flow
June 2006 
Simplify Your Time, Part 1
Posted on Mar 29th, 2006
by 
Maile
Maile
An important and potentially overlooked aspect of voluntary simplicity is the simplifying of our time. When this is considered, it seems usually to be framed in terms of money. An article in this month's Harper's, entitled The Spirit of Disobedience puts it well. The authors, comparing Thoreau to Marx say:
"It is the money-form, as Marx called it, that has captured and distorted a more human notion of time. Time, for Homo economicus, is not 'the stream I go a-fishing in.' It is a medium of exchange. We trade our time for money.... The true cost of a thing, Thoreau shrewdly observes, condensing hundreds of pages of Marxist analysis to an epigram, is 'the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.'" (pg. 37)
This sounds a lot like what we get from Dominguez and and Robin in Your Money or Your Life. They reframe money as "life-energy" and have the reader consider their actual hourly wage, factoring the costs of clothing, special meals, commuting, job-related illness, downtime required, etc. In the end, many of us are devoting a lot of our lives to jobs we don't love. The book encourages us to value our life-energy, both in seeking paid work that we do love and in pursuing unpaid interests that give us just as much a sense of purpose and satisfaction, pursuing, in effect, what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls Flow in his book by the same name, what turns out to be, basically, the Buddhist notion of mindfulness.
Most people do value money and connect with the notion of money as life-energy right away, but if these ideas are new to us, it can be daunting to think of changing our lives all at once. Fortunately, as with all aspects of voluntary simplicity (and most aspects of life), we can make these changes gradually. In future entries, I plan to discuss several small changes that have worked for me. For now I'll start with one: I got rid of my TV.
This happened in steps. I first eliminated cable, then cut back on my hours of watching, but it wasn't until I finally turned the TV off totally that I felt the change. And it's been wonderful. I read more books, spend more time with my husband, have more time to blog and generally have more time for Flow activities (many things can be Flow activities, but unless you are a TV writer or producer, watching TV will probably not be one of them).
I often hear people wish there were more hours in the day. My answer is: kill your TV and there will be.
"It is the money-form, as Marx called it, that has captured and distorted a more human notion of time. Time, for Homo economicus, is not 'the stream I go a-fishing in.' It is a medium of exchange. We trade our time for money.... The true cost of a thing, Thoreau shrewdly observes, condensing hundreds of pages of Marxist analysis to an epigram, is 'the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.'" (pg. 37)
This sounds a lot like what we get from Dominguez and and Robin in Your Money or Your Life. They reframe money as "life-energy" and have the reader consider their actual hourly wage, factoring the costs of clothing, special meals, commuting, job-related illness, downtime required, etc. In the end, many of us are devoting a lot of our lives to jobs we don't love. The book encourages us to value our life-energy, both in seeking paid work that we do love and in pursuing unpaid interests that give us just as much a sense of purpose and satisfaction, pursuing, in effect, what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls Flow in his book by the same name, what turns out to be, basically, the Buddhist notion of mindfulness.
Most people do value money and connect with the notion of money as life-energy right away, but if these ideas are new to us, it can be daunting to think of changing our lives all at once. Fortunately, as with all aspects of voluntary simplicity (and most aspects of life), we can make these changes gradually. In future entries, I plan to discuss several small changes that have worked for me. For now I'll start with one: I got rid of my TV.
This happened in steps. I first eliminated cable, then cut back on my hours of watching, but it wasn't until I finally turned the TV off totally that I felt the change. And it's been wonderful. I read more books, spend more time with my husband, have more time to blog and generally have more time for Flow activities (many things can be Flow activities, but unless you are a TV writer or producer, watching TV will probably not be one of them).
I often hear people wish there were more hours in the day. My answer is: kill your TV and there will be.
Access: Public
Very encouraging post, Maile! Maybe a gradual weaning would be easier than cold turkey.
Do you keep one around for movies or have you buried it completely?
I NEED PEACE IN MY LIFE, these tv watching marathons MUST STOP!
Couldn't a computer and the internet just be viewed as a TV substitute (another time waster)? Every day, the computer is becoming more like a TV, and the TV is becoming more like a computer. What are we to do when they eventually converge?
Paul: gradual weaning for sure! I quit cable first, then tivoed only shows i really wanted that the antenna picked up, then cut back my time watching…
And the process is still going. I do still watch movies from Netflix. I think they'll go eventually, but I'm in no rush.
Same for the computer, like Michael said. The other night my husband and I were watching some of the u-tube videos, parts of South Park episodes. How is this different from TV? The funny thing was we quickly got bored with it and moved on to something productive. And there are plenty other time-wasters on the computer.
We generally know what they are, and I think we can use the same gradual process to reduce our reliance on them. The important thing for me has been not pressuring myself, instead making changes is small steps. It's a process I hope to continue for the rest of my life–never reaching perfection.
According to Nielsen the average American watches 4 hours 32 minutes every day, and climbing…. That is over 32 hours per week! With the entire population that is over 1.3 billion viewing hours per day. Ack!
The best way to gradually cut back on your viewing time is to replace it with more fun and exciting activities, in my experience, like pursuing the goals everyone listed here in zaadz. :).
Katherine