Can you picture that feeling of joy you get when a meeting gets canceled and you suddenly find yourself with a little bit of ‘extra’ time? I know I can. Just yesterday a colleague said (upon canceling a meeting), “Found time is always a gift!” It’s like time stands still for just a moment and the possibilities are endless. As that moment hangs in the air it shifts fairly quickly to what do you do with that time? Do you spend the time scrolling through Insta-Facea-Snapa-Chata-gram? Do you move ahead on that one project that is always falling to the bottom of the pile? Grading? Eating lunch (at 3pm!)? What do you do?
Parallel to this excitement due to cancelation, do you just feel SO busy? While scrolling through my own Insta-Facea-Snapa-Chata-gram feeds, ironically during some of my own ‘Found Time’, I saw a post from another colleague lamenting how every day at that time they look at their calendar for the next day, hoping to see a few blocks of open time, and every day they are disappointed. I could TOTALLY relate to this, and I wasn’t sure I was happy about it.
My commute to campus affords me the luxury of an hour-long podcast-fest, another effort to maximize my use of time during the day. Lately I’ve been LOVING the Happiness Lab and today’s was no exception. I’m not saying it’s always all puppies and cupcakes to learn about the science of happiness and examine our lives as humans but it gave me some time to ask some important questions. Specifically, is it right that I get so much joy from a canceled meeting, and is it okay to be so busy? In addition to the self-reflection I was also really amused at the host’s, Dr. Laurie Santos, own admissions of struggling with this same issue.
Here’s what I took away and wanted to share with you, my dear colleagues, about whom I honestly care so much. Dr. Santos talked about the risks of ‘Time Famine’ and the havoc it can wreak upon our health and relationships with others. She described an experiment where three groups were told to give a sermon that day. One was told they were already late, one was told they had to leave right then and the last group was told that they had the afternoon to prepare. As these subjects rushed off to prepare or give their sermons (ironically about the Good Samaritan), an actor laid in the hallway impersonating an injured student. Can you guess what happened? The people in the biggest rush were least likely to stop and help. The people who had more time were more likely to stop. Still though, not 100% of them stopped. So, science tells us that when we are starved for time we stop being Good Samaritans for the people we love and instead actually become crappier people. When we pack our schedules to the brim, we cannot help the people we care about. We have to ask what kind of people we might become as a result of being so busy all the time. Most importantly, professionally, what does this mean for how we serve our students?
The good news is, there are some remedies. It turns out that idleness, yes I’m talking about doing nothing, is actually necessary for us. Doing nothing could look like taking an actual lunch break and having meaningful conversation with other humans, taking a hike without checking email, gazing out the window, take the scenic route to work and not listening to podcasts, or cuddling with a puppy. In addition to making room for idleness, it also turns out that we should use our ‘Time Windfalls’ or ‘Found Time’ to invest in ourselves as humans such as: sending a note of gratitude, calling someone you love, taking a walk, doing a brief meditation, surprising someone in their office hour and telling them your best joke. In fact, perhaps we should all have a list of how we might spend our ‘Time Windfalls.’
So in anticipation of finding yourself in ‘Time Affluence’ after a big ‘Time Windfall’, draft yourself a list of ways to use that time for you as a human. This is actually a tough pill to swallow, but one that will certainly pay dividends for our students, our colleagues and our friends and loved ones.
Want to hear the full podcast? It’s here: Season 2, Episode 5 of the Happiness Lab: For Whom the Alarm Clock Tolls. Brief aside – totally LOVE this podcast and am forever grateful for Lori V’s recommending it in a previous CTL Blog.
Image by Nattanan Kanchanaprat from Pixabay
