A different way to spring clean
your life?



I’m not sure why cleaning is often taken as a metaphor for larger matters, but it is. I suspect that Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up has been sitting on the best-seller list for months not because of the “tidy” premise, but because of the “life-changing” one. Organize your stuff and you’ll organize your life!

We often extend this metaphor to our schedules. Spring cleaning our lives means de-cluttering our calendars. We prune back the brambles and quit obligations so we have time for the fun stuff.

And maybe there’s something to that. But the more I study how people spend their time, and particularly as I think about the time logs in my next book, I Know How She Does It, the more I become convinced that this metaphor gets things backwards. The best way to create a better life is to start by adding, not subtracting.

I was pondering this as I looked at how I spent my hours over a recent weekend. I’d written during “Habits Week” on my blog that I lacked a fiction reading habit. I do read some (I run fiction reviews in this newsletter, for instance), but I’m particular about the sort of book I like to read, and don’t, so I’m wary of starting books that aren’t for me. I’m busy!

But I’d been asked to review Adeline, by Norah Vincent, and since I’m kind of a Virginia Woolf junkie, and it’s about her, I said yes. The book started slowly. It seemed overwritten. If I have to look up words in the dictionary, that’s not a positive sign. Yet by 40 pages in, I found myself absorbed in this portrayal of the brooding novelist. I loved the image of Woolf pulling To The Lighthouse off the shelf, just to remind herself that she had written that magical prose.

Over a full weekend that included 3 kid birthday parties, swim lessons, a night hike at a nature preserve, a long run, an Easter egg hunt, a trip to the YMCA, an in-home date night dinner, some work, plus the general care and feeding of four kids under age 8, I found 2 hours to read Adeline.

Where did that time come from? I’m not sure. I did not actively prune back something else so I could read fiction. Instead, I had a book I wanted to read. Stuff I didn’t care about pruned back on its own. 

When I was thinking once about the futility of organizing emails, a phrase came to me: We don’t build the lives we want by saving time. We build the lives we want, and then time saves itself. (click to tweet) Any attempt to spring clean the calendar must take this into account. You can spend much mental energy trying to come up with ways to meal plan more efficiently, run fewer errands, and modify the meeting schedule at work in order to fit a Wednesday night soccer league into your life. Or you can just sign up for the league, commit to going, and trust that everything else will sort itself out. You probably won’t starve. If you run out of paper towels, you’ll figure out some solution.

Put in the fun stuff first, and the fun stuff happens. Put in the fun stuff first and it crowds out the not-fun stuff. That is a life-changing realization.
 
All the best,

Laura