Last week I had a free hour to go for a walk before a meeting. It was a beautiful fall day, and I wanted to get out and enjoy the sunshine and nature. As I walked out of my house, I put on my headphones and opened my Libby app to listen to my current book. I fell into the story, a beautiful memoir read by the author. As she was telling me about living in Paris, my phone dinged. It was a text from a prospective client getting back to me from earlier in the morning. After I made a mental note to respond when I was back in front of my computer, I rewound the book 30 seconds and kept walking. Five minutes later, another notification dinged. My son posted on Instagram, so I opened it to look and see what was happening in his senior year of college. I smiled, and the story ended, leaving me looking at a post from a former classmate who was on a trip. Beautiful pictures. I scrolled until I got another text, which I didn’t read, but pulled me out of Insta and back to my walk. Rewind 60 seconds in the book, notice the newly fallen tree on the path. Keep listening and walking. Twenty minutes later, as I was heading back home, my phone dinged again with a text from my husband about dinner. I quickly replied, and as I was about to rewind yet again, the phone rang.
Sound familiar? My hour of relaxation and nature wasn’t really that at all. First, the book distracted me from my surroundings, and then the notifications distracted me from the book. It was time confetti.
The phrase “time confetti” was coined by journalist Brigid Schulte in her 2014 book, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time. Time confetti are “short, unenjoyable moments that end up stressing us out rather than relaxing us.” Think of the tiny pockets of time we all experience: waiting for the microwave to finish, standing in a line, or a short break between meetings. Instead of using these moments to relax or recharge, we further break them up with distractions or obligations that don’t actually fulfill us. In order to be “productive,” we answer an email, check notifications, tick something small off our to-do list, scroll social media… But using these scattered moments rarely leaves us feeling productive, much less rested, even when data suggests people have more leisure time than ever before. Instead, they create low-level exhaustion and a feeling of being always “on” and can eat up as much as 10% of our free time. Time confetti stops us from fully disengaging from the demands of daily life.
Social Psychologist and associate professor at Harvard, Ashley Whillans writes:
When we do this, that free hour turns from the image shown in Figure 1-1 into something more like one of the images in Figure 1-2.
Whillans continues:
In each case, the hour of leisure becomes several smaller chunks, sometimes only five or six minutes long. Even if you’re disciplined about not responding or not responding very quickly, the interruptions undermine the quality of those smaller, less predictable chunks of leisure time by reminding you of all the activities that you could or should be doing….
When we try to enjoy a birthday dinner, notifications about our friends’ tropical vacation photos make our pasta taste less delicious. When we try to choose a restaurant for our next date, the endless ocean of reviews and ratings leads us to spend more time choosing our meals than savoring them. When we try to have meaningful time off with friends and family, our alerts from work create guilt and dread over what we’re not getting done.
Thinking about work while trying to relax induces panic, because feelings of time poverty are caused by how well activities fit together in our mind….
It also takes time to cognitively recover from shifting our minds away from the present to some other stress-inducing activity. People end up enjoying their free time less and, when asked to reflect on it, estimate that they had less free time than they actually did. That’s how invasive the technology time trap is: time confetti makes us feel even more time impoverished than we actually are.
She concludes:
…don’t ever beat yourself up about being bad at prioritizing time. Remember, multiple forces are making it difficult. We don’t naturally respond to time poverty in a way that controls it. Actually, when we feel busy, studies show that we start taking on more tasks….there’s an absurd logic at play here. When we feel time poor, we take on small, easy-to-complete tasks because they help us feel more control over our time. We think, There! I made a protein shake and finished that errand. I’m getting stuff done! In this case, it’s a false sense of control that doesn’t alleviate the root cause of our busyness.
The same scenario as my opening story above happened while working, too. In fact, it happened writing this very blog. As I was just getting settled in to write, my phone dinged, pulling my focus and scattering my concentration. We are driven by a need to optimize our time, to make the most of every moment, feeling almost panicked that we haven’t done enough, seen enough, been enough. So we constantly allow input that can generate a compulsive need to work beyond the expected working hours, blurring the boundaries between personal life and work.
https://wyzowl.com/human-attention-span/
What to do? Strategies to balance the effects of time confetti revolve around reducing distractions and valuing and creating larger blocks of focused time. Here are some ideas, large and small:
- Establish some tech-free time every day.
- Designate part of your day as “interruption-free” time.
- Remove the little icon on your email tab that shows when you get new emails.
- Turn off news and social media notifications on your watch and/or phone, or use settings or a focus app to set hours for Do Not Disturb.
- Move more in general. To specifically target fragmented thinking, Dr. Brynna Connor suggests pairing additional daily movement with a manual task that challenges your hand-eye coordination. You might try juggling, drawing, typing, playing an instrument, or even cooking complex recipes.
- Resist the urge to fill every gap. Treat small breaks as the gift they are and avoid further fragmenting them. Just drink your coffee, wait in that line, or take a minute to breathe. Not every moment needs to be filled. Sometimes, doing nothing is the most productive choice of all.
- Try out the Dutch concept of ‘niksen’: the act of doing nothing or being idle as a way to manage stress and burnout. It encourages an antidote to busyness. You can dial things down by simply hanging out, observing your environment, or listening to music without multitasking. The idea is doing something without a purpose.
- Prioritize what matters, including more leisure activities. Schedule and protect leisure time.
- Shift perception of busyness as success
- Take a breathing break
Today I went for another walk. I had about 90 minutes between meetings on another stunningly beautiful fall day and was near Stu Visser Trails. After I parked, my automatic move was to dig out my earbuds. I stopped myself. I wanted to focus on nature. Then I went to grab my phone to put in my pocket. I stopped myself again. My internal monologue went something like this:
Me: I should bring it just in case.
Also me: In case what?
M: What if someone needs me?
AM: Exactly, what if you get interrupted trying to enjoy a short walk?
M: But, but…
AM: It’ll be 30 minutes. Anyone who needs you can wait.
It was a struggle, y’all. Like, I felt irresponsible and naked without my phone. But I left it in the car and enjoyed 30 minutes of actual nature and solitude. AND I had to remember the things I thought of to say in this blog instead of pulling out my phone and instantly recording it. I had to use my brain.
Will I do that every time? I can guarantee I won’t. But do I know it’s an option that actually leads to better mental health? Yes, I do. And if 80s tv taught me anything, it’s that knowledge is power.
