Brigid Schulte’s new book looks at why we’re constantly battling “the overwhelm.” Nicole Dubowitz explains how the idea for the book came about:
As a mom of two young kids, Schulte was incredulous when University of Maryland sociologist John Robinson asserted that women have at least thirty hours of leisure time every week — “not as much as men,” he said, “but women have more leisure now than they did in the 1960s, even though more women are working outside the home.” He encouraged Schulte to keep a diary on her leisure time usage and report back. Overwhelmed began with the author’s 2010 feature in The Washington Post magazine, where she posed the first of many questions: “How did researchers compile this statistic that said we were rolling in leisure — over four hours a day? Did any of us feel that we actually had downtime?”
In keeping her diary, Schulte was pretty sure she would prove Robinson wrong, or else find that she had been “squandering” away leisure time while feeling overwhelmed. More questions for the book developed: Do our daily commitments “contaminate” the leisure time we do have? Why are things the way they are, and is there anything we can do to make them better?
Hanna Rosin digs into Schulte’s findings:
To be deep in the overwhelm requires not just doing too many things in one 24-hour period but doing so many different kinds of things that they all blend into each other and a day has no sense of distinct phases.
Researchers call it “contaminated time,” and apparently women are more susceptible to it than men, because they have a harder time shutting down the tape that runs in their heads about what needs to get done that day. The only relief from the time pressure comes from cordoning off genuine stretches of free or leisure time, creating a sense of what Schulte calls “time serenity” or “flow.” But over the years, time use diaries show that women have become terrible at that, squeezing out any free time and instead, as Schulte puts it, resorting to “crappy bits of leisure time confetti.”
Helen Lewis points out that we bring on some of the stress ourselves:
The relatively affluent have to take some responsibility for worshipping at the Altar of Overwork, an attitude Schulte calls “busier than thou”. Just as having a tan became a status symbol once it denoted that you could afford foreign holidays, so being overwhelmed is a badge of honour for middle-class professionals. Oh, between Jonny’s clarinet lessons and my Mandarin classes and Steve getting promoted to partner, I don’t have a minute to myself, they trill. Having no free time makes the point you don’t just have a job. You have a career. You are Going Somewhere.
Schulte’s prescription is simple: decide whether you love the bragging rights of being busy enough to live in a debilitating whirlwind of activity. If you don’t, perhaps leave the clarinet unmolested and the boxercise class undone. As for housework, one researcher’s message to women is refreshingly simple: be a slattern. “Do you have to be able to do open-heart surgery on the kitchen floor?” he asks. Also, make sure Himself pulls his weight.
In an interview, Schulte explains how her perspective has changed:
I was just with my father who’s had a stroke, and sitting in a hospital room really makes you remember: … We don’t have that much time; what do you want to make of your life here on this Earth? And so, my to-do list is really: What are my priorities? What is most important to me? And then everything else, everything my to-do list used to be, I call the other 5 percent — it shouldn’t take more than 5 percent of my time or energy. There’s a lot of stuff that I used to do that I don’t do anymore.
