why i schedule six weeks in advance (part 2): becoming allergic to frenzy

last year or the year before, at our end of the year staff party, my colleague, curtis, shared that he was going to start avoiding frenzy. he had been running himself pretty ragged and was tired of being tired. he was tired of himself (and others) using ‘busy as a status symbol.’ his words resonated with me because i often felt the same way. 

and with my intention set so clearly on matching my time with my values [see part 1], i had a clear place to strategize. so i started to look in my life for what made me feel frenzied and started to build ways to make myself allergic to it.

i started watching my energy levels over the course of a few weeks. one key thing i found was that hanging out with multiple people a day really drained my energy. why?

• i hate small talk with a passion. i would rather be silent and just share someone’s physical company than to talk and think about meaningless things.  
  
• when i meet up with a friend, i want the time to be directed towards maintaining or deepening that meaningful relationship. doing that actually takes quite a bit of mental and emotional energy. so doing it multiple times a day is quite resource intensive.
  

so i decided to strive to meet up with only one person per day. on my calendar, this is implemented via a weekly cap.yes, i have a numerical maximum on the number of friends i will see in a single week. of course, there are exceptions and the number can change (a little) based on what else is going on that week, but i try to keep to it pretty firmly.

having followed this strategy for about a year now, i’ve found the following:

• based on the number of people i know, the frequency at which i run into them around town, and the time i allot in my schedule to see friends, this books my schedule out about six weeks on average.
  
• seeing one friend (or small group of friends) per day not only allows me to show up more fully for when i DO see someone.
• at the end of each day and week, my overall exhausting levels have gone down drastically compared to previous phases of my life.
• running this type of schedule seems like it is also based on living on boston. other cities with different types of social gravity work differently. this sort of thing would never work in gainesville or new york.
• a great side-benefit of a drastic cut in my spending on alcohol, food, and snacks. so often we use consumption as a way to facilitate communion, but that needn’t be. i’m actively trying to get away from that in as many ways as possible, but it still happens, ya know?

anyways, that’s all i got. being allergic to the frenzy feels like a really good thing. at least for me for now.

ps - in all of this, having a more fully developed practice of saying no has been amazingly helpful. definitely necessary.

why i plan my schedule six weeks in advance

​since about the middle of 2015, i’ve gotten real rigorous about my calendar game. i’ve always been a calendarer, but after my 2015 reflection weekend, i really stepped it up a notch.

this increased rigor regarding my schedule has had many impacts, but the one that most of my friends encounter is this: when people want to hangout, i schedule it (on average) six weeks in advance.

this has prompted all sorts of interesting (hurt, annoyed, frustrated) comments from people:

• “wow! you’re really that busy?”
• “oh, you must not care about hanging out with me that much.”
• “i don’t even know what i’m doing in six weeks; put it on your calendar and remind me two weeks beforehand.”

here’s a little more backstory: in 2015 and 2016, i took 1-2 days during the first weekend of january to reflect on the previous year. the 2015 reflection was at a coffeeshop called simon’s too on mass ave with my dear friend, annemarie. i forget where the 2016 reflection happened… i used this holstee tool. it basically lead me to this process:

• make a list of your priorities,
• review how you spent your time* last year,
• check to see if how you spent time lines up with your priorities,
• if they match on all accounts, change nothing; if they don’t, make changes.

i saw that my time didn’t match what was important to me. and i know from the getting things done methodology that most people struggle to achieve their high level goals/vision because they have insufficient mechanisms for connecting minute-to-minute decision-making with the big picture ideals. all of this lead to me thinking at a very granular level about how i spend my time each week. based on my priorities, i determined that the following categories were how i wanted to spend my weeknights:

• personal projects
• friend/group projects
• close friend hangouts (these are recurring with certain people and only certain people)
• friend hangouts (these are for when someone wants to get a drink or coffee)
• wildcard or network-building
• preparing for the week

this has had lots of impacts on me and my time. it’s made me think clearly about: who my close friends are and how i want to cultivate and invest in those relationships, what do i want to spend my energy on outside of work, how do i want to use my social energy when not with close friends, et cetera.

the different catgories don’t have to be on the same day week to week. normally i plan for network-building things to happen on saturdays, but if something comes up on friday, i have no problem swapping it from saturday to friday and then moving what was planned for friday to saturday.

that said, some of the categories are much easier when they are regularly scheduled. for example, preparing for the week almost always happens on sundays. that way, food i cook lasts the whole week without going bad.

close friend hangouts are also easier on fixed schedules. it helps both parties stay committed to seeing each other when (1) we know exactly how to plan other things around the time and (2) we don’t have to worry about it being too long before we get to see each other again.

anyways, when all of this thinking combines with the number of people i know and the rate at which i make new connections, it results in my schedule being planned about six weeks in advance.

so in early august when i schedule our dinner date for mid-september, now you know why.

ps - wow. realizing that this should have been multiple posts and this is sort of all a jumble, but i just couldn’t stop.

pps - i was encouraged to write this post after a real good conversation with my friend, dan schenk, at haley house last week. thanks for asking and subsequently prompting the writing, dan!

ppps - my thinking about all this stuff has been shaped by more than just what’s included up there. i know i’ve had conversations with my friend, ofer, about these things, but many friends as well.

* note: the word ‘time’ can be replaced with any list of resources: ‘time and money’, ‘time, money, and energy,’ whatever you want to and have ability to measure. 

“it's all here”: american environmental diversity

back in may, i was talking with a new friend and colleague, deina, about travel. she and i were talking about traveling in the united states between new england, the south, and the west. she and i both had trips planned and we were just chatting about it all.

and then she said something that stuck with me:

“in america, you can really choose what type of lifestyle you want. cities, rural, busy, quiet, crowded, not crowded; it’s all here. it’s not like that everywhere.”

and i just sort of sat with that for a second. she’s totally right. without leaving my country, i can see mountains, beaches, tundra, forest, desert, and more. without crossing any international borders (which is an increasingly prominent social problem these days), i can see all of that. having the resources to do that travel so is a different question, but still.

as our conversation continued, she explained that not only do americans have access to those places, but we can choose to live in almost any one of them. again, not a common global phenomenon. where she’s from, pretty much everyone lives in the same condition.

and, if i’m honest, i’ve always known that, but i hadn’t known it in this way until she surfaced it. this is a huge privilege (i think). but what to do with it (if anything?)

a couple of friends (annemarie, cameron, ben, miriam, others) have this dream of having a network of houses all over the country (world?) where we can collectively exist, raise our families, work, vacation, etc… maybe?

why i want to cap my income

for better or worse, most of favorite reading is comes from black feminist women or old white transcendental men. in some ways, this is surprising. in other ways, it’s totally not. go figure. 

anyway, i was instructed to read walden by henry david thoreau a long time ago. although it was long and rambly, one thing has stuck with me: his thoughts on economic needs, work, and time.

essentially, thoreau believed that most people in the world worked too much. he believed that the increased standard of living from working a lot wasn’t even close to worth it. he thought people should figure out exactly what their basic needs were and then work enough to meet them. at that point, they should stop working and actually enjoy life. for him, this came out to working about six weeks a year. he then took the rest to wander around in the woods, travel, and engage in other shenanigans.

when i first understood what he was saying, it literally blew my mind. since then, i’ve realized at several critical moments that his thinking about this lines up with much of my thinking about alternative economies, intentional communities, and enoughness (some of which is catalogued here and here).

needless to say, i have been inspired by his thinking and i’m actively working to integrate it into my life. for me, his thinking translates to me as calculating an income maximum for myself. once i hit that every year (which will include some savings, but not thinking about retirement scale savings), i want to be free to stop doing things that generate income or if i do continue to generate income, i want to be intentional about giving away the excess. if i’m really honest, i’d love to have enough savings in the bank to not work for an entire year (sabbatical). but given that i don’t actually need that much resource to live for a year, i don’t think that’s outlandish.

anyway, here’s another blog post on thoreau’s thinking about income and working hours that includes some actual quotes. good shit.

why i don’t follow people i will likely never meet (including pop stars and movie actors)

for most of my life i have been very clear with myself and with others about intentionally removing pop stars from my sphere of care. not that i don’t care about them as people, but i have little interest in following along in their personal affairs. this baffles many of my friends. they genuinely can’t understand why i still don’t know the difference between leonardo dicaprio and hugh jackman.

i’ve always said that i don’t follow pop stars because i would rather know my neighbors. i would rather save brain space for information about people who personally care about me and whom i care about.

recently, i learned about dunbar’s number (in my post about being over-networked). i also have learned (probably from an episode of onbeing, though i can’t remember which one) that our brains don’t differentiate between digital relationships and face-to-face relationships. finally, i know from personal experience that social media and ubiquitous computing (via cell phones) now allow us to follow the lives of pop stars minute by minute if we want.

all of this to me points to one really terrible conclusion: closely following the lives of pop stars and media figures literally limits the number of intimate connections we can have. our brains actually can’t hold more than a certain number of faces and relationships. for every pop star that someone follows intimately, that’s one less person they can be close with in their actual community.

so now i feel justified in my approach to just not give a fuck about who got married to who in 1998. i don’t want to know the names of that movie star’s kids. i want to save my brain space for people who live in my community (wendell berry style).

oops.