Redefine what you care about as a responsibility, not a reward.
At first glance, American politics doesn’t seem like an ideal environment for seeking answers to one of life’s core dilemmas: How to make more time for the people and activities that matter most to us. Politics is generally associated with angry shouting matches on cable news, relentless barrages of patronizing TV ads, endless streams of questionable and fringe-y content on our social media feeds, and condescending rhetoric that leaves everyone exhausted and cynical. (I’m getting agitated just writing this.)
In other words, it’s not exactly a case study in self-awareness or work-life balance. But while politics may be a uniquely high-profile line of work, as a work environment most of its day-to-day challenges are thoroughly ordinary. From being tethered to email and bombarded with incoming information, to equating busyness with importance and stress with status, to burying lingering questions of what the point of all this work and stress really is, most of the trials of working in politics aren’t limited to any one profession.
In fact, they seem nearly universal today. Two-thirds of full-time employees, according to a 2018 Gallup survey, report feeling burned out at work at least some of the time. (Those in my age cohort, the ever-intriguing millennials, report even higher levels of burnout.) A 2016 study conducted by Groupon found, according to Forbes, that “60 percent of Americans have an unhealthy work-life balance.” Nearly as many report that “there simply are not enough hours in the day to do what they must do.” In the United Kingdom, where I’ve lived since 2017, respondents to a Virgin Active survey said they don’t have enough time for, among other things, sleep, exercise, or “me time.” (They also want more wine, cups of tea, and Instagram likes, for what that’s worth.) These numbers reflect a clear trend: We crave more time to do the things we find most fulfilling.
Before landing in London two years ago, I spent eight years working in American politics, mostly in the U.S. House and Senate in Washington, D.C. The universe I stepped away from is indeed a strange one. Life as a political staffer is hopeful, hopeless, fun, exhausting, inspiring, depressing, addicting, insular, unique, toxic, and invigorating. It’s all of those things, often at the same time. It can offer proximity to power and influence at an uncomfortably young age. It attracts some of the most hardworking, idealistic, and service-oriented people in the country (and a small number of the most cynical, disingenuous, and power-hungry ones, too). It casts aside entirely the idea of work-life balance and replaces it with a pseudo-reality in which work and life and the news and current events are all the same thing. It can be completely transformed in an instant by an election, a scandal, or a national disaster.
Like any workplace, though, politics is really just a collection of human beings trying to balance a challenging profession with a fulfilling personal life. Like any workplace, it’s a world in which everyone’s expected to strive constantly for the next job or promotion. It’s a world that thrives on the illusion of planning, plotting, and controlling things we can’t. It’s a world that rarely encourages people to make time for the things in life that matter most to them outside the workplace. It’s a world, for instance, where dinner with your grandparents or a weekend away to celebrate your in-laws’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary can be supplanted by frantically drafting a statement condemning the president’s latest tweet or rewriting a memo for an upcoming subcommittee hearing. (Those last examples are totally hypothetical, of course.)
In short, it’s an all-consuming world in which busyness and burnout all too easily obscure a fundamental fact of life: It’s up to us to carve out more time for the activities that most fulfill us and the people we care most about. For many of us, our instincts — and sometimes our bosses — urge us to organize our lives so what matters is a reward for completing what’s been assigned. Our “want-to-dos,” we’re told, have to come second to our “have-to-dos.” But what if we reverse that hierarchy? What if we redefine our want-to-dos as responsibilities, instead of as rewards?
To be clear, making time for what matters doesn’t mean neglecting life’s basic responsibilities. Nor does it mean we can do everything we’ve always dreamed of if only we say “no” to more stuff. Time is finite, sadly, and we can’t do it all. But whether it’s a side hustle or your main source of income, whether you’re sitting in front of a computer or stocking shelves all day, eight years in politics taught me it’s possible for anyone to tip their life in a more fulfilling direction. No matter your job, age, background, or circumstances, by thinking differently about how you spend your time, you can balance and prioritize better.
Here are four techniques, honed in the relentlessly-multitasking and always-on world of politics, to reframe your days to create more time for what matters to you.
1. Put your priorities on your to-do list
Life isn’t a to-do list. But let’s be honest: Most of the time most of us are going to treat it like one. We might as well put the things we care about on that list, too — not just the stuff we think we have to do before we get to the things we care about.
That’s a practical point as much as a philosophical one. Sure, things like “pay credit card bill” and “buy groceries” and “do laundry” are on my to-do list. But, every day, so is meditating. So is writing. So is reading The Economist. So is taking a walk. So is thinking. (Yes, the task just says “Think,” as in, “Sit with your thoughts without any incoming stimulus.”) So is going for a walk. So is calling my parents. So is checking in with my partner, Erin. Not because I’m likely to forget any of these things but because, as Daniel H. Pink puts it simply in When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, “What gets scheduled gets done.” I want the things that matter most to me to get done. I want my priorities to happen.
An obvious question here is, Doesn’t putting “spend time with kids” on the to-do list and “do daily positive affirmation” on the calendar trivialize these activities? Aren’t we over-prescribing our lives, trying to control the uncontrollable? It certainly does feel weird to put this stuff — the stuff that matters most — on a list traditionally reserved for tasks like “respond to emails” or “do taxes” or “call cable company.” I sometimes feel like I’m equating calling my parents, which is one of the most important things I do every week, with calling our internet provider yet again to find out why the wifi is down, which is one of the least fulfilling tasks imaginable.
But the to-do list is what I depend on to make sure I do what I need to do. I invest my time and trust in it. Why not use it to keep the important stuff on my agenda, in addition to tackling the unpleasantries of life? Putting what matters most into the system I use to manage my days makes me prioritize these want-to-dos at least as much as the obligatory have-to-dos — and forces me to consider the trade-offs that come with, say, sacrificing time with a passion project to run an errand. This system elevates the fulfilling want-to-dos to their rightful place, so things like meditating, writing, and calling home get the time they deserve. It doesn’t mean I do everything I want to do every day — any set of to-dos, whether groceries or life goals, requires flexibility to function — but it does mean I’m pretty aware of whether I’m focusing on the big stuff over time.
In Tim Ferriss’ Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World, Drew Houston, the co-founder of Dropbox, describes how he prioritizes his “rocks,” the things that matter most to him. “Schedule specific blocks of time in advance for your rocks so you don’t have to think about them,” Houston urges. “Don’t rely on wishful thinking (e.g., ‘I’ll get that workout in when I have some downtime’); if you can’t see your rocks on your calendar, they might as well not exist. … If you don’t put those in first, no one will.” Houston’s last observation is perhaps the most important: If you don’t put them first, no one will. Whether we call them our rocks, priorities, goals, want-to-dos — it’s on us to put them first.
If something’s truly important to us, one might ask, shouldn’t it be easy to remember? Maybe, but I’m not confident that’s realistic in our over-stimulated, oversubscribed world. I don’t trust myself always to know what matters to me at the exact moment I need to know, especially in the middle of a hectic day. And even when I do know, I don’t trust myself to act in accordance with that knowledge — like when I get out my phone to read a saved New Yorker article but end up reading emails instead. Instead, I trust the system I’ve built. I trust that the person (me) who designed this system over time knows better how I work and what I want to focus on than the person (also me) who’s tired or overwhelmed or not sure what to prioritize at any given moment.
There are plenty of caveats. Anyone who’s spent a day organizing and re-organizing a to-do list, only to find that all the tasks shifted around but none of them actually got done, has learned that systems don’t do our work for us. Sometimes our jobs or other circumstances make these hard-and-fast rules impossible. Importantly, no system enables anyone to do it all; accepting that unfortunate reality is a prerequisite for a technique like this. Even so, we can spend more time doing what matters to us if we choose to prioritize it.
2. Work like you have young kids
Here’s another (admittedly odd) way I balance life and work, which was inspired by observing some of my former colleagues in the U.S. Senate: Work like you have young kids. This sounds pretty strange, especially coming from someone without children. But families with kids don’t have much time (or, I imagine, energy) for things that don’t satisfy one of two conditions: 1) it has to be done, or 2) it provides them with real, meaningful value. They have to prioritize. They have to work deliberately and efficiently when they’re at work; they don’t have the option to stay late to catch up on emails because they wasted the first three hours of the day on Twitter. They have to focus on what’s most important and what matters. They have small humans counting on them at 5:30 pm.
The same is true at home. This theoretical parent of young children with their priorities in order doesn’t have time (or interest) in sending emails for the sake of sending emails. They don’t have the time (or interest) in working relentlessly for the purpose of fooling themselves into a fleeting sense of accomplishment or productivity. Evenings? Weekends? Vacations? Holidays? They know what matters, and it isn’t PowerPoint. Like any boundary, working with the urgency of having kids at home focuses the mind and closes off the impossible-yet-tantalizing possibility of doing it all. It makes it more difficult to justify obsessing over the small things that don’t really matter in the long run. When we know we can’t do everything, we have to choose.
This mental framework isn’t just for time management. It’s about using our limited energy and attention to invest in activities that fulfill us. I assume raising a child is one of those activities, but there are plenty of ways to redirect our brains and our schedules in a more meaningful direction. Mine are surely familiar to many: Spending time with friends and family. Traveling. Working out. Meditating. Writing. Reading. Now that I’m out of politics, I’m fortunate to have more flexibility to prioritize many of these activities, but the point is that no matter our circumstances — even in the heat of a political campaign, for instance — we can all tweak our priorities so what we care most about isn’t the first thing we sacrifice by default.
Working like you have young kids isn’t a call to action for working more efficiently or trying to sneak in extra tasks after the (hypothetical) children are asleep. It’s a call to action for working less. Doing less. Focusing on what’s most important, and letting the rest go.
I’m sure actual parents can find plenty of ways to quibble with this imperfect analogy, and I’m sure they’re right. I have no idea what it’s like to raise a child, which is why I’m not giving parenting advice. I’m simply urging us to organize our days deliberately, spend our time intentionally, and free ourselves from the mythical idea that anyone can “do it all.” As Cal Newport writes in Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, “Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.” If we choose to prioritize the small things, we inevitably run out of time for the big things.
If this parenthood thought experiment isn’t working for you, the author Neil Pasricha suggests a complementary approach in his 2016 book, The Happiness Equation. (His suggestion is conveniently free of the awkward complexities that come with urging someone to pretend small children are in their home.) It’s what Pasricha calls the “The Saturday Morning Test.” When we’re trying to identify the activities that bring happiness, “What do you do on a Saturday morning when you have nothing to do?” Pasricha asks. “Your authentic self should go toward that.”
Time is perhaps the most valuable resource anyone has. Why wouldn’t you invest it in ways that give you value and fulfillment? Next time you’re tempted to check your email on the weekend or stay late to clean out your inbox yet again (as if it won’t be full again in the morning), instead work like you have young kids at home. Or like it’s Saturday morning and you have time — not a few minutes, but hours of uninterrupted, unscheduled, uncommitted time to do what you really care about. Or work like you’re on vacation, when you do only the most critical non-vacation stuff, and scrap the rest until you have to be back in the real world.
3. Embrace Parkinson’s law
Work expands to fill the time allotted for it. This fundamental attribute of human behavior was first captured in The Economist in November of 1955. The column that introduced the world to this notion, or at least put it into words for the first time, described a hypothetical “elderly lady of leisure” who spends an entire day crafting a postcard to her niece. This task “would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told,” the piece observed. But because this lady of leisure can spend all day writing the note, instead of having to fit it into three minutes, it takes her all day.
It’s a simple observation of a powerful truth that has only become more relevant in an age of constant distractions fighting for our attention and tasks fighting for our time: Within reason, the more time we set aside for a project, the more time that project is going to take. This unscientific law is the foundation of my unscientific observation about how coworkers with kids get their work done more efficiently, and how they manage to find time for the things that matter to them. They recognize the limits on their time, and they work within those limitations. They focus on the most important stuff first, and they do that stuff only as effectively as they need to (good enough, not perfect).
As much as we like to think the volume of time spent working automatically translates into the volume of value we create, reality doesn’t exactly bear that out. Cal Newport, for example, produces a huge amount of high-quality content, from books to blog posts to academic research, but he works on a strict schedule. When he’s on, he’s on. When he’s off, he’s off. As Newport writes, “When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.”
This formula has worked particularly well for the software firm Basecamp. As company co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson describe in their new book, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, Basecamp employees generally work 40 hours a week, no matter what (except in the summer months, when the company operates on a four-day, 32-hour-a-week schedule). “If you can’t fit everything you want to do within 40 hours per week,” they write, “you need to get better at picking what to do, not work longer hours.” Basecamp employees do what they need to do in the time they have. And with very limited exceptions, if they aren’t able to get done what they expected, they change their expectations, not their schedules.
Parkinson’s law comes with a critical caveat. Planning our days with this concept in mind can make it dangerously tempting to set our expectations even higher and cram in more tasks and responsibilities just because we can. That would be a missed opportunity. Just because we can do more than we think in less time than we think doesn’t mean we should. The real opportunity lies in leveraging Parkinson’s law to make more time for the things that matter most to us, and not to let the less important stuff take up more time or mental energy than it deserves. Don’t do more for the sake of doing more. Do more of what matters. (Perhaps the “elderly lady of leisure” who spends all day writing a postcard to her niece has it right.)
Fortunately, many societies already have a structure that empowers us to embrace Parkinson’s law: It’s called the weekend. Nothing will make me less effective during the week than giving up on a project because “I’ll just finish it over the weekend.” And nothing will make me more moody and distracted by a vague sense of guilt or obligation over the weekend — not to mention fail to recharge me for the week ahead — than worrying about something I could’ve done during the week (or could do next week).
As Parkinson’s law suggests, if you allot two extra days for a task, that task will magically expand to require seven days. Make Saturdays and Sundays off-limits to everything except what matters most, and you’ll probably get done in the other five days whatever you need to get done. And if you don’t? Take two days off over the weekend, and then log in on Monday rested and ready to get back to work.
4. Beware the “tyranny of the remembering self”
In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, the legendary psychologist Daniel Kahneman makes a key observation about the subjectivity of the human experience. Our lives, Kahneman argues, are essentially composed of two selves. There’s the “experiencing self,” which is how we feel in the middle of doing something. Then there’s the “remembering self,” which is how we feel about that activity afterwards — how we remember it. As Kahneman points out, how we remember something often differs greatly from what we felt as we experienced it. And when it comes to planning and decision-making, the remembering self seems to be far more powerful than the experiencing self.
How many times have you committed to something — a networking event, a workout class, even drinks with an old acquaintance — and then later asked yourself when you rediscovered it on your calendar, “Why did I say ‘yes’ to this again?” Why do we keep returning to activities that we don’t enjoy doing? Why do we prioritize things that don’t leave us fulfilled, forcing us to push the things that do to the mythical “tomorrow?”
There are plenty of answers to these questions, some more legitimate than others. We made a commitment. We have to (perhaps it’s the law — that’s a good reason). We want to help someone out. We believe it’s important. We like what the activity signals about us. We enjoy the idea of being the type of person who does that activity. We think it’ll be good for us. We like the feeling of saying “yes” to a future commitment when we get all the productive satisfaction of making that commitment without having yet had to do anything.
These are all real and, to varying degrees, valid reasons. But another reason we say yes to things that don’t leave us fulfilled is that we remember things differently than they felt as we experienced them. The remembering self, Kahneman notes, “neglects duration, exaggerates peaks and ends, and is susceptible to hindsight.” All of these shortcomings in perception and memory impact how we recall things and, thus, how we make future decisions. “I am my remembering self,” writes Kahneman, in a reflection of all of us, “and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”
If we’re determined to spend more of our time in genuinely fulfilling ways, this reality is one we have to recognize and reckon with. Unlocking more time to do what matters to us means building awareness of how we feel when we’re doing something, not just how we remember it or would like to remember it. It means identifying the activities that bring us value as we experience them, not just in what they signal about us. It means embracing the remembering self and choosing to push through uncomfortable activities that leave us happily exhausted afterwards, not the ones that leave us thinking, “That was a waste of time.”
“Time is the ultimate finite resource,” Kahneman observes. But the “remembering self ignores [that] reality.” Most of the time every impulse in our brain is telling us the remembering self is the one we should heed. But the more time we spend engaged in what actually matters to us, and the more aware we are during that time, the more we learn to recognize that these are the activities we need to prioritize.
The next time you’re considering a far-off request or volunteering to work on a non-urgent project over the weekend, take a moment to think about Kahneman’s two selves. Do you really want to say yes, or is doing so just the path of least resistance? Do you really need to work this weekend, or do you just like what that would signal about you? By reflecting on the remembering and experiencing selves as you make decisions about how you spend your time and organize your days, you can tilt the balance slightly more in the direction of things you care about. And, over a lifetime, a slight tilt today can lead to a dramatically different trajectory.
What matters should be a responsibility, not a reward
Family. Friends. Reading. Writing. Fitness. Travel. Meditation. Moments of stillness. As I’ve learned over the years, these are the parts of my life that instill in me a sense of fulfillment, wholeness, and completion. The things that force me into the present moment and create value in my life. The things that give me energy in the morning and leave me with a feeling of contented exhaustion at the end of the day. The things I need to prioritize for a life fulfilled. The things that give me the confidence and stability to be there for others.
Yet like so many of us, I’ve long operated on a model that doesn’t reflect these priorities. What gives me joy and fulfillment — the things I want to do, the things that are entirely in my control — are slotted around the things I have to do, the things I feel I’m supposed be doing. Instead of carving out time for a workout, I let work emails determine whether I’ll exercise. Instead of reading books that challenge and educate me, I let Twitter and political news come first. Instead of carving out time for side hustles or meditation, I postpone them or try to fit them into 15-minute increments at the end of a long day.
It almost goes without saying that what I most value — spending time with my partner, Erin, and our families and friends — suffers because of my inability to make it a priority, rather than a reward for having gotten everything else done first. In The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, Ryan Holiday asks rhetorically, “If real self-improvement is what we’re after, why do we leave our reading until those few minutes before we shut off the lights and go to bed?” To paraphrase Holiday, if we want to spend more time doing what matters to us, why do we leave these activities until those few minutes in between obligations or at the end of the day?
Why, I’ve asked myself, do I feel compelled to squeeze in reading or writing or meditation or exercise around news, emails, and errands, rather than the other way around? Why have I been trained to feel that being seen as “online” or “available” or “not slacking” should dictate how I spend my time, rather than recognizing these thoughts as the insecurities and irrational cravings for acceptance they are? Why do I continue to say “yes” to things that I have no interest in and don’t need to do?
***
Daniel Kahneman’s research has led him to a simple theory: “The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time,” he writes. “Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?” Sometimes, of course, we don’t have a choice. But sometimes we do. We can put our priorities on our to-do list. We can work like we have young kids. We can embrace Parkinson’s law. We can watch out for Kahneman’s “tyranny of the remembering self.” For me, these four ways of reframing how I allocate time have made a meaningful difference in how I approach my days and, in turn, my life. But the entire premise of spending more time doing what we care about requires some fine print.
As the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates told Ezra Klein during a 2017 interview, “If you want to be wild in your work life, you need to be boring in your home life.” Life is full of trade-offs, and we can’t do everything. No matter what articles like this one might imply, no one can truly life-hack or time-manage their way to doing it all. Holding oneself to a standard that requires perfect compliance with ideas like “only do things that matter to you” is a recipe for failure. Human beings get distracted, make mistakes, and fall short of our goals a lot of the time. Sometimes we need time to be bored or watch TV mindlessly. We often do things because we have to, or just because it’s the right thing to do.
So, how do we make time for what matters to us in a responsible way? How do we find a pragmatic balance between pursuing what we care most about and upholding the obligations of life — not just the daily to-do list and what we’ve been assigned, but our commitments to friends and family, to colleagues, to civic society, to those in need?
I’m convinced that every human being, regardless of circumstance, can benefit from spending more time doing what they really care about. We have more time than we think, or at least we have the freedom to de-prioritize the things we do for no reason other than because everyone else does. In some cases, it might be selfish to focus on making time for what matters to us. But it’s also impossible to operate at our best if we don’t carve out any time for these activities.
That brings us back to politics. It’s true that the state of political discourse and world affairs today is pretty uninspiring. It’s also true that some of humanity’s most pressing global challenges, from war and poverty to climate change and economic inequality, demand collective action. But the techniques I’ve described, honed through the lens of politics, have left me optimistic.
I’m optimistic that each of us, as individuals, can take steps to make our lives more manageable and more meaningful. We can each focus just a little more on doing what matters to us. That doesn’t only make our days more enjoyable. It also gives us strength for the sacrifices and struggles our future requires. It might even make our politics work a little better, too.
This column was originally published in the Medium publication ‘The Ascent.’
