'm going to run a mile every day." This is unreasonable for a beginner, and after you miss the first few days, you'll probably quit. One more frustration, one more failure: exactly what you don't need.

First,

—

there

If

it's

taken you 15 years

to grow to your present state of flab, it's madness to think you can get in shape quickly. You'll only frustrate and possibly injure yourself by setting up an impossible exercise schedule.

Rather, pick three days of the week and a sport or activity that involves breathing deeply for 10 or 20 minutes (such as running, walking, swimming, bicycling, or jumping rope).

Write on your calendar exactly when you will exercise. (A good time is before any meal, but it's your life, so you know when is best for you.)

Then

try to keep moving for at least 20 minutes each session. When you get out of breath, slow down but keep moving.

Be

gentle with your body. You don't have to turn exercise into a grim second job. Take it slow and long and if it hurts, stop. Have faith that the exercise

you've chosen,

if

continued regularly,

will

31

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

have a cumulative effect on your body. It'll become easier. Over the coming months, you'll notice the improvement.

A common complaint cise

when

want

I

get

"I'm too tired to exer-

is,

home from work.

burn up the

Besides,

I

don't

have left by exercising." In fact, exercise brings oxygen into your system to move that tiredness on through. Regular exercise rejuvenates you rather than tiring you more. to

little

energy

I

And don't be

Try to imagine yourself as a person who will exercise the rest of your life.

If

you miss a day or a or even a month

week

exercise,

it

because

in

you'll eventually

back

of

won't matter, the long run,

ease

into the routine.

discouraged if you miss exercise days. At one time or another, everybody has trouble coaxing poor old bones out of a warm bed to exercise. Some people seem to program themselves for failure at exercise and then triumphantly give up. "I tried running every day, but the snows came and I quit." So what! Start again, but with an exercise routine that doesn't call for daily dedication. You don't have to run or swim every day, unless it feels so good that it's worth it After you've been exercising three times a week for several months, you'll be ready to step up your exercise program. Read one of the books in our reading list at the end of this section for a more accurate description of how much exercise is

right for you.

NUTRITION Your

physical condition

is

also strongly affected

although many choose not to acknowledge this. Obviously, you can be wiped out by eating too much, or by eating too little. An extraordinarily thin neighbor of ours once called,

by what you

32

eat,

PART 2: PAUSE

complaining of light-headedness and dizziness. She was also very depressed about her life, her marriage, and her new baby.

"What have you eaten today?" we

asked.

"Oh, I can't eat until tonight," she replied. "We're going out and I'm saving up for a dish of ice cream and a drink."

"What does

that have to

I gain weight a day."

"Well, ries It

was no

if I

do with

eat

it?"

more than 800

calo-

feat of genius to figure out her prob-

lem. If all that she ingested in a day was shellac thinner and ice cream, naturally she'd act a bit

weird and not have any energy. We suggested that she have her doctor check her for hypoglycemia. She did, and was diagnosed instead as having anorexia, the plague of obsessive dieters.

You

eat to maintain your body. If your body doesn't get appropriate nutrition vitamins, min-

—

carbohydrates, and fat have the energy to get it all done. erals, protein,

—you won't

LIKE BODY, LIKE MIND Likewise, medicine, food additives, alcohol, and drugs all affect you, often pleasantly in the short run, but with unpleasant consequences in the long run. We're not advocating a return to roots

and berries or the pure ascetic

life,

but you might

ask yourself if some of the harriedness you experience as time scarcity might not be connected with what you put in your mouth.

You could start by remembering how rushed and twitchy you felt the last time you drank too

much

coffee.

33

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

BODY CONTACT

We have other physical needs besides such body maintenance requirements as proper nutrition and sufficient exercise. For one, body contact. You can no doubt add this brief

list

to of physical interfere

states which with getting on with a

more satisfying life. But one fact is clear: if your body needs attention, you should give it. Otherwise you may find that you can neither generate the energy to get things done nor enjoy them when you do them.

Study after study has shown that babies deprived of body contact but provided with all other vital needs will die. As we grow older, we get less and less body contact from our parents, and though

we

learn to survive with

fect us.

As

adults,

less, it

we need

it

continues to af-

too, or

we

shrivel,

not physically like the unfortunate babies, but emotionally. Look around you, at the most hurried, time-obsessed people you know. Can you imagine them hugging someone affectionately?

IS

YOUR HEAD SCREWED UP?

Your perception

of time

is

also affected by your

state. If you engage in a pleasant activa relaxed way, time stretches, if you're

emotional ity in

aware of it at all. (How many times have you heard someone say, "Time sure does fly when you're having fun"?) But if you approach the same activity when you're agitated and tense, you are aware of the seconds dragging by and it is unlikely you will enjoy yourself.

Remember tests and quizzes at school? If you were confident and secure, you breezed through the questions; if you were nervous and stressedout, you may have forgotten all you learned.

34

PART 2: PAUSE

LIKE MIND, LIKE BODY All emotional states are mirrored in your physical state

and can be described

in a physiological

much

a matter of way. Anger, for example, is as certain muscles tightening, certain hormones pouring into the bloodstream, and your breath become more shallow, as it is an emotional reaction. You can't banish anger from your system by mentally ordering it gone; you also have to deal with its physical side. You have to relax those tense muscles; you have to move that adrenaline on through; and you must revert to deep breathing before your anger is really gone. Likewise, negative mental states like worry and

must be dealt with on all levels, including the physical, so that they do not interfere with your pleasure in living. But you cannot sweep negative emotions under the rug as many try to do with tranquilizers and hope they'll go away. They continue to fester and ooze out in twisted ways, one of which is definitely a feeling of never having enough time. guilt

—

—

Deal with these emotions directly and you'll soon find that you aren't as worried about not having enough time. That sounds simple, but exactly how can you deal with these powerful emotions?

Remember your

own

that

path.

you are unique. You must find

What works well

may You may

for others

work partially for you or not at all. have to wage a multi-front attack on your self-defeating emotions, while your mate may only need only

to run or to tear

ance.

paper to regain a mental balThere are many different ways of coping.

See the books in the Reading List at the end of this section if you wish to pursue the following ideas for dealing with the emotions that interfere with your pleasurable use of time.

35

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

EXERCISE WORKS HERE, TOO Any

brisk exercise of sufficient length has much

the

same

effect

on

stress, anger, etc. walk, bike ride, or

A stiff swim

can work wonders on your attitude.

One

of the easiest and fastest ways for many to deal with worry, anger, and stress is to exercise. For example, after about 20 minutes of steady running, the blood level of norepinephrine, the "happiness hormone," increases. We've often felt the anger from before a run melt during a run

and disappear after a run. (But you have to pay your dues first i.e., get in shape in order to be able to run 20 minutes at a time. That doesn't

—

"Most people believe

happen

—

overnight.

that they are thoroughly

knowledgeable about four of

life's

basic func-

tions: eating, breathing,

sexual

activity,

ation.

It

is

and

assumed

relax-

that

these functions are automatic and that any deviation from the familiar

norms

is incorrect or pathological. Working with stress disorders, it becomes immediately evident that this is inaccurate, and that serious dysfunctions frequently occur in people's eating, breathing, sexual, and relaxation habits, many of them resulting from unconscious choices."

BREATHE EASY You can learn less

energetic remedies for stress Alexander Lowen, M.D., states in Pleasure; Creative Approach to Life (see Reading List at

A

the end of this section, page 45) that "in situations of stress the average person tends to hold his breath." When you feel stress, breathe more

deeply to confront and lessen your

stress.

For many people meditation is the way to slow down, breathe deeply, relax tense muscles, and soothe the time-troubled mind. See Waiting on page 86, for another simple relaxation process.

Kenneth R. Pelletier, Mind as Healer, Mind as Slayer, Delacorte Press,

1977.

THE WRONGEST APPROACH Others turn on with drugs when they're angry or depressed, or drink, or take tranquilizers to alter their mental states. This may help if only done oc casionally, but we all know someone who chroni-

36

PART 2: PAUSE

cally uses these crutches.

The

side-effects are

worse than the original problem, and the problem is still there when the drug or drink wears off. It's like calling the fire department when your house burns, only to have them come out, turn off the alarm, and leave.

WRITE IT OUT, TALK IT OUT Another way

to confront the

emotions that de-

stroy a comfortable sense of time

is

to write

them

down

in a journal or to talk to a friend or theraExternalize what is haunting you internally through writing or talking pist.

.

Many people keep

a journal for just this purmonths of keeping a journal and it doesn't have to be done daily or even often, only when you're disturbed you may notice how you repeat certain behavior patterns, how you set yourself up so that you cannot take full advantage of your time or your life. This is a fruitful start at remedying the situation.

pose. After several

—

—

ARE YOU IRRATIONAL ENOUGH? Many of those who

most from a sense of time scarcity are admirable people whopride themselves on their logical approach to life. And that

is

suffer

precisely their problem.

They may worship rationality for good reason: it helps them get some things done, and they are rewarded usually in their work for applying it.

—

—

The November

'88 issue

of Psychology Today reports that students at Southern Methodist University who wrote for 20 minutes for four consecutive days about trau-

matic events they hadn't shared with anyone had an enhanced immune response. The number of white blood cells that fight off bacteria

and

vi-

ruses increased. Keep yourself from being sick

by

writing.

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

Ironically,

because they do not value their nonra-

tional side

and do not provide

for

its

needs, they

find that satisfaction escapes them.

Such a person may claim that he uses time efficiently, and in a twisted way, that statement is true. He might even have a schedule covering every minute of the day, and he may attack all aspects of his life using what he calls "the scientific way," "an engineering approach," or "logic." He attempts to categorize everything in this very ilcomplicated world. All this stiff lacks, in

logical,

some life

fact, is

in his life.

He becomes a victim, chained to our linear,

seg-

mented, control-obsessed American time view (see Part 7: Perspective on page 146 for a detailed discussion of this). His efficient exertions become an end in themselves, completely dissociated from their original purpose, which was to provide a satisfying

life.

He jogs with a stopwatch. It has hundredth-of-asecond splits. He looks at it every other step. The man we've What

described is a mess, no doubt about it. of us share his problem, to some extent. exactly are we missing, or at least, not giv-

ing

proper due?

But

all

its

has been described as the "left brain/right brain split." One half of the brain, it is claimed, governs rational, logical, and verbal functions, while the other controls the patternIn recent years,

it

recognizing, intuitive,

One

and creative functions.

a scientist; the other, an inarticu late artist. Whether this is a metaphor or a true physiological description doesn't matter; we recognize that each of us contains these capabilities half of us

is

PART 2: PAUSE

you have a creative part of your personality (which has nothing to do with high and lofty art). If you do not cultivate this part, it withers but you carry its dead weight with you in the form of desperation and frustration. Then you wonder what all the rushing around, all the endless deadlines and hurried activity is for, because whatever you're doing doesn't satisfy you. In particular,

—

But

this side

ing half

of you

—the

—never really

much you

neglect

it.

creative, pattern-find-

dies, regardless of

And

how

here's the evidence:

you can be feeling harried and fractured, and suddenly, magically, something will suspend time for you, erase those negative feelings, and heal wounds. a checklist of some healers that jog and tickle that part of you which has no use whatever

Here

is

for rationality:

One of our favorite funny books: The Meaning of Lift, Douglas

Adams and John

Lloyd,

Pan Books and

Faber

&

"In Life,

Faber, 1983. there are

hundreds of

many

common

ex-

periences, feelings, situations and even objects

which

we

all

know and

recognize, but for which

no words

"On the other hand, the

LAUGHTER

world

Laughter can be so powerful that you actually cry as you laugh, and later you feel wrung out and exhausted, as if you've been through a deep emotional experience. It can be as effective in relieving tension as crying and men can do it, too.

—

But what delights or convulses one person bores another, and any attempt to explain why something's funny to you is unfunny. Everyone thinks that everyone else has a weird sense of humor, but the oldest folk wisdom agrees with the most modern psychological thinking on this: a person who cannot laugh is a deeply disturbed person.

exist.

is littered

with

thousands of spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places.

"Our job, as to get these

we see

it,

is

words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes and sucklings and so on, where they

can start earning their keep in everyday conversation and make a more positive contribution to society."

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

We

need to sleep, and to dream. If you

SLEEPING/DREAMING

we need

deprive people of sleep for long periods, or

even

you consistently interrupt their dream cycles, they invariably exhibit irritability, anxiety, and eventually, psychotic behavior.

Some people

act as though the only part of

that counts

what happens when we're awake.

if

Heavy and continued

If

these

is

same people are "time

experts," they ad-

you to shave an hour or two off your "sleep schedule" because over a lifetime, this will "add two years to your usable time." Except for the rare occasions when cutting back your sleep is

vise

necessary, this

use of drugs or alcohol interferes with normal dreaming, with the results described above.

life

since

is

foolish

and dangerous advice,

many important physical and emotional

functions occur while you're asleep.

Your muscles cells

rest, your heart rate slows, the of your body repair and replenish them-

yourself.

selves. And sleep is a quiet time in which your brain dredges up and integrates for you all the fears, hopes, and buried images that make you the unique person you are. Sigmund Freud wasn't whistling "Dixie" when he used dreams as an approach to understanding psychological

tant

problems.

Keep your dreams

to

They are importo you alone but

usually exasperating if told in detail to others.

Would you

Inflict this

your friends? "Hey, this great

dream

was

I

on had

last

an ice skating rink and then it was suddenly Madison Square Gardens and was an elephant only then became a snakenight.

I

at

I

I

wait! Don't

go away."

Nightmares are a form dreaming that de-

of

serve as much attention as pleasant dreams. See the Reading List for good information on dealing with them.

40

Cherish those images as if they were your children; encourage them, coax them, learn from them. No matter what happens to your exterior life, no matter how dismal it may seem to you at times, you still have a rich inner life, and this is re vealed to you in your dreams.

Although it is not necessary, because the activity of dreaming alone is enough, you may find additional pleasure in recording some of your dreams, either by writing or drawing. Keep a notebook beside your bed and when you have a vivid memory of a dream, either jot it down or sketch the images you saw. Over the years you will amaze and delight yourself rereading the dreams you otherwise would have forgotten.

PART 2: PAUSE

ARTS, CRAFTS, AND

YOUR HANDS

The self-proclaimed atively impaired

You also need to participate and to observe, to make use of and enjoy all your senses. And humanity has worked with its hands since we be-

can often

came human. Today, however, we've chopped up life so much that some people claim, "I can't do a thing with my hands, can't even draw a

tion."

me cold, and I don't have a creative bone in my body." This may seem straight line,

music leaves

but it's also henpiddle. We believe that those people choose not to include arts, crafts, and the joyful use of their senses in their lives; but we do not believe they can 't do it. true,

You can

learn to enjoy music; you can recapture

the pleasure of looking at things; you can remind

You can draw; you can sew; you can build. These are not talents

yourself that food tastes good.

some and missing in others. As adults are embarrassed by the ineptness of our first

cre-

person

recall some unpleasant event which explains the impairment. It usually involves "educa-

How many men

learned

not to sing from

some

discouraging gradeschool music teacher? How many of us learned to hate drawing from some old prune whose only criteria for art was coloring inside the lines? Stories like these are often told with some rage. This is entirely appropriate. One should be enraged when a child is crippled for life.

innate to

we

clumsy attempts; for some the judgment of our handwork is so painful that we'd rather not try at all. As for the pleasures of our senses, we allow ourselves to get out of the habit of noticing.

Imagine whajt would happen to a child who gave up trying to walk after the first failed attempt: 80 years old, in a business suit with cigar, still crawling: "No, I'm not a walker. Can't walk for beans."

You have

the

same innate need

man did; ate looks beautiful

to create that

whether or not what you creis a matter of practice and self-education. This is not to say that you will become a Leonardo da Vinci if you merely practice enough. That level of vision is a gift. But you can bring yourself much pleasure by learning to use

primitive

your hands.

"If

I

had to live my life would have

again,

I

made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain

now

atrophied

would thus have been kept active through use. of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect,

The loss

and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Darwin, Recollections.

41

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

Something magical happens when you use your hands to create: time seems to slow down; your

mind

is

free to day-dream, to ruminate, to coast.

The deep

satisfaction this brings can erase or modify that frazzled feeling of not-enough-time, and that is why it's worth your while to learn a craft or take

up gardening.

you have never worked with your hands, you have no idea what's possible and where to start. The classic handcrafts have arisen from the traditional natural materials clay, fiber, wood, metal, glass, leather, dyes and pigments. The only way to find out which material you like workIf

will

—

ing with best

And

if

is

to experiment.

buy a heap of and the material shows you what it can do.

you are

really adventurous,

clay or a pile of fabrics or a load of wood

play until

You

are more likely to be successful in this play you have no ultimate goal. Don't try to make a pitcher out of your clay, for example. With your if

inexperience, the pitcher will probably look like Casper the Friendly Ghost and you'll end up frus trated rather than pleased. in half; roll

it

around; feel

oblongs, squares. Stack If you are the kind of person who learns best by being shown, take a

beginners' class.

On

the other hand, if you learn best by reading, ask your public library or favorite bookstore for a well-written how-to

book

42

books good start).

(children's

are always a

it

Poke the

it.

Make

clay; cut

it

up; knock

it

into circles,

it

over;

squish it down. If you need a master teacher to show you how to play, invite a five-year-old over and do everything he or she does. You were exactly like that child, once.

What happened

your capacity for play along the way?

to

PART 2: PAUSE

TO ENJOY YOURSELF, PREPARE YOURSELF need for direct participation you can enter a magical state

In addition to your in arts

and

crafts,

by observing the efforts of true artists. Color, texall can affect you in ture, form, pattern, sound

—

a sense we are all crashing to our deaths from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal "in

pleasing ways.

Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passCaress the ing wall

However, sometimes you have to extend yourself

details."

.

almost the same as being out of physical shape; realize that you're re-entering at a disadvantage, without the continuous years of training that make exercise to

reap

the benefits of

all

art. It's

pleasurable. Understanding

and

Vladimir

.

.

Nabokov

relishing art

—

sometimes means doing your homework reading about an artist, trying to understand what the artist says and why, comprehending how this particular piece of art

has affected the rest of the

world.

When

our family attended Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado for the first time, we checked a

children's story.

book out of the

library to learn the

We also listened to the music ahead of

time and memorized many of the songs, because they were so entertaining. The actual perfor-

mance sparkled I

l

I

I

t

143

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

Variations of this picture are the road:

and sometimes a wavy, ribbonlike

strip,

or river.

Common to all these images of time are three qualities. It 1.

is

pictured as being:

—

Linear (one-dimensional only even in the k two pictures, which have a two-dimensional appearance, the basic idea is one-dimensional).

2..

Segmented (broken up into intervals or compartments).

3.

Directional (with the future direction of far

more importance

to us than the past

—and

we

feel the future has to be controlled by planning and scheduling).

After completing the exercise of sketching out a picture of time, most people ask, "Is there any other way to look at it?" The question itself points out that our linear, segmented, directiona

PART 7: PERSPECTIVE

view is ingrown, unconscious, unexamined, and considered "natural" in some sense.

Can you imagine some other way to

picture time?

As "natural" or God-ordained

may seem

as

it

to

our linear, segmented, future-oriented image of time is by no means the only one possible. It is, in fact, a minority view on our planet. It has come about through a complex series of cultural, us,

causes.

—

—

and yes Only Americans, Germans, and Swiss

technological, philosophical

religious

share this time-view in its pristine form. Let us briefly mention other possibilities before pressing on to the consequences of our time image.

"Most of us who

live in

the industrialized world are using and distinguishing between six to eight (of the nine) kinds of time that it is possible There are to identify sacred, profane, meta.

.

.

physical, physical, biological, and clock times,

but we have very little idea of how they all fit together or how each affects our lives."

Edward T. Hall, The Dance of Life/The Other Dimension of Time, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983.

THERE ARE OTHER IMAGES OF TIME Note,

first,

that

metaphor

we

always use

some kind of spa-

time.We do

constantly in our language. Events are a "long" time or "short" time ago; it happened "around the same time.'This need for spatial imagery hints again that time is no simple concept.

tial

to describe

this

Another "natural" image of time is that of a circle, deriving from the cyclic nature of many ob-

phenomena: the day-night circle, the crop cycles, the seasons, and the tides. Some of

servable

the earliest measuring devices

—the

of stones at Stonehenge, sun clocks, sundials physically used this image. In fact, our clocks until the past two decades have been round-faced. circle

—

It is

also possible to have

able time, as

among

sure to Europeans.

no concept of measur-

the Eskimos before expo-

For

these, the present

is

a

in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

"Far out

"Orbiting this at a dis-

tance of roughly ninetyeight million miles is an utterly insignificant

blue-green planet

little

whose

ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the

Galaxy.

145

GET ITALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

"I

have measured out

life in

my

coffee-spoons."

T.S. Eliot, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.

point at which we stand and there is no measuring of time only synchronization with the sea's tides. Cross-cultural studies of what we call primi

—

peoples show many subtle variations of the lack of measurable time. In fact, some languages have no separate word for "time." tive

Another

possibility for a time image is to cona plane (two-dimensional) or a space of field (three-dimensional imagery), extending in

sider

it

many directions. Yet another is one eternal Now (the are one time).

'If,

I

thought, patients

can eradicate certain illnesses through adopting a nonlinear view of time wherein past, present, and future merge into a timeless stillness, the obvious question was: do we make ourselves sick by conforming to an idea of strict linear time composed of a rigid succession of future, past, and present?"

Larry Dossey, M.D., Space, Time, and Medicine, Shambhala, 1982.

to imagine

mystic's view that

all

it

as

times

So there are other concepts of time, hard as it is for us to imagine them and unnatural as they may seem to us. Our minority view of time is incomprehensible to most of the citizens of the earth and one of the sources of our noncommuni cation with other cultures. "Time" is a high-level abstraction, instead of the simple concept ally think

it is.

The famous

we

usv

child psychologist

Piaget claims that it takes a child a full dozen years to understand and use our culturally cone tioned view of time.

KEY ASPECTS OF OUR TIME PICTURl Our linear, segmented, future-oriented notion of time affects what we do and how we feel about It is the underlying source of much of our time discomfort.

146

PART 7: PERSPECTIVE

LINEARITY Because we view time as linear, we think it is necessary to sequence all our activities in time. We feel that this is only as it should be and that there is no other way of doing it. Putting cart before horse, we forget that time seems linear because

we

are in the habit of sequencing

activities.

Sequencing generates a way of using time which anthropologist Edward J. Hall calls "monochrome." The preferred way of doing things in the monochronic culture is "one thing at a time,"

and one who cannot arrange his activities this way is looked at askance and even thought of as sloppy or disorganized. We Americans live in an overwhelmingly monochronic culture.

|

People from cultures variety of things

all

which it is natural to do a once may seem inefficient,

in

at

ludicrous, or stupid to us. In fact they are only

using time according to their image of

it

—

"poly-

many activities at once. we appear hurried to the

chronically" or allowing

To

these same people point of madness.

Two 1.

questions arise:

Is it

bad

to

be polychronic (or monochronic)?

As a moral as 2.

i

'

Is

it

question, this is not as ridiculous sounds, and later we shall deal with it.

there any other

way to be

in a given culture?

Perhaps the only reasonable answers are: (1) only if it bothers you, and (2) yes and no. In America today, it is difficult and uncomfortable to be a polychronic person, if only because the whole culture is so overwhelmingly monochronic. Some of the most frazzled, harried people are

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

those who are forced by their situations to be polychronic. An obvious example of someone who suffers from handling too many things at once is the mother of several small children.

American

time-talk:

waste time

make time fill

time

buy time give time

take time

SEGMENTATION Segmentation complements our linear view of time. We chop time up into segments. Time can thus be treated as a thing. Time is something solid. With our American mercantile bent, we turn time into a commodity. Our language reflects this.

manage time spend time time

is

money

A Peace Corps

volun-

teer recently returned from Sierra Leone tested

an American audience by showing a slide of a native woman working in the middle of a field with a primitive handhoe; a group of men appeared in the same apparently resting at the edge of the field.

slide,

under the trees

"Don't the men look lazy?" she asked. The audience agreed.

Because of our time-language we feel compelled to use time. That is, we can't merely let it flow over us. Few of us pass time, as the case in other cultures. As a tive, antsy people. If

it is

possible for us to

tainer,

be

fill

is

linguistically

result,

our time

we

are ac-

like a con-

we can ask how densely our time car How many activities we can pack into a

then

filled.

container (week, hour) of time? How efficiently can we stuff our day? We are accustomed to ask ing these questions at work, and even in our pei sonal lives.

On

top of the idea of efficient time-packing we add a moral dimension ("Idle hands are the devil's helpmates") that seems, to put it bluntly, insane to those not raised in our culture. We, oi

We view people from othe] segmented views of time, as advanced than us, or simply lazier.

course, reciprocate. M

they're resting between bouts of backbreaking labor while ln fact,

sharing their village's only plowing tool."

148

cultures, with less

they are less

ii

PART 7: PERSPECTIVE

FUTURE ORIENTATION The future

orientation of Americans

is

legendary.

Other nations know us for our notion of progress and our mania for planning and controlling everything. The one good thing we can say about our linear, segmented, future-oriented time view is works. The material successes these attitudes (and our methods for implementing these attitudes) have brought us are at the same time admired, envied, and hated by other nations. this: it

THE DOWN SIDE

s

But our linear, segmented, future-oriented time view seems to work only on the level of material welfare. It worked in driving us to our high standard of living. When we examine the emotional state of many Americans, however, we must question whether it works at all. Let's look at the negative side of

America, hurry sickness is not the sole provIn

it.

Our linearity, the "one-thing-at-a-time" aspect of our time view, gets things done for us. It can also lead to tunnel vision, rigidity, and harriedness. *

i

Our segmentation of time, with its related notions of efficiency and productivity, so dominates our work time that it spills over into our non-work lives. The result can be a feeling of fragmentaa sense of life as unconnected actions: the Tve-got-to-get-it-together" feeling. The compul-

tion,

sion to

fit

more and more

activities (still se-

quenced, of course) into less and less time results in what has been called hurry sickness.

ince of frantic adults. During the 1980s there were many clinical studies of highly over-

stressed children. In rushing to prepare their children for life, parents are subjecting them to such stress-caused symptoms as hypertension, heart disease, and

nervous breakdowns.

Some of the children with these problems were

five

years old.

149

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

Our future orientation, with its related enthusiasm for planning and controlling all activities, can also schedule out of our

we need

to enjoy ourselves.

uling activities

and

fail

satisfying, unharried

lives the satisfaction

We succeed at schec

to provide for living a full

life.

THE WORK/FREE TIME SPLIT In America, and in other lands influenced by Western European culture, we all live by an artificial division of time even stronger than the night/day dichotomy: work time/free time. It is s< basic that we are functionally unaware of its effect on us.

WORK TIME VS. FREE TIME All but the idle or independently wealthy surely

understand what "work" time is. And "free" time, of course, is nothing other than the time left over after work time. We live as if they're two lives that don't touch, as if you can have on( in order but not the other.

The work/free time tinction,

we

really

split is

a useful abstract dis-

no sense real. We will find that don't have a good conscious under-

but

in

standing of the work/free time

150

split.

PART 7: PERSPECTIVE

WORK TIME We all consider work time as time which is not our own.

At

trol. it

It is

least,

and direct

we have no we must actively struggle to

time over which

it

concontrol

toward our personal goals.

For example, suppose that you work for someone else most people in America do. Most likely you have definite work hours. When you are late for work you draw down on yourself the wrath of your employer, your immediate supervi-

—

sor,

and,

if

the lateness

the workers It

is

sufficiently noticeable,

around you.

doesn't matter whether this reaction to your

appropriate, rational, or even someone else's proper concern. The fact is, all the people involved feel strongly that you are cheating by using for your own individual purposes a commodity which is not yours to use time which belongs to someone else, the company. lateness

is

—

—

a description only of the more socially-esteemed white-collar job. If you are locked into a

This

is

punch-the-clock position, your observance of company time has to be even more strict, or you can start applying for unemployment.

As a rule, chronic latecomers at work are held in the same easy contempt as petty thieves. The same holds true for leaving early(whether or not there is work to be done), for long lunch hours, for coffee breaks, and for any other such infringements on com-

pany

time.

We often rate a person's status in a company by arranging his own work is in the control of others, the lower his status. secretary who uses all her time ministering to her boss generally has low status in the eyes of the work group. planner, regardless of job title, who can make his own hours, is envied by almost all others. manager, who not only controls the use of his own time but that of others, is the object of fear as well as

the discretion time.

he has

The more

his

in

work time

A

A

A

On the other hand, the "executive assistant" who helps to plan and regulate her boss's time is often a higher-status employee.

envy.

757

—

.

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

WORKAHOLICS it may seem that a person of high status someone who apparently controls the work time of others and has more discretion in the use of his own should be less imprisoned by work time, this is not the case. The alarming prolifera-

While

—

30 years of men and women who are obsessed with their jobs clearly shows this. The term "workaholic," coined as late as 1970 described the situation so well, that it has become a standard term in the work environment. tion in the past

The Workaholic's Lament: "You can't get anyin this business unless you put in the extra hours."(Note that the emphasis is on extra hours not extra work.)

where

—

of the personal time man-

agement notebook (scheduler, planner, appointment book) was a commercial response to the hopeful but mistaken belief that "work" approaches carry over to free time.

—

A compelling study of this phenomenon, which gave

The 1980s phenomenon

—

a workaholic? A person usually male, though not always whose addiction to work becomes unbearable to himself and others near him. In terms of our work/free breakdown, he is a person who has so confused himself that he progressively shifts more and more of his free time over to work time. He approaches the limit of allowing himself no free time at all. Such work aholics rarely use time efficiently. The compulsion is rather to devote more and more time, not accomplishment, to work

What is

it

the

name "Lockheed syndrome"

(1971),

enumerated the sufferings its victims undergo. Among them are insomnia, anxiety, high stress reactions, ulcers and other diseases, sexual dysfunction, family problems, alcoholism, divorce,

and a high percentage of nervous breakdowns.

And yet on

the surface, don't we envy and praisi Aren't hard workers held

this typical sufferer?

up If

for our admiration?

you are looking for personal

satisfaction,

you're less likely to get it during work time. The notable exceptions are those who completely

152

PART 7: PERSPECTIVE

give over their lives to their work and are happy. These are few, and too often those around them suffer a good deal.

FREE TIME It is

much

we can try for we have not quite

our free time, then, that

in

happiness. But

we

free time as

find that

we might wish

to believe.

so

Most

not "free." It's ironic how little of free time can actually be devoted to leisure. of our free time

is

out of the 16-1/4 hours which technically are not work time, about eight must go toward sleep. Some of us need more than eight hours, many of us less; but that leaves the "free" pool at about eight hours. How much of that is "free"? First,

It

takes time to maintain your

own body

—

to feed

it, wash it, groom it. It takes time to maintain your family, especially if there are younger children in it. It takes time to maintain a home

(cleaning, laundering, repairing, building, trim-

ming).

It

takes time to shop for time-saving de-

it takes time to use them; it takes time to maintain them; and in an ironic shift, it takes time to "enjoy" them. It takes time not much different from "work" time to do all of these things. All of these activities are forms oipseudowork.

vices;

We have described those aspects of our "free" time which take on at least the emotional coloring of work time those activities which in our

—

we cannot seem to avoid. For many of us in America, when we subtract pseudowork

free

time

from our "free" time, there is no time left whatsoever. Every activity, every day-filling act, time

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

carries with

it

compulsion, obligation, morality,

necessity.

(I'm bringing home the for supper. Make sure that we impress the Smythes at the dinner. I've got a deal I'm cook-

boss

ing

up

for him.')

Note that

all

of a

housewife's time

is

tech-

For the wife or female counterpart of the workaholic man, for example, even social obligations are a form of work. It is currently unfashionable to use the term "housewife," and more than 50% of married women now work away from the home in addition to working at home. Nonetheless, the housewife holds a special place in the wonderful world of pseudowork time. The housewife who is exhausted by the end of the day when hubby ar-

rives

since she doesn't go to the office or the plant. Doesn't this suggest that the nor-

her)

mal definition of "free" time might be just a little

And

nically "free" time,

screwy?

home and wants

(without reciprocating by giving his attention to is

so

common

as to

be a comic-strip cliche

(Blondie).

the

woman who works

outside the

home

is

expected to manage or maintain the home and to take pride in it. Is it any wonder that there are so many resentful, harried pseudoworkaholic women in America? There isn't enough time to get it all done in our "free" time, so we begin relinquishing duties to others, buying time-saving still

Which of the manv actividay do we choose to farm out, and Do we thereby gain a saner, calme

devices and services. ties that is it

fill

worth

life?

154

attention and service

a

it?

PART 7: PERSPECTIVE

WE DON'T HAVE TIME FOR IT Agreed,

we

work

2.

Our Things

personal

3.

Making decisions

time. Agreed,

we have

4.

Enjoying the family

5.

Making love

we tend to turn our free time into something very much like work time, for reasons we barely understand. Since

very

little

free time. Agreed,

only a limited amount of time don't we have time for?

The

list

sounds exactly

Body maintenance

much

can't expect to reap

satisfaction during

1.

is

available,

like the ranting of

what

some

we no longer that make life

puritanical moralist: the things

make time for are the things worthwhile. "Saving" time by sidestepping or not doing these things is like tossing the baby out with the bath water/

/.

BODY MAINTENANCE

Despite

all

the Jane

American majority

Fonda videotapes,

the

sustains a 40-year trend

away

from maintaining our bodies. Why? It takes time to do it, time which we're less and less willing to spend. So instead of taking the time to bathe, we spend billions on cosmetic coverups: •

deodorants, which are really perfumes used body odors

to hide

•

toothpastes, which hide

bad breath rather

than clean teeth •

clothes which hide the flab

•

sprays,

which make our hair look clean with-

out cleaning

it

755

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

we buy products which hide the fact we no longer take the time to take care of

In short, that

our bodies. Yes, there is a Body Boom, a return to taking actual care of the body through exercise. But the main reason given for not joining is still, "I don't have the time to run 20 minutes a day." And it is no accident that the "aerobics" approach which began the Body Boom in the late 1960s turned exercise into a form of measurable work and let you rate your productivity by counting points. Something in the American character seems to require countable units.

We don't clean and exercise our bodies due to

"no time," and we don't take the time to check what we put into them, either. More and more o: the food we eat is "fast-food" or convenience food from the supermarket. We buy over 40% ol our food on impulse, snatching whatever catches our eye, a habit encouraged by and profitable toj supermarket management. Often the food we buy is the most immediately pleasant and the breakfast cereals which are least healthy for us 75% sugar, frozen and fried foods, and so forth.

—

One

of the most ironic facts about not taking th( time to eat properly is that we are the fattest na tion

on

sport for ing.

The American-made animated feature movie Hugo the Hippo defined

And

The

American indoor the past 25 years has been crash-diet-

earth.

despite arguable claims that

most unhealthy nations,

we

of medicines

think about

fairly superficial,

156

we have

we are one of th we go by the amount

the best medical care on earth,

the major difference between animals and humans as: "animals don't take medicine" (a strange statement, if you it).

favorite

if

ingest.

So we don't take the time to take care of ourselves, and we cover up the resultant mess in cosmetic ways.

PART 7: PERSPECTIVE

2.

OUR THINGS

If we don't take time to take care of ourselves, we certainly don't have time to take care of our material goods, much less to enjoy them. Looking around our homes, we can divide up our

Things into: (l)utilitarian devices and furniture, and (2) toys. The toys are the Things we buy mainly for enjoyment; the utilitarian devices, for productive purposes (often because they are "time-saving").

Do we take

care of the Things

we own?

Hardly.

We don't have the time. We are conditioned to use Things once or twice, then heave them, or at

put them away, to collect dust. It's only natuwe treat our Things this way. It's simple mathematics: we have so many Things that the amount of time we have for using and enjoying any specific Thing is extremely small.

least

ral that

American industry doesn't need to plan obsolescence into what it produces. We obsolete our Things by disuse.

Throughout the world Americans, where they are considered children who And gadget-consciousness is one of the primary aims of all forms of advertising and sales. Gadgets are central in our commercial life. Christmas gifts are almost

are tolerated at

all,

are fascinated with gadgets.

and Christmas shopping acgood percentage of all nonstaple goods sold in America. But more importantly, exclusively gadgets,

We are

like children in a

nursery overflowing with toys.

We move fitfully

from one to another, without the to stop one.

will or ability

and enjoy any

counts for a

they drain our time. Consider the emotional en-

velope of a gadget in America.

It is presented as something irresistably desirable; you have to have it. As a matter of fact, it couldn't be a gadget if it were a necessity, but we don't take the time to decide these things; that automatic coffee maker, or that Compact Disk player, or that all-new VCR, is something you have to have.

157

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

You buy it, for yourself or for someone else. And now its true gadget-nature manifests itself. You once, and forever after, whenever you notice it at the back of the closet or garage, you feel a pang of guilt because you aren't using it. You may even use it once or twice more when you don't feel like using it, because you own it. You can't enjoy it wholeheartedly, but you can't bear to keep looking at it. The Great American Garage Sale is the result. What holds for the pure case of the utterly unnecessary gadget also holds

use

it

more or less

in the case of

our "necessary" pos-

sessions. Because we have so many of these Things, we can't use them all; yet we feel compelled to use them ). The mere fact of owning dictates our actions, and the more we own, the less time goods.

we

feel

we can devote

to using specific

And do we

take care of the Things we own? Of course not. It takes time to care for the car, so we send it to the garage. It takes time to care for the furnace, so we send out for the furnace man. It takes time to do almost anything, so we delegate the task to the specialist, who does a terrible job of it, and so we complain, have the job done again,

and waste more time.

The more Things you own,

the

more

likely

it is

that you'll have to pay others to take care of

these Things, and the less likely that you'll be able to enjoy the Things themselves. Merely own ing a Thing takes time, whether you use it or not

Anthropologists and economists tell us repeatedly that the higher the standard of living the more material goods and services generally avail able in a culture, the more the members of tha culture feel a lack of time.

—

—

PART 7: PERSPECTIVE

3.

MAKING DECISIONS

takes time to make a decision. Obviously, the actual decision takes place in a second or so. But making a rational decision, one that involves a reasonable choice among understood alternatives, takes the time to gather information, the time to compare alternatives, and the time to It

consider related information.

As we have seen

already,

we

are taking less and

less time to make decisions about shopping for possibly rational decifoods and other goods. about food shopping would go like this: Plan sion menus for two weeks. Suppose you plan to have tuna fish salad. Wh^n you shop, if there are two or more brands of tuna available, compare prices: 9 oz. for 68 cents or 13 oz. for 99 cents. Buy whichever satisfies your recipe (otherwise you'll waste some) and whichever is the best buy.

A

But tuna fish decisions take time. Shrewd food producers and supermarket managers know well that not one in a hundred shoppers will take that time. The supermarket manager who wants to make a killing in tuna fish takes advantage of our reluctance to use time in decision-making in several simple ways. He displays only one brand of

tuna at an insanely high price; shows brightly colored labels, preferably with adorable cartoons on them; displays no prices whatsoever; or piles tuna fish cans into a big sales display at 8 oz. for 91 cents rather than 9 oz. for 68 cents.

—

all female shoppers do not even look at the prices, much less compare them. Most

Half of

money-conscious wives would not dream of letting their husbands a supermarket. studies have shown that when the

loose

in

Some

man shops, his impulse buying pumps the average checkout

150% erage

of the

bill

to over av-

woman's

bill.

worth our while to make rational decihave so many decisions to make each day, how can we spend enough time to make the right decision? And the higher our standard of living, the more complex our lives seem

But

is it

sions? If we

159

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

to

be and the more decisions we need

And the more It

is

we

this state of affairs refer to

when we

say,

had the craziest day." We are aware that many, if not most, of the decisions we have made were totally arbitrary. "I've

to

make.

we can devote to making each one. Result: the more complicated our lives, the more irrational we are. Going back little

decisions needed, the less time

to shopping, in

many cases

sense to shop "logically." All of us

someone who

it

makes

know

comparison shopping to such an extreme that he will drive to another city to take advantage of an advertised special, with a savings less than that of the price of gas he uses and a waste of much time. carries

Obviously it isn't only in shopping that we need to take the time to make decisions. Active, intelligent people like ourselves make choices constantly,

choices

4.

and many of them would be better if we had time to consider them.

ENJOYING THE FAMILY

The term The father who hardly

knows his children has become a modern folk figure,

complete with

tra-

"father-stranger" used to characterize

men who have

little

contact with their children or

These days, the more common counterpart is the mother who farms out her children, whether or not she works outside the home. their wives.

ditional lines like:

can hardly wait until my kids grow up so can talk to them." "I

I

Parents who don't have the time for their children often buy that time, either by paying others to keep them or, more directly, by giving the child expensive toys or large allowances. Perhaps as a result of guilt feelings turally

pletely

in

America

it is

cul-

unacceptable to ignore your children com-

—children are receiving more attention

this kind,

and

less

personal attention from parIt's not necessarily good

ents than ever before. for the children.

160

—

of|

PART 7: PERSPECTIVE

The

cost in terms of parental frustration

is

also

The most frequent complaint among paris something like this: "I don't know where

high.

ents

he gets those ideas," or, "I was never like that when I was her age." These are statements of what the 60s called the "Generation Gap."

The Generation Gap and its causes are real enough. Our children's world is different from the one we knew as children (for one thing, we didn't have us for parents).

Studies in primate behavior confirm that most of the socializing behavior of offspring, beyond that small amount programmed by instinct, is learned from parents. No generation of human parents before ours has ever thought of denying that the

same

is

true of

human

children.

It is

most unrea-

sonable to expect that the child who sees parents only during TV commercial breaks will pattern himself or herself after the parents. And there is support for this idea in the growing number of young people who seem to speak only in sound effects

This

5.

of the most noxious ideas of recent years is

that of "quality time."

Apparently, you can spend a small amount of "quality time" with your kids to make up for not

spending normal of some other kind of time perhaps "quantity time"—with

amounts

—

them.

and commercial jingles.

is all

One

a result of "not having time."

MAKING LOVE

We don't have time for love. We hardly have time for sex. Do you find that hard to believe? America oversexed? Aren't our children experimenting more and at an earlier age? Isn't sex as a whole becoming more casual home plate on the first date? Isn't pornography, soft and hard-core, approaching pandemic proportions? And what about advertising, entertainment, and women's magazines, which seem sometimes to center exclusively on sex? Isn't that evidence that more time is devoted to sex rather than less? Isn't

—

Actually overheard locker room:

in

a

"You remember last when we blew $20,000 on remodeling

year,

the kitchen? Guess what? My wife has stopped cooking. And now I'm really worried. She wants to remodel " the bedroom

161

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

If

you have

difficulty be-

lieving that less time is

being devoted to sex,

we can supply some negative evidence. Nine after the spec-

months

tacular power outages of the 60s, the hospitals in the blackout areas ex-

perienced a dramatic run on the maternity ward. So what were these new parents doing before the lights went out?

Well, yes,

maybe we spend more time

thinking

even looking at various sanitized versions of it on TV, but the fact is, we are spending less time doing it. While we may agree with the informal definition of sex as "what we're thinking about when we're not thinking about anything in particular," nothing indicates that there is any more real sex going on now than about

it,

talking about

it,

ever before.

We cut corners in lovemaking at our own risk. Women complain that men never give them enough time to become aroused. An increasing number of young marrieds wake from their inidelirium to find themselves staring across the conservative estibreakfast table at strangers. tial

Young couples do spend less time getting acquainted before leaping into

bed together.

merely another of Hurry Sickness, kids rushing into adult experiences? Isn't this

symptom

A

mate

50%

of all married couples suffer some form of sexual dysfunction (impotence, frigidity, premature ejaculation). And the divorce rate is still growing. states that over

Taking pleasure

in

We don't have

have time to

chiildren, either.

Professional women a decade deferred their child-bearing

who for

now say

plainly, "My biological clock is running

out," when they explain why they are now having

children.

162

—beyond the —takes time. takes

lovemaking

lease of biological tensions

re-

It

know a person, as opposed to pickup someone whose function you view as being a carrier of the appropriate complementary genitalia. It takes time to build up the little pleasures and tensions which add joy to what is time to get to ing

otherwise an instinct-satisfying pleasure. All the now-necessary love manuals tell us this, and all the old poets have always told us this. It takes time to decide whether it is possible to live in close proximity and intimacy with someone else, and fewer people seem to be taking that time.

PART 7: PERSPECTIVE

WHY WE FEEL WE HAVE NO TIME It

really isn't time

which causes

all

these prob-

some

cases the causes are so interwoven and complex that we can't separate them; and certainly in all cases mentioned above, no simple

lems. In

cause can be found. Perhaps the only common thread is that we experience these complications as part of not having time. "I can't seem to find the time for. ." (the kids, cleaning house, read.

ings

—you

The most

fill

in the blank).

cause for our feeling of no time, argued so persuasively in The Harried Leisure Class, is our affluence. Because we have so many good Things, we have to spend time maintaining, acquiring, consuming, using, and enjoying them. Our relations with other people become more complex, driving us to synchronize and schedule more and more of our likely

as S.B. Linder has

Stsffan B. Linder, The Harried Leisure Class, Columbia University Press, 1970.

But the more activities and goods available, the less time for enjoyment and satisfaction of any particular good or activity.

activities.

The only escape from this seems to be the vacation, the aim of which is to disengage from all the goods and activities by removing oneself to a simenvironment like a ranch, a seashore, or the mountains. Here, while roughing it (that is, with less Things around), we can recuperate from the accumulated poisons of our regular time, both sexes leaving work and home behind for sanity's

pler

sake.

163

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

IN SUMMARY

We have lightly explored the major American

—

—

time breakdown the work/free time split and observed that our free time, while technically increasing, is in reality decreasing. We live in a time famine. Among the active middle class, there is a sense of time rushing by; we feel frazzled, hectic, harried.

We don't have time, and

not all subjective. Part of it comes from having too many Things to deal with, and it pains us.

The

painful effect of not having

these important things

•

it's

is

enough time

for

threefold.

We do not get the pleasure we expect and require. The result is chronic frustration, a lack of (or a souring of) our satisfaction.

•

We are violating a cultural imperative, and we

feel guilty. In

spend

our culture, a person should

sufficient time

on

children, family, sex,

food, self-improvement, upkeep of homes and possessions. The reality (that we don't have enough time for it) pales before the should,

•

We become increasingly frantic. The convicwe aren't spending the U.S. RecomDaily Allotment of time (that we ought to be) on these activities makes us even more resolved to compress more activity into less time, escalating us into yet more

tion that

mended

harriedness.

We thus become more frustrated, more guilty, and more

164

frantic.

PART 7: PERSPECTIVE

We've inherited a linear, segmented, future-oriented image of "time," as well as a work split. Work time we make the best endure, or surrender to; it is generally not our own to do with as we please, and we are under compulsion to be productive for someone else. Our free time is what's left over, but every day we're pressed from another side to turn our free time into pseudowork time.

time/free time of,

The "efficiency" methods used to run a business may work for business, but they fail miserably when used in an attempt to gain personal satisApplying such principles as "time is money" to your home life wreaks havoc. Unhappiness, dissatisfactiqn, feelings of being frazzled and harried and of never accomplishing anything worthwhile all these are the result. faction.

—

GET ITALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

STOP THE WORLD! Is it hopeless? Are you doomed to feel frazzled the rest of your life? No. Quite simply, no. You

can change. We've structured the Part 1: Action portion of this book to help you direct your own changes.

•

Holding

Uppers

Zone

slots.

•

The Upper/Downer Pattern and Wish List emphasize activities and the satisfaction you can get from them, not the scheduling of these activities.

Downers

WISH LIST Unfinished

Patterning is a technique based on lateral, not vertical or linear, thinking. You naturally think in patterns. Your Life Pattern helps you avoid thinking in terms of narrow time

•

Unstarted

Aiming

for satisfaction will enable you to balTry to keep ticking off satisfactions, not a soulless list of comlast unsatisfying activities.

pleted tasks.

•

The Presume helps you track your dreams, which are more important to you than your goals.

PRESUME

xxlxxlxx

You

can't easily

change the culture around you,

but you can change your own use of time and feelings about time. Watch out for tacks; protect your feet; remove any pain immediately; and turn on the

166

light.

PART 7: PERSPECTIVE

ANOTHER WAY There are people in the world who have absolutely no problems with managing their time. They seem to float along, rather unhurried, rarely upset, getting done almost everything they want, and try as you might, you never see them popping tranquilizers or hitting the bottle behind the dieffenbachia.

For these people, most of the preceding discussion is academic. They simply aren't uncomfortable enough about their use of time to think it's worth discussing. We asked such a person what rules, if any, he followed. Irritatingly enough, he had none. So we asked him to describe the way he attacked life. "Attack?" he said. This was not a familiar concept for him. Eventually, in his own good time, he gave us the following list:

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

10 RELAXED RULES FOR 1.

Break

it

—then

up

MANAGING TIME

start only

what you can

fin-

ish.

2.

Do the least you can.

3.

Ask yourself, "Who

says

4.

Ask yourself, "Who

says / have to

5.

Ask yourself, "Why do I have

I

have to do this?"

to

do

do

this?"

this

now?"

6.

Wear a watch without a second hand, need a watch at all.

7.

Learn to say "Yes!" to insistent people, and then don't do it after all.

8.

Tell yourself,

"Ten years from now,

if

you

this will

seem unimportant." you absolutely have to do something, set some time for doing it when you don't need to eat or sleep.

9. If

aside

10.

Try real hard not to worry about getting things done.

11.

Only buy clothing with pockets; otherwise you're always looking for a place to put things.

12.

Don't

13.

Don't go by the numbers; don't think

live

gories.

by slogans

—thinking

is

better. in cate-

APPENDIX Enter here what you want to do consistently every week. In addition to listing such things as routine cleaning and maintenance chores and children's lessons, we suggest you enter what's in your Wish List and Presum6. Make time for your dreams to come true (e.g., enter exactly when you plan to walk, to study Italian, to read a challenging book, to garden, to write letters, to play the guitar, to visit the library, to stare into space). Tear out or photocopy the calendar and post it.

SUNDAY

MONDAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

AM.

AM.

P.M.

P.M.

THURSDAY

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

AM.

AM.

P.M.

P.M.

One-week Calendar

169

GET ITALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

ONE-YEAR CALENDAR An undated One-year Calendar can be one of your best time-savers.

Use

endar (available

the following

lists

to prepare your

own

cal-

at office-supply stores in large sizes).

We all have different ideas about what needs to be done regularly throughout the year,

when

to

do

it.

The

how often to repeat

a task, and

following Sales List and Maintenance

Checklist are only suggested checklists; enter your tasks or activities

own

on your One-year Calendar.

You can save

time and money by knowing the regular sales normally on sale during certain months of the year are given in the following One-year Sales List. cycles. Objects

Month January

Items on Sale This Month Christmas cards, winter clothing, under-

wear and lingerie, sheets, towels, televisions and radios, cars, floor coverings, toys (also during the week after Xmas) reDruary

March

China, glassware, housewares

April

May

Spring clothing

June

summer clothes, luggage

July

Bathing

August

Furniture, underwear, lingerie, white goods, lawn mowers, major appliances

September

Cars and

October

suits,

tires

Fall clothing,

boats,

camping equip-

ment, lawn furniture

November December

170

(See January

for

after-Xmas sales.)

APPENDIX

MAINTENANCE C Housework, outside: • wash windows • check roof and gutters • repair leaks and other

• battery • tune-up • tires • vacuum and/or wash Bicycle:

nuisances

• plant/prune/cleanup

• check condition of tires,

garden

tubes, spokes

• water/turn/spread compost heap • clean garage

• clean

Housework,

•

inside:

leys,

• shampoo rugs/wash and wax floors • spring and fall house-

moving parts

wheels

• repair gear and brake cables

Personal dates:

cleaning *

all

(chain, freewheel, chainrings, spokes, etc.) oil chain and gear pul-

• clean winter • •

clothes/drapes

• turn mattresses • wash windows • clean out fireplace,

• six-month Presume-peek • performances, speeches,

check furnace

museum shows,

• repair paint chips, moldy windows, etc.

Body (whole

(in-

cluding eyes) • dental checkup • breast examination • cosmetics (haircuts, facials, nails, etc.)

• vacations and other

irra-

tionalities (see Part 2)

• exercise (running, walking, bicycling, swimming,

etc.)

• clothing (school, work, Halloween, party,

etc.)

Motor vehicles: • change oil, lube job • points and plugs

classes,

etc.

family):

• physical checkup

birthdays, anniversaries holidays, festivals, celebrations

Financial dates: •

taxes (federal, state, county, and city)

• insurance payments (health,

life,

car, etc.)

• monthly payments

(car,

house, etc.) • savings deposit

•

subscriptions, membership dues, church and charity donations

Community

Service:

• blood donations • volunteer service • esprit de corps (block parties, neighborhood bands, parades, etc.)

171

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

RESOURCE LIST Time-management Aids Note:

A good office-supply

one of the following brands of notebook systems: LeFax,

Organizing Aids • W.A. Charnstrom Co. 9801 James Circle Minneapolis,

store will have at least

Executive, Stuff, Filofax,

Day Runner, Play Runner, Write Track, Quo Vadis, At-a-Glance, Organized Time, Masterplan. (Make your own, with a loose-leaf binder of any size and customized dividers.) • Baldwin-Cooke 2401 Waukegan Rd Deerfield, IL 60015

MN 55431

Mail-room equipment

•

Dome Publishing Co Providence, RI 02903 Dome Inventory of Household and Personal Property, found in

most

office-supply stores

• Exposures 9180 Le Saint Dr Fairfield,

Ways to

OH 45014

display

and store

photos

• Henniker's 779 Bush St San Francisco,

CA 94120

The Executive Planner and

Unusual organizers for the

other organizing aids

home

• Caddylak Systems,

Inc.

131 Heartland Blvd 11717 Brentwood,

NY

Magnetic planning boards, wall files, ScanMaster organizer

• Hold Everything

PO Box 7807 San Francisco,

CA 94120

Storage systems for your Things

• Rubbermaid Inc

• Day-Timers, Allentown,

Inc.

PA 18001

Day- Timer notebook system, Family Record & Inventory notebook

• Planner Pads, 5062

Inc.

S.

107th St

NE 68127

A clever Planner Pad categorizes, prioritizes,

on one

and schedules,

large page

• Remarkable Products 245 Pegasus Ave Northvale, NJ 07647 Erasable wall calendars

172

Rd

OH 44691

The Work Space System of pegboard hangers, and caddies can be used anywhere available in hardware bins,

—

stores

Omaha,

all

1147 Akron Wooster,

Stationery and Cards • Current Products, Inc Colorado Springs, 80941

CO

Probably the best-known source for cards and stationery

• The Drawing Board PO Box 620004 Dallas,

TX 75262

Handy memo forms, imprinted stationery and envelopes

• Metropolitan Museum of Art 255 Gracie Station New York, NY 10028 Art cards (check your local museums, too)

Personalized stationery; Reading-to- Remember Kit

UNICEF Cards 3 United Nations Plaza New York, 10017

NY

Beautiful cards by international (including children)

• The Writewell Co 894 Transit Bldg Torrington,

A

• The American Audio Prose Library, Inc. PO Box 842 Columbia, 65205

MO

The best contemporary

CT 06790

wide range of gifts and statio-

non-profit organization

—

Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Elmore Leonard, Alice Walker, more

• Books on Tape PO Box 7900 Newport Beach,

CA

92658

favorite resource

• Blue Sky Marketing PO Box 21583

MN

55121 St. Paul, Books and Weekly Menu Planner in a "Get Organized Bookshelf

• Consumer Information Center Pueblo,

CO 81009

The government publishes tons ofpamphlets on every subject, including "How to buy (you

name it) " —free catalog

• Self-Care Catalog

nery

PO Box 130 Mandeville,

Groups

LA 70470

Up-to-date health

• Overachiever's Anony-

mous PO Box 210-282 San Francisco,

writers

read and discuss excerpts of their work, on tape; offered by a

—

William Company PO Box 72 Covington, CA 30209

J.

artists

Miscellaneous of Interest

Every imaginable book, fiction and non-fiction, for rent our

• Morning Mail

•

—

"

APPENDIX

CA 94121

Founded by Carol Orsbom, author of Enough is Enough. Bylaws promise "no meetings, no classes, no fund-raisers.

tools, with

and fitness

a bound-in

newsletter

© Whole Earth Access 2990 Seventh St Berkeley, CA 94710 Will send almost any book mentioned in this book

173

"

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

BIBLIOGRAPHY Even though most time-management books repeat the same information, each has a slightly difon the challenge. It's worth it to keep reading, because you inspire yourself and because you pick up one or two new-to-you ideas in each book. (Remember, your library can find almost any book for you through Inter-library ferent angle

Loan.)

Dewey Decimal Classification numbers are given in parentheses when known. Books already listed in the text are

means

"this

not repeated here.

book is particularly worth finding.

ON TIME AND TIME MANAGEMENT •

Aveni, Anthony, Empires of TimeI Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures, Basic Books, 1989 (529 A).

•

Brooks, Andree Aelion, Children of Fast-Track Parents/Raising Self-Sufficient and Confident Children in an Achievement-Oriented World, Viking Press, 1989 (649.1B).

Edwin C, Getting Things Done: The ABC's Time Management, Charles Scribner's Sons, of Bliss,

1976 (658.4B).

•

Douglass, Merrill E, and Donna N. Douglass, Manage Your Time, Manage Your Work, Manage Yourself,

•

174

AMACOM,

1980 (650D).

Fraser, J.T., The Voices of Time, 1966 (115F).

George

Braziller,

.

APPENDIX

•

•

Goldfein, Donna, Every Woman's Guide to Time Management/A Personalized System of Controlling Time, Les Femmes, 1977. Lakein, Alan, How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, NAL, 1989 (153L).

LeBoeuf, Michael, Working Smart/How to AccomHalf the Time, McGraw-Hill, 1979

plish More in (650.1L).

•

Mackenzie, R. Alex, The Time Trap/Managing Your Way Out, AMACOM, 1972 (658.4M).

•

Mackenzie, Alec, and Kay Cronkite Waldo, About Time! A Woman's Guide to Time Management, McGraw-Hill, 1981 (158.1M).

•

Piaget, Jean,

The Child's Conception of Time,

Basic Books, 1969. *

•

Rifkin, Jeremy, Time Wars/The Primary Conflict Human History, Henry Holt, 1987 (303.4R).

in

Scott, Dru, How to Put More Time in Your Life, Rawson, Wade, 1980 (158.1S). Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Louis, The Art of Time,

Addison-Wesley, 1988 (640.43S).

GETTING YOURSELF ORGANIZED •

Baldrige, Letitia, Juggling: The Art of Balancing Marriage, Motherhood, and Career, Viking Press, 1976.

•

Brothers, Dr. Joyce,

•

Davenport, Rita, Making Time, Making Money, St. Martin's Press, 1982 (650D).

How to Get Whatever You Want Out of Life, Simon & Schuster, 1988 Brothers, Dr. Joyce, The Successful Woman, Simon & Schuster, 1988 (306.87B).

Orsborn, Carol, Enough Is Enough, Sons, 1986 (640.430).

GP Putnam's

175

.

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

Shaevitz, Marjorie Hansen, The Superwoman Syndrome, Warner Books, 1984 (305.42S).

Sher, Barbara, with Annie Gottlieb, Wishcraft/How to Get What You Really Want, Viking Press, 1979(158.1S).

GETTING THINGS ORGANIZED •

Culp, Stephanie, How to Get Organized When You Don't Have the Time, Writer's Digest, 1988.

•

Dorff, Pat, File

.

.

.

Don

't

Pile, St.

Martin's Press,

1983 (640D).

•

Eisenberg, Ronni, and Kate Kelly, Organize YourMacmillan, 1986.

self/,

Fulton, Alice, and Pauline Hatch, It's Here Somewhere, Writer's Digest Books, 1985 (640F). .

•

.

Hemphill, Barbara, Taming the Paper Tiger/OrganPaper in Your Life, Dodd, Mead, 1988 (651.5H).

izing the

•

•

Jenkins, Colleen, The Home Owner's Journal: What I Did and When I Did It, Blue Sky Marketing, 1987.

McCullough, Bonnie Runyan, Bonnie 's Household Budget Book,

•

St.

Martin's Press, 1987.

McCullough, Bonnie Runyan, Bonnie's HouseSt. Martin's Press, 1980 (640M).

hold Organizer,

McCullough, Bonnie Runyan, Totally Organized McCullough Way, St. Martin's Press, 1986 (640M).

the Bonnie

Schlenger, Sunny, and Roberta Roesch,

Be Organized in

•

Spite of Yourself,

NAL,

How to 1989.

Schofield, Deniece, Confessions of a Hapnily Organized Family, Writer's Digest Books, 1984

(640S).

Winston, Stephanie, Getting Organized, Warner Books, 1978.

176

APPENDIX

CONQUERING HOUSEWORK Don, Is There Life After Housework?, Writer's Digest Books, 1981 (648A).

Aslett,

•

Aslett, Don, and Laura Aslett Simons, Make Your House Do the Housework, Writer's Digest Books,

1986 (648A).

Chapman, Eugenia, Clean Your House and Everything In

•

It,

Grosset

& Dunlap,

1982 (648.5C).

Conran, Shirley, Superwoman/For Every Woman Who Hates Housework, Crown Publishers, 1978 (640C).

•

Consumer Guide

eds.,

The Fastest, Cheapest, Best

Way to Clean Everything, Simon

& Schuster,

1982.

Felton, Sandra, The Messies Manual/The Procrastinator's Guide to Good Housekeeping, Fleming H. Revell, 1984 (648F).

Young, Pam, and Peggy Jones, Sidetracked Home Executives/From Pigpen to Paradise, Warner Books, 1981 (648Y).

777

GET IT ALL. DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

INDEX The Act of Creation, 46

Adams, Douglas, 145 Adams, Douglas and Lloyd, John, 39

Adams, James

L.,

45

Advertising, 63 African Genesis, 99 Aids, organizing, 172 Aids, time-management,

172 Altruistic egoism, 137

Anatomy of an

Illness,

46

Answering machine, 53 The Aquarian Conspiracy, 46 Ardrey, Robert, 99 The Art of Time, 57

& Morgan, 126 122 Arts, 41 At a Journal Workshop, 46 Atwood, Margaret, 97 Arthur Artist,

Bach, George R. and Wyden, Peter, 136 Bag of tricks, 47, 93, 117 Bailey, Covert, 45 Benson, Herbert, and Proctor, William, 45

Beyond the Relaxation Response, 45 Bibliography, 174 Bicycles, 171 Bliss,

Edwin C, 90

Blocks, mental, 89

Body, 29, 45, 100, 115, 171 Body contact, 34 Body maintenance, 155 Books on Tape, 173 Books, children's, 122 Brain IMind Bulletin, 45 Brody, Jane, 45 Bulk buying, 74 Butt First, 89 Buzan, Tony, 46

178

Calendar, 78 Campbell, Joseph, 46 Car trips, 59 Cards, 73, 173 The Care & Feeding of Ideas, 45 Cars, 171 Cassidy, Robert, 126 Charlotte's Web, 123 Cheaper by the Dozen, 50 Children, 124 Children's books, 122 Christmas, 73 Cleaning schedule, 66 Clothing, 127 Clutter, 76 Co-ops, 119 Coffee, 33 Communities, 126 Community service, 171 Commuting, 60 Computers, personal, 123 Conran, Shirley, 111 Consumer Reports, 72 Cooper, Kenneth H., 45 Cooperation, 118 Coughlan, William, and Franke, Monte, 119 Couple, 134 Cousins, Norman, 46 Crafts, 41

The Dance of Life, 145 Darwin, 41 Dates, 171 Deadlines, 134 Decisions, 159 Direct Mail/Marketing Assoc., 127 Directional time, 144 Do it now!, 17, 19 Do it now, 113

Doing It Now, 90 Dornay, Robert C, 110 Dossey, Larry, 146

Doyle, Michael, and Straus, David, 119 Drawing on the Right Side

of the Brain, 46

Dream, pick

a, 16 "Dustbuster", 124 Dychtwalk, Ken, 115 Dyer, Wayne W,, 46

The Edible Woman, 91 Edwards, Betty, 46 Efficiency experts, 50

146 Errands, 61, 74 Eliot, T.S.,

The Essential Whole Earth Catalog, 75 Exercise, 30

Family, 160 Feel good, 96 Ferguson, Marilyn, 45, 46 Field, Joanna, 46 Files,

107

Finn, David, 46 Fit or Fat?, 45 Flexibility, 115 Food for Sport, 45, 127 Frantic, 142 Free time, 153 Freebies, 120 "Fresh Air", 124

Friedman, Meyer, and Rosenman, Ray H., 45 Friends, 81 Furniture, 127

Future-oriented time, 14(

Gadgets, 70 Gadgets, electronic, 78 Generation Gap, 161

Get up

earlier/stay

up

121 Gifts, 73, 127 later,

Going Co-Op, 119 The Goodfellow Catalog, Government property, li

Great Catalog Guide, 127

Groups, 173 Guides, mail-order, 126 Habits, 69

Hagen, Walter C, 96 Hall, Hall,

Edward J., 147 Edward T., 145

Hands, 41, 86 The Harried Leisure Class, 163

Harvard Business Review, 110

Head, 34 Help, 92 The Hitchhiker's Guide

to

the Galaxy, 145

Holding Zone, 12 Horky, 67 Housecleaning, 92 Housewife, 154 Housework, 64, 171 How Things Don't Work,5l How to Be Organized in Spite of Yourself, 11 How to Make and Break HabitsJO

How to Make Meetings Work, 119

How to Make Your Car Last Almost Forever, 68

"How to Make Your Car Last 20 Years", 68

How to

a Museum, 46 Hugo the Hippo, 156 Hurry sickness, 149 Hypnopaedia, 25 I

Visit

Am the Cheese, 123

Idiot work,

Kitchen timer, 112, 123 Koestler, Arthur, 46 Kohler, Mariane, 46

One-week Calendar, 169

Late factor, 135 Lateness, 132 Laughter, 39 Libraries, 119

Orientation, future, 149

Papanek, Victor, and Hennessey, James, 51 Patterning,

Lists, 104 Livable Cities, 126

People, other, 132 Periods, peak, 99 Perspective, 140 Peter, Dr. Laurence J., 114 Pictures of time, 143

Prufrock, 146

Lowen, Alexander, Luce,

36,

Making

love, 161

Mantle, Mickey, 30 Meals, 71

Hie Meaning ofLiff, 39, 73 Medical Self-Care, 120 Meetings, 84 Mental blocks, 89 The Mikado, 43 Mind, 33, 36, 45

Monochrome Ms.

,

,

147

87

Housework?, 80

Good Food

and

file,

A

107

Creative to Life, 36

Polychronic, 147 Post-it™ Notes, 79, 129

The Power of Myth,

46, 124

Prayer, 98

Preparing yourself, 43 Presume, 20, 95, 166 Primate behavior, 161 Progoff, Ira, 46 Psychology Today, 37 Purchases, 73 Quality time, 161

Radio, 124 Rat,

little

Reading

gray, 94

List,

45

Recollections, 41

Nabokov, Vladimir, 43 The Natural Way to Draw,

Blind", 124 Nicholaides, Kimon, 46

46

Pile

Pleasure;

Approach Machines, 123 Mail-order guides, 75, 126 Maintenance, 68 Maintenance Checklist, 171 Make time, 103

Information Anxiety, 109 The Intimate Enemy, 136

Jane Brody's Book, 45

46

Gay Gaer, 100

Images of time, 145 Impulse buying, 72, 159

There Life After

5, 84, 104,

Peace Corps volunteer, 148 Peak periods, 99 Pelletier, Kenneth R., 36

Lockheed syndrome, 152 The Lovesong of J. Alfred

The New Aerobics, 45 "Newspapers for the

Is

166

Life Pattern, 3, 166 Linder, Staffan B., 163 Linear time, 144 Linearity, 147

46

64

Irrationality, 37,

One-year Calendar, 170 One-year Sales List, 170 Organize, 76

Relaxation, 87 Resistance, 18

Resource

List,

172

Resources, 120

Nightmares, 40 Nixon, Richard, 30 No time, 163 Nutrition, 32

Respect others' time, 138 Rhythms, 136 Rhythms, natural, 102 Riflcin, Jeremy, 134 Robbins, J., and Fisher, D., 70 Robertson, Jim and

On Not Being Able to Paint,

Rule of One, 63

46

Carolyn, 126

GET IT ALL DONE AND STILL BE HUMAN

Sales,

73 Stretchers, time, 118 Sturgeon's law, 44

Sales cycles, 170 Satisfaction, 166

Say "No!", 110 Say "Yes!", 113 Scnlenger, Sunny, and

Roesch, Roberta, 77 Science and Human Behavior, 70 The Secrets of Relaxation,

46 Segmentation, 148 Segmented time, 144 Selective Software, 124 Self Creation, 46 Selye, Dr. Hans, 136 Serendipity, 128 Sex, 161 Shopping, 71 Skinner, B.F., 70 Sleeping/dreaming, 40 Slop time, 132

The Small Community, 126 The Small Towns Book,126 Smith, Leif, 17 Smith, Nathan J.

& Ronnie

Worthington-Roberts, 45 Space, Time, and Medicine, 146 St.

Francis of Assisi prayer,

98 Stationery and cards, 173 Stop the world!, 166

The Stress of Life, 137 Stretch, 115

180

Summary, 164 Supermom, 111 Superwoman, 111 The Sword in the Stone, 26

Type A Behavior and Your Heart, 45

The Ultimate Shopper's Catalogue, 75

Unload, 110

Upper/Downer

Pattern,

48, 95, 98, 166

Synchronizing, 49

Uppers and Downers, 11 Tack

in the sole of

foot,

your

140

Tape

recorder, 124 Telephone, 52, 124 Television, 56 Ten Relaxed Rules, 168 Territoriality, 99 Things, 79, 157 Threnody, 25

Time Management Made Easy, 90, 134 Time language, 137 Time, "quality", 161 Time, images of, 145 Time, waste of, 50, 87 Time-gobblers, 48 Time-scarcity, 47 Time-stretchers, 118 Timer, kitchen, 112, 123 Tired, 101 Tools, human, 94 Trick, cheap, 19 Trivia,

62

Turla, Peter,

Kathleen

and Hawkins,

L.,

Use Both Sides of Your Brain, 46 Utne Reader, 121

Vacuum cleaners, Visits, drop-in,

124

81

Wait, 92 Waiting, 86

Warehouses, discount, 74

Waste of time, 50 Weekends, 102 Weekly Menu Planner, 71 Weinberg, George, 46 The Western Way of Death, 59 White, T.H., 26

Whole Earth Review, 121

Wish

166 151 Work/free time split, 150 Workaholics, 152 Wrinkle in Time, 123 Writing, 37 List, 7, 95, 121,

Work time,

A

Wurman, Richard

Saul, 10

90

Your Erroneous Zones, 46

(

About the Authors Tony and Robbie Fanning

are active in their

commu-

and are the parents of a 19-year-old daughter. Tony is an expert in desk-top publishing and personal computers. Robbie writes, edits, and publishes articles and books for several publishers. She is an expert in teaching writing and volunteers in a local thirdgrade classroom. The Fannings wrote the "Organizing" section of The Whole Earth Software Review. nity

Other books by the authors

k

The Busy Woman 's Sewing Book (with Nancy Zieman) The Busy Woman 's Fitting Book (with Nancy Zieman) The Complete Book of Machine Embroidery The Complete Book of Machine Quilting Here and Now Stitchery From Other Times and Places

Keep Running 100 Butterflies, 1000 Islands Decorative Machine Stitchery f

Robbie Fanning s Sewing Companion

181

.

.

.

An Afterword The

First Edition

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time-management

immediate impetus to action... Detailed strategies for coping with the major demands on how-to

is its

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and adaptable."

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Not enough hours in the day to do it all? Feel doomed, as though you'll never catch up? In motion all the time, with no pay-off in satisfaction? Take heart. There is hope for you.

YOU CAN GET IT ALL DONE Inventory your fast

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Wipe out your worst time-wasters. Apply some simple time-making Stretch

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Use your time with others more

Understand

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AND STILL BE HUMAN WHILE YOU DO! ISBN 0-1320AL,