For my birthday my mother-in-law gave me a copy of Laura Vanderkam's book 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think -- a well-timed gift given my summer plans. It's a well-written book with lots of intriguing facts and ideas, and it prompted a total bolt-from-the-blue moment. Vanderkam writes about living a life that emphasizes your core competencies. What are the things that you do best, the things nobody else can do as well? A twofold realization hit me like a ton of bricks: (1) Folding laundry is not one of my core competencies (2) One of my core competencies is teaching my children how to get along in the world, which means they need to learn how to take care of their clothing.
I'd been procrastinating on teaching my children to pick up more household responsibility, because I hate that learning curve. It almost always takes longer than you think it should, and in the beginning it's so much faster to just do the stupid job yourself. The book was a welcome smack upside the head: nobody was benefiting from my procrastination.
Vanderkam also writes about figuring out what you want to do, both at work and at play, and finding ways to fit it in. That's been really fun. It dawned on me that I miss exploring other languages, so I subscribed to Le Monde on my Kindle. It's a good level for me, and I think fifty cents a day is a reasonable fee for a painless way to hone my rusty French skills. (I don't read it cover to cover, just in case you wondered, and I skip most of the French political stuff. But even reading a handful of short articles each day will let me pick up new vocabulary and dust off forgotten grammatical knowledge.)
I also realized that I miss making music. One of the problems with being rusty is that the music I used to love to play is too hard, and I haven't felt like I had the time to get back to where I used to be. I put a book of easy music out on the piano, and I sent my flute off to be repaired (prompted by my fifth-grader's decision to learn flute this year). It's remarkable how much more refreshing it is to make music for ten minutes than to sit in front of the computer idly clicking for ten minutes. It would be hard for me to find an uninterrupted hour every day for two weeks to work on the Schumann piece I played when I was a senior in high school. Ten minutes is pretty easy, and I'm optimistic that it will help my fingers remember some of what they used to know.
My friend Carla said she couldn't get past Vanderkam's apparent disregard for full-time mothers, and I hear where she's coming from. The book talks a lot about how little full-time mothers actually interact with their kids, and how you can plan lots of fun activities with your kids even if you have a full-time job, but I just kept thinking of a line from The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding: Babies need quantities of quality time.
I also disagree with some of her time-saving strategies, like her recommendation that you hire a service rather than an individual if you want someone to help you clean your house. (ETA: her point being that you'd save time this way since they do the interviewing.) If I ever hire someone to clean for me, I will absolutely find someone who works for herself and expects a living wage. I'm not going to pay Merry Maids so they can pass along minimum wage to the women doing the hard work. It's been almost ten years since I read Nickel and Dimed, but it made an indelible impression on me. I'm not going to buy myself more free time in a way that keeps other women stuck in poverty.
Similarly, I'm not a fan of food recommendations like "buy frozen burritos so you can spend less time making lunch." Maybe I've read too many Michael Pollan books, but I'd rather use our family's food dollars elsewhere rather than supporting Big Food (source of the vast majority of frozen burritos) and all it stands for: the untrammeled food-borne pathogens, the toothless FDA, Eric Schlosser saying he told us so, etc.
Those are fairly minor quibbles, though; they reminded me of reading the Tightwad Gazette and thinking, "I am NEVER going to be poor enough to cut blocks for my children out of my empty styrofoam meat trays." Laura Vanderkam, like Amy Dacyczyn, has plenty of good things to say despite the bits that make me go hmm. Now I have to stop writing and go to bed, because I"m logging my time use this week and finding that it makes me less likely to ignore the clock. The end.
PS One of the perils of blogging quickly is that you sacrifice clarity in the interest of time. I'm not saying that it's evil to buy frozen burritos, only that they're a purchase with hidden costs. Vanderkam seems skeptical in general about the choice to spend time making things with one's hands over making things with one's brain (she sounds a bit derisive about knitting, too, which is one of my favorite things to do with a spare ten minutes). I wonder if she fails to see that putting some time into cooking allows a person to become a better and faster cook, one who can fling together a tasty, cheap, and nutritious meal in about as much time as it takes to bake a pan of pre-packaged frozen lasagna -- one who will have many more opportunities to teach her kids about the pleasures of time spent in the kitchen and how to feed themselves for a lifetime.
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