Everyday Life in Middletown
Time Directive
Diarist A01
For this directive, I diarized periodically, when I had a moment, trying particularly to record moments where I was aware of time. The diary notes are below. Reading over it, the main insights seem to be:
1) I feel quite aware of time most of the time, usually not pleasantly so. I had one nice relaxing Saturday in here, and Mondays, when I rarely have meetings, time seems more manageable and the hours don’t get away from me. Much of the rest of the week I either feel like I’m rushing from one thing to another or, if I’m not working, I’m wishing time would slow down.
2) I think my job (and my attitude towards it, my management/mismanagement of my energies) has more to do with my experience of time than the pandemic does; I think the pandemic has just intensified the way things normally feel, which is that the weeks feel long and draining but, in retrospect, weeks and months seem to have passed quickly.
3) Workdays generally go quickly—I’m not bored or idle very much. Towards the end of the week I get fatigued and slack off a bit, and that makes time go unpleasantly fast, especially as Thursday is a teaching day and I have a deadline every Friday.
4) In reality, I schedule a good proportion of my activities. I almost always have things scheduled a few days in advance in some detail, and up to a week or more in broader outlines. I do have a job where I have to solve problems as they arise, so I get off my schedule frequently. And, with both regular meetings and meetings that have to be scheduled as the week’s events play out, my control of my activities has significant limits, but I do decide on a lot of it.
And yet, it doesn’t feel like I have much control of it.
Of course I’m also on an academic schedule, and even though I’m on a 12-month contract, I will gain a great deal more control of my schedule when spring semester ends.
5) (This really doesn’t show up in the notes below): I feel like my eyes are 90 percent on the immediate road ahead: what’s up this morning, this afternoon, tomorrow. I am able to pay heed to the present moment when I stretch and meditate, and intermittently when I remind myself to do so. Walking across campus to get coffee, sometimes while driving, I will purposefully tune into the moment, pay attention to my breathing and my senses—what I can see and hear and smell.
I don’t think a ton about the past, and I think just a bit about the future: and I do these in pretty scheduled, ritualistic ways. Every Saturday C. and I have a long, leisurely lunch where we talk about the week, our moods and overall well-being, and (usually) plan for the short- and mid-range, and plan/dream about the future. And I have a therapy appointment every two weeks, where the future and the past get their due.
Otherwise I’ve usually got my eyes trained on the road ahead: the next meeting, the next hour blocked out, the next class. Even at night, watching TV, I’m thinking about whether I’m ready for work or the commute in the morning, what time I’m going to bed, etc.
I don’t love this!
4/1 Thursday
7:57. There’s a huge line of cars in the Dunkin Donuts drive-through. I park and go into the store because I think it will be faster. I’m masked, even though I’m fully vaccinated. I have to wait a bit: they’re busy. A young, veiled Muslim woman is in line in front of me selecting a dozen donuts. Slowly. By the time I get outside the line of cars is mostly gone; I probably would have gotten served more quickly if I’d stayed in the car.
8:46. See the time in the upper right corner of my computer: think I’ve still not gotten much done and have to get moving, how is it 8:46 already?
10:05. consciously trying to be in the moment while aware of all the things I have to do. Washing my hands, I tune into the feeling of hot water on my hands, breathing deeply, trying to displace the feeling of the ticking clock.
11:25. glancing at clock while prepping class. The couple of hours before class feel like being on deadline.
4/2 Friday
6:30. The alarm goes off and I hit snooze 3 times. I took an allergy pill last night, which makes me loogy in the morning. I then end up listening to the classical music on the radio until 7:15. This is more like 90 minutes or more later than I usually get up. Working at home today. I keep my phone next to me as my wife and I eat breakfast so I can get to my desk not long after 8. It’s 8:08 when I finally get set up at my desk.
The next two hours of work are inefficient, as I toggle between email and reading about sports and scrolling social media. I am very tired, partly the allergy pill and just partly a long, hard, week, I think. So, I’m tired and aware of time passing without much focus or progress on tasks.
11:45 I’m going to take an hour walk now to keep up my exercise goals and also try to re-invigorate myself for the afternoon’s work. I will set my alarm for 30 minutes and turn back when it goes off: my usual routine for hour-long walks or bike rides.
2-3:30 p.m. I’ve been in Zoom meetings and on phone calls and simultaneously managing an unfolding interpersonal crisis at work (remotely). Quite intense and stressful. Now I’m writing a weekly notes column that I share with colleagues at 5:30 every Friday; it’s clear that I won’t be able to write very much this week. 5:30 is a hard deadline, as on pandemic Fridays I Zoom with my brother and his wife & grown children, my nephews, at 5:30. This combination makes Friday a deadline-oriented day.
As with preparing for class on Thursday, managing all this while knowing I have my notes due is, again, like being on deadline as a reporter (the life I lived from the ages of 23 to 29, more than two decades ago). I’m also doing this while I’m in my virtual office hours; they’re quiet for most of the 3-4 hour but someone comes in at 4, and at the same time a friend/colleague, E., texts me to say she’s going to say hi during office hours.
From 4-5, this particular bit is not stressful, exactly. By about 4 I’ve got the notes fully drafted; they just need a quick edit; and it’s always good to talk to E.—we have a good connection and she is a good sounding board for professional and personal things. So I’m rushed if not stressed, but quite aware of the clock.
Friday evening I’m fried from the day and the week, and time shifts significantly. I drink a big glass of wine while we’re on the Zoom with my family. Afterwards we order Indian food and I put jazz on the stereo, and C. and I sit on the couch and talk. The food is supposed to be ready at 725. I pick up my phone every few minutes to see what time it is. 7:05. 7:11. Time seems to be moving neither fast nor slow. I’m hungry but not starving, not anxious for the food.
4/3 Saturday
I sleep an extra half-hour and wake up feeling somewhat refreshed. When I go for a bike ride at 11:15, I set my phone alarm for a half-hour to tell me to come back. Or, I think I do! I forget to hit “start” on the alarm. But because I’ve taken a familiar route, I know when I reach Michigan Street (downtown Indy) that I’ve been gone for about a half-hour, so I turn back. When I get home I look at my phone: 12:20—I was gone 65 minutes.
[I actually have a very accurate internal clock. This is a joke between my wife and I. She’ll look at me on the couch on a random evening and say, “What time is it?” and without looking, I’ll say, like, “8:27.” And I’m usually within a couple minutes. I jokingly pretend I’m proud of this. I actually think it’s a sign of my thorough subjection to capitalism, my status as a Foucauldian disciplinary subject.]
I’m driving to Muncie for a baby shower this afternoon. It starts at 3; I’ll want to leave around 2. AT 1:30 I prepare to shower, and text my friend EH, and say, “Hey I’m going to be driving for an hour shortly, do you want to catch up on the phone?” He calls me a few minutes later. I tell him I’ll be leaving around 2 and I’ll call him. So I’ve planned to use that hour of driving to get caught up.
In the big time scale, he’s an old friend—from the reporter days. I haven’t talked to him in more than a year. We sometimes go this long but rarely, and the connection is strong. I call him at about 10 after 2, as I’m in the Starbucks Drive through getting a latte. Talking to him makes the hour’s drive to Muncie go very fast.
At the baby shower, I look at my phone at about 5 and think I should go. I want to have some hang-out time with C. on this Saturday.
4/4 Sunday
I usually work Sunday mornings, to lighten the early week load. I’ve woken at 7 (I stayed up late watching Nomadland), and by the time I’ve had breakfast and surveyed the New York Times it’s 8. I’ve planned the morning: I’ll work until no later than 12:30; go for a bike ride; then alternate watching baseball and cooking for the afternoon. Making a ham, in a secular nod to Easter, but also because we can eat off it for days and then I’ll make soup. Efficiency.
I’m writing this in real time now: It’s 8:02 and time to work.
9:53 a.m. – I’ve looked up from my work (grading quizzes and planning class) to see the time in the upper-right corner of my computer. Time is passing at an appropriate rate: I’ve gotten a good deal done but still have a couple hours of dedicated work time left. But I also note that I’ve been sitting more or less motionless on the couch, with my computer on my lap and my feet up on a chair, for almost two hours. I need to get up and stretch.
4/5 Monday
I hit the alarm twice after it goes off at 5:30. I’m thinking I’d like to be in the office by 8; do I have time to stretch? To meditate? I’ve almost decided that I’ll do the latter but not the former when I go out into the living room and see my yoga mat on the floor. So I do my stretching routine; shower; pack breakfast (to eat in the car) and lunch, and am out of the house a little after 7, observing, neutrally, how governed by the clock I am. Which doesn’t stop me from getting a coffee at Dunkin Donuts at 8:15 after stopping for gas, so I’m actually in the office at 8:30. And I take my computer out of my bag and boot it up and see that I have 61% power and forgot my power cord, so I may have to leave early and finish work at home. And I’m hoping to get a bike ride in around 5 or 6. The day is a list of things to check off and two meetings (for which I’ll need my computer), so this is going to take some careful management.
It’s 10:41. I’ve spent the last hour on phone calls and reviewing notes on a difficult personnel matter. This time has gone quickly but not in such a way as to create a feeling of pressure. At 10:30 I decide to take a 10-minute break and read a few news & sports stories. Having done so I am surprised to see that it’s only 10:41 (10:42 now). Time seems to be moving at an appropriate speed.
It’s 12:38. I’ve been working through lunch, getting caught up on emails. When I just looked at the clock on my computer I was surprised to see it was only 12:38—I was expecting it to be almost 1. I have noticed before that I am less stressed out on Mondays than on most other days in the week. I typically don’t’ have any meetings and the mornings especially are quiet, and I get to be focused and work on things. Interesting: time seems to move more slowly.
4/6 Tuesday
11:04: My calendar for today says “Write/research” from 10 to 11. This is on my calendar most days. I get to it less than half of those days. Today I got a slightly late start on “write/research” and set my watch for 54 minutes so I would remember to shift gears to get ready for class in time. But it must have been slightly later that I thought when I set the alarm, because when I look at that clock in the upper-right corner of my computer, it says “11:04.” I want to be ready for class by noon to teach at 12:30. So I finish a sentence and save and close that file. And I have to go to the bathroom now, which is going to take a couple minutes. (Yes, I’m really thinking that.) Tuesdays are very booked up and there’s that little extra pressure of having to perform in class. I’m also recognizing, through this exercise, that the little clock in the upper right corner of the computer screen is pretty much my tyrant.
4/11 Saturday
Saturday the tone is different and hours go by in which I don’t look at the clock, although the day starts with awareness of time. This is because every Saturday morning I meet via Zoom with some guy pals for a sort of unscientific, unofficial group therapy. This happens at 8:30. I wake up on this Saturday at about 6:30, a little tired because I stayed up late. I sit on the couch with C; she watches TV and I read the news on my phone. At some point we start talking—about some work stuff that is making her a little anxious. Two hours pass very quickly and pleasantly (though I’m loogy, even after coffee) in this fashion. I meet with the guys for an hour.
It’s a rainy day, which means no bike ride (I sometimes ride for as much as two hours on Saturdays). That’s a bummer but it further opens up the day, which passes pleasantly. A full day off. We order brunch and talk at the table (another weekly ritual), sharing thoughts and feelings and going over plans: we routinely linger over this, hanging out for 90 minutes or two hours in this fashion. Sometimes towards the end I start to feel antsy and ready to get on to the next thing (usually a bike ride), but not today, because of the rain, enforcing inactivity and thus taking pressure of the schedule. So today I feel relaxed and unhurried, which seems rare, sadly.
Later in the day I shower and, having really not thought much about the time at all, I see that it’s 3:05. I think “that’s not a bad time for it to be,” which is a jokey motif in my wife’s and my mutual patter. I go back to reading.
Throughout the day I read a bunch—dispatching two issues of the New Yorker and about 60 pages of a Victorian novel. The rain lets up around 5 and I go for a walk. We watch a TV show then I turn on a baseball game, which we watch while we eat (pizza delivery) with a glass of wine. It feels like the day passes pretty quickly, but not uncomfortably so. The hours reading in the middle of the day felt really nice—out of the so, so demanding stream of things. The thought registers around 8 or 9 p.m. that the day off is almost over, and this thought is almost without regret. (Per usual, I’ll wake early Sunday and do a bunch of work in the morning. Tomorrow on an administrative task and prepping my class for next week).
4/12, Monday, evening
I go to bed between 9:30 and 10 most nights, and I try to get about eight hours of sleep. (Although in the last year or so it seems like my need has diminished a bit—I often wake up after 7 hours and 40 minutes, or something like that.) I have a loose routine, but this doesn’t eliminate the need to plan almost nightly for bed and wake-up time & to consider what has to be done in the morning—whether I’m driving to work (1 hour) or working at home, whether my lunch is packed, whether I’m eating breakfast at home or in the car, etc. And I usually spend about a half-hour each morning doing yoga and meditating—the yoga is a must on driving days so I don’t get too stiff.
So on Sundays and weeknights I find myself timing my bedtime from about 8 o’clock on. Tonight we watch Jeopardy (on DVR) till just after 8, then watch a sitcom, till about 8:30. I do the dishes and prepare my lunch for the next morning, because I know I want to be in the office by 8 which means wake up at 5:30 for the morning routine (see above) so I want to be in bed not long after 9:30. There are a lot of dishes to do; as I’m doing them I glance at the clock on the stove. Then I pack up lunch, which by happenstance has a lot of parts: cottage cheese into a plastic tub, crackers in a baggie, nuts in a baggie, veggies in a baggie.
When I go back into the living room C. asks what took me so long. I tell her I was getting my lunch in addition to doing the dishes. We watch another sitcom & I read a couple poems. I head to bed about 9:38, which is good for setting the alarm for 5:30.
4/13
The next morning I wake up about 15 minutes before the alarm, so I have a good amount of time to do the morning routine. By about 5:35 I’m on my yoga mat stretching. This takes a little more than 20 minutes. I meditate for 13 minutes, on the couch in the home office, timing myself with my phone. I shower. Then I go to the kitchen and do the one thing I didn’t do last night: make breakfast for the car. Even with all this it’s only 6:46 and I’m ready to go, so I stand in the kitchen and talk to C. for a few minutes. It’s 6:56 when I turn the ignition to leave for Muncie. I listen to the news as I drive and occasionally flip over to satellite radio, though none of the songs enchant. The hour passes quickly, though. It’s mostly cloudy but the sunrise turns the bottom rim of the clouds golden. It’s crisp and cool outside. I turn onto Tillotson at 7:54 and swerve into the Dunkin Donuts for coffee. When I actually get to my desk (8:06) I remark to myself that no matter how early I get up I still end up getting to the office after 8.
On my calendar, I have the day mapped out hour by hour: “8-9 Admin; 9-10 Outstanding Senior/Class Prep; 10-11 Write/research; 11-12 Area Meeting,” etc. I don’t do this detailed hour-by-hour plan every day, just when the short-term task list is getting uncomfortably long, which it is now. (There are 13 items on it: some are just things for which I need to monitor via email; others are tasks that will take a half-hour or more to do).
And yet it’s 8:34 at this very moment, and I am writing this (not doing “Admin”). It’s pleasurable, and feels a bit like playing hooky. So…getting to it.
4/14
I’ve been working at home today. Towards the end of the workday, I look at my calendar. I keep a paper calendar—one of those ones with a black cover and the days of each month blocked out in squares on facing pages. I also keep an electronic calendar. I use the paper calendar to record detailed to-do lists and to provide the broader picture (putting dates for concerts, trips, etc.—when these were things!—on there.) I use the electronic calendar on my email interface to schedule meetings with Zoom links (nowadays!) and occasionally to block out time to do things that either are essential (class prep) or won’t get done otherwise (see “research/writing” above.)
It’s taken till this penultimate day of this EDLM experiment for me to get to the fact that these calendars are my main way of managing time (mostly work time, but time generally). In addition to that, I also make quick, ad-hoc to-do lists on yellow sticky notes, which I stick inside the paper calendar; and weekly to-do lists on the paper calendar, usually in the Sunday block; and I maintain a green sheet (I recycle an office document) on which I divide my short-, medium-, and long-term goals and tasks into their various categories (“Admin” with several subcategories; “Teaching,” “Scholarship” with sub-categories for each project, and “Other Service” for committee work and such that doesn’t fit into my main administrative job.
It would be interesting to know how much time all this time management takes. It sounds overly complex but it works, generally, I think, and I don’t know that I could do it more efficiently. But I’m also very persnickety and ritualistic about it.
Anyway, to return: Towards the end of the workday, I look at my calendar…and note that April is about half over; that there are just over two weeks of class left in the semester, then a week of finals; and that a week after that my annual report is due. So this month is BONKERS and I really, really want to take a week’s vacation starting May 15. Now I am writing this on
4/15, at 4:40 p.m.
With a with a productive day’s work behind me and with the weekend in sight, I feel fine, but I’ve frequently been feeling exhausted, uninspired, and just short of burned out. So I need the vacation, and am planning for it, and I also feel like that will amp up the pressure more so that I can walk out of work on May 15th (or out of Commencement, rather, that Saturday) and be on vacation.
And, looking at my calendar yesterday, in addition to what I wrote above, I noted that while I’m in the middle of them the weeks feel interminable, especially on Tuesday and Wednesday (which are both very busy); it feels like I’ve done two weeks of work by Wednesday afternoon. At the same time, when I locate myself within the month or the semester, it feels like the weeks have been flying by. That tension is not exactly new—especially the feeling that the semester as a whole is going by really fast. But it feels much more intense, and the weird co-existence of these different time–feelings feels…weirder? Heavier? in this pandemic time.