Over the last few months, my wife and I have both felt really busy. Maybe overwhelmed is a better word for it.
Most days have looked pretty similar. Wake up, work out, start work, maybe go for a walk in the middle of the day, finish work, make dinner, watch TV, go to bed, and do it all over again.
The last three months have kind of felt like a blur.
At some point we both started talking about how fast the weeks were going by. It felt like we were getting everything done that we needed to get done, but we weren’t really enjoying much of the space in between. The workday would end, we’d eat dinner, turn something on, and suddenly the night was over.
Neither of us really liked that feeling.
So lately we’ve been trying to be more intentional about what happens when the workday ends. Not in some big life-overhaul way. Mostly we’ve just been asking ourselves what we actually want our evenings to look like instead of automatically defaulting to the same routine.
We’ve been trying to finish work around 5:00 or 5:30 and actually be done. Then we make dinner together and eat at the dinner table. Instead of dinner being something we need to get through before sitting on the couch, we’ve been making dinner more of the activity for the night.
It has been really nice.
My wife is currently in her master’s program for nutrition, and she has a detox protocol with a bunch of nutrient-dense recipes that she can send to clients. We’ve been cooking more of those recipes lately because we realized our diet had gotten pretty repetitive.
When life gets busy, convenience starts winning. You find a handful of meals that are easy and before long you’re eating basically the same stuff every week.
For example, we’ve made grilled salmon over quinoa salad with green beans and toasted almonds, filet mignon with wild rice and a crisp Asian-style salad, and a turkey and bok choy stir fry.
More than anything, it has made dinner feel interesting again.
And because we’re not rushing through dinner to go watch something, cooking has become something we actually do together.
We cook. We sit at the table. We talk about our days. We laugh and goof around. Dinner takes longer, but somehow the evenings feel longer too.
We’ve also found that we bond a lot more over the whole process. Finding new recipes together, making something we haven’t had before, cooking it, and then sitting down to eat gives us something to do together that isn’t just watching something. It’s become one of the parts of the evening I look forward to.
That’s what has made me start wondering if we’ve actually been as busy as we thought we were.
Maybe we’ve just been distracted.
We both spend most of the day at home, but that doesn’t mean we’re spending the day together. I work from home and she is a full-time student. We have our own work to do. We work out. We have responsibilities. There are plenty of hours during the day where our attention legitimately needs to be somewhere else.
So the few hours at the end of the day are some of the only hours that really belong to us.
It’s easy to give those away too.
Watch TV. Look something up on my phone. Reply to a text. Check something else. Suddenly it’s time for bed.
None of those things are inherently bad. I’m going to watch TV again. I’m going to play video games again. I’m definitely going to use my phone.
But I think there’s a difference between choosing to do those things versus automatically filling every empty part of the day with them.
Cal Newport talks about something similar in Deep Work. One of his rules is “Embrace Boredom.” The basic idea is that when we constantly reach for stimulation whenever nothing is happening, we train ourselves to expect that stimulation. He explores the idea further in Digital Minimalism, especially how constantly filling empty moments with screens can push out things that are ultimately more meaningful.
I think I’ve been doing exactly that without really noticing it.
I feel overwhelmed when I don’t have enough time to think. But then when I finally have time where nobody needs anything from me, I distract myself.
That’s pretty counterintuitive.
I saw a video on YouTube recently where someone was talking about what he does when he gets stuck on a problem. His solution was basically to stare at a wall for ten minutes.
I laughed when I heard it, but I’ve kept thinking about it.
We’re so used to constant input that doing absolutely nothing almost feels strange. But you can just sit there. You can think about a problem. You can think about your life. You can meditate. You can let your mind wander.
You don’t have to turn every free moment into entertainment.
My wife and I experienced a lot of that on a road trip we took from Colorado to Alaska. There were stretches where we had no service at all, and some days we were driving for 16 hours.
Sometimes SiriusXM would come through and we’d listen to whatever was available. Other times there was nothing.
So we just drove.
We looked at the scenery. We talked. We sat quietly. We thought about things. We daydreamed.
There wasn’t anything else competing for our attention, and I think there’s something really valuable about that. You give your mind enough space and it starts wandering on its own. You think about things you haven’t thought about in a while. You make connections. Sometimes you don’t think about anything important at all.
We’ve gotten so used to having something available every second that I think we’ve forgotten how important it is to just let our minds wander.
And when I give myself that space, I feel more creative. I want to work on my blog. I want to read. I think through problems I’ve been stuck on. Sometimes I don’t do anything productive at all.
That’s okay too.
I’m realizing that doing less isn’t necessarily about finding another way to squeeze productivity out of my evenings. It’s about having some part of my day where my attention isn’t constantly being pulled somewhere else.
The same thing is true with my wife.
When I’m looking at my phone while she’s looking at hers, we’re technically together. When we’re sitting next to each other watching TV, we’re together too.
But it’s different from making dinner together with nothing else going on and actually talking.
We’ve been having more of those moments lately. We’ve talked more. We’ve laughed more. We’ve gotten to hear about what the other person has been working on all day.
There isn’t some new productivity system behind any of this. We didn’t suddenly find another three hours in the day.
We just stopped filling every available minute.
And somehow, the days don’t feel like they’re moving quite as fast.