Mahnmut

It doesn’t really feel like seven years have passed since I wrote my little essay about un-structured time. Just after I wrote it, I told myself I would check in after a while and see how my attempts at structuring my time were playing out.

Seven years is probably too long to wait for the exercise to really be useful, but I’m doing it anyway since I have a few thoughts.

For seven years now, I have had two reoccurring calendar events that show up on my phone every two weeks. All they do is raise a message which I can easily dismiss. The idea with the events is that I could choose to make my time structured each time in the moment.

The first event is simply titled “call your parents”. My rough calculation is that I have ignored it four out of five times. The fifth time, I’ve taken it as inspiration, and called up a parent on the phone to chat sometime later in the day. So the question of whether it actually added structure is not easily answered.

The other event is titled “home improvement power hour“ and the idea is that whenever I see the alert, I can pick one of the dozens of home improvement projects in my perpetually long list, and spend an hour doing it. I completely ignore that notification 19 out of 20 times, so I would say the mission was not accomplished.

But on the other hand, I have been seeing those calenda events pop up in my face every couple of weeks for seven whole years, and though I have thought a few times about deleting them permanently, I never did, because I have discovered that I like the reminder, even if I don’t actually heed the message.

And perhaps that’s the best I can ask for, really. My brain is extremely clever at knowing when something truly needs to be fixed in my schedule, and when I can let it slide. For example, any kind of deadline on my work calendar is taken with total seriousness. I hit those right on the minute, and on rare occasions when I can’t, I do things to mitigate in advance. It’s very American of me: Convinced that there is no social safety net of any value, I treat work as the existential obligation that it is. My brain understands that, and so I find it much easier to structure my time around work. I can tell that there is a part of me constantly pushing to skip a deadline or disregard an appointment and stay in its freely distractible state, or stay wedged in a mode of extreme focus - a mode that is totally different from a distractible state but just as hostile to the dictates of a schedule - and work raises a barrier high enough that even this usually irresistible de-structuring urge can’t push it over.
All the other activities in my life that are resistant to this urge aer existential in some degree: it’s hard to get appointments scheduled to see a doctor or a dentist, so I never missed those. It’s also hard to get on the schedule of a plumber or an electrician or a roofer or a repair man for the utility company, but even those fall on a scale. If there’s a hole in the roof and it’s raining, you can bet I will be all over that problem. If rats have found their way into the walls and are chewing on the wiring, I will be on that problem as well, though slightly less so because of an instinctive understanding that even determined rats do take at least a little while to chew through walls and wiring. Water can ruin things instantly, but with rats the difference between 1 day or 2 days is much less drastic.

I hate that I have to push back very hard against my own instincts to deal with these problems immediately, even during times when I obviously have plenty of additional hours in the day that won’t be affected. That greedy little bastard inside me keeps me sane, but I still deeply dislike him.

But none of this is new. I knew this seven years ago, which is why I was determined to keep fighting. And to stay on track with the idea of an update, rather than simply a rehashing, I can at least say this:

For many years I've had a tiny, but industrious filing clerk living inside me. One activity it deeply enjoys is constructing a schedule with each hour of the day allocated for tasks that I arguably should be handling as soon as possible. The act of assembling the schedule and setting reminders for it most definitely does not result in me following it…

But it does provide me with something to contrast my actual day against. Knowing that I could do all these things, but instead am enjoying whatever random thing is inspiring me in the moment, has two good consequences: It helps me to savor just how indulgent I’m being, and it keeps those things popping up enough in the foreground of my mind that I occasionally think of them at other times when I’m actually in the mood to do them.

The trick, I’ve learned, is to not feel guilty each time I dismiss the reminder, but instead to tell myself that since I was the one who put it there, I am exercising a perverse sort of self-control by deferring it: I'm not just spacing out and forgetting, I am consciously deciding to do something else. It’s very difficult to honestly ask yourself the question “are you sure you still want to do something else?” without letting guilt dictate the answer. But if you can, you make room for a different reaction: A banal but ultimately satisfying feeling of practicality, that compels you to do a thing not for the sake of eliminating guilt, but for the sake of gaining that slight boost in your well-being when one less obligation is looming over you.

And I suppose, as long as I can keep the lights on and food on the shelves, and keep preventable health problems at bay, that is the very best I can ask for. I need to accept that I am simply never going to run my life in a fully structured way - or even a mostly structured way - and I am probably never going to feel as though I actually have enough unstructured time.

Hell, for almost all of last year I was unemployed, and there were still long runs of days where I felt as though I just did not have enough time away from structure. Even things that I knew I would enjoy and would be very healthy for me, gave me mild distress when they were scheduled for an exact day and time, even if that day was weeks in the future. Call it burnout, call it depression, call it being stupidly unrealistic and unsustainable and ridiculous... Call it being a bad adult... I can’t argue back because I can’t really explain it.

But I’m doing OK, which is actually saying a lot given that I’m at a stage in life where one can seriously make up one’s own rules for happiness ... and there are many ways to screw that up.

The phone reminders are staying put.