Happier at Home

  “But that means you’re still answering emails on the weekend,” I pointed out.

  “True, but I don’t really mind. This way, I keep the volume lower and answer only at a convenient time.”

  Technology is a good servant but a bad master, and technology can be used to restrain technology. Some people use computer programs to block their Internet access during certain periods, so they have to reboot to get online. A friend working frantically to meet a writing deadline set her email’s automatic reply to read, “If this is an urgent matter, please contact my husband at ————.” She figured, rightly, that for a real emergency, people would contact her husband, but that they’d think hard before they did.

  But I knew I shouldn’t really blame technology. The real problem wasn’t the switch on my computer, but the switch inside my mind. To be more focused, I came up with eight rules for controlling the cubicle in my pocket:

  • When I’m with my family, I put away my phone, iPad, and laptop. Often, I’m tempted to check email not because I expect any urgent message, but because I’m a bit bored—standing around in the grocery store while Eliza takes forever to choose the snack to take to the school party, or watching Eleanor finish, with maddening precision, the twenty flowers she draws at the bottom of every picture. If these devices are around, it’s hard for me to resist them, yet nothing is more poignant than seeing a child sit ignored beside a parent who is gazing into a screen. (I still get distracted by newspapers, magazines, books, and the mail, but this rule helps.)

  • I don’t check my email or talk on the phone when I’m traveling from one place to another, whether by foot, bus, subway, or taxi. I used to press myself to use that time efficiently, but then I realized that many of my most important ideas have come to me in these loose moments. As Virginia Woolf noted in her diary, “My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.” (Along the same lines, a friend met her husband when they sat across from each other on a bus. If they’d been busy with their devices, they never would have spoken.)

  • Whenever I work at home, I get pulled online to tackle various tasks, so to do the intellectually demanding work of writing, I leave my home office and my three beloved computer monitors to work at the wonderful old library that’s just a block from my apartment. Instead of trying to resist the siren call of email, Facebook, Twitter, my blog, and the phone, I put them out of reach—another way to “Abandon my self-control.” Also, the atmosphere of a library helps me to think. When I want to take a break, instead of heading to the kitchen for a snack, I wander among the many floors of books.

  • I don’t check email at bedtime. I love ending the day with an emptier in-box, but the stimulation of reading emails wakes me right up, and as a consequence, I often have trouble falling asleep. Unless someone is crying, throwing up, or smells smoke, sleep is my first priority.

  • I mute my cell phone. Someone coined the term “fauxcellarm” to describe the jumpy feeling you get when you imagine that your cell phone is ringing.

  • If possible, I do my heavy writing in the morning. I wasn’t surprised to learn that most people work at peak efficiency a few hours after they wake up, for a period of about four hours. According to that research, my prime work hours would stretch from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.—which is exactly right. However …

  • In violation of the advice of most efficiency experts, who argue that people should work first on their own priorities, I start my day by tackling my email. For a while, I tried to do original writing in the hour between 6 and 7 a.m., when I work at my desk before my family is awake, but I found that I couldn’t concentrate until I’d read through my in-box.

  • I embrace the fact that I do a lot of connecting with friends and acquaintances through technology. Although nothing replaces face-to-face meetings, it’s better to use those tools than not to connect at all.

  These steps helped me feel calmer and more focused, but I wondered whether they were making me less productive. I was reassured, therefore, to see research showing that when people were interrupted to respond to email or IM, they needed about fifteen minutes to resume a serious mental task. Maintaining a single focus would actually help me work more efficiently.

  Of course, I was extremely fortunate to have such flexible work. In fact, one of my gratitude exercises was to remind myself how much I loved my work, every time I sat down at the computer. Compared to many people, I had enormous control over my time; but that wouldn’t do me any good if I didn’t use that flexibility to give my life the shape I wanted.

  In September, when I’d thought about my possessions, I’d realized that I shouldn’t focus on having less or having more, but on loving what I had; with time, I thought, I shouldn’t focus on doing less or doing more, but doing what I valued. Instead of pursuing the impossible goal of “balance,” I sought to cram my days with the activities I loved—which also meant making time for rereading, playing, taking notes without a purpose, and wandering. I always had the uncomfortable feeling that if I wasn’t sitting in front of a computer typing, I was wasting my time—but I pushed myself to take a wider view of what was “productive.” Time spent with my family and friends was never wasted. My office was my workplace, but it was also my playground, my backyard, my tree house.

  GUARD MY CHILDREN’S FREE TIME

  One of the main happiness differences between adults and children is their control of time. Although adults often complain about not being in control of their time, children face a different kind of lack of control. As a parent, I have tremendous influence over what my daughters do with their time when they’re home from school.

  As we were considering Eliza’s after-school schedule for the new semester, I felt pulled in different directions. So many classes, so many opportunities! If she wanted, she could learn anything, from Chinese to chess to cello. Such activities would be enjoyable and enriching—plus the careerist part of me noted that they’d be useful on future applications and résumés. But what about a lesson Eliza didn’t want? For instance, I’d become preoccupied with the idea of piano lessons. If she was ever going to take piano, she should probably start now. But she didn’t want to take piano lessons. Should Jamie and I insist? Like many parents, we wanted to give our children every advantage we possibly could. We felt incredibly lucky to be in a position to provide lessons, but that didn’t help us decide whether to provide them—or impose them.

  I could muster several arguments for making Eliza take piano lessons. Surely the knowledge of music, the discipline of practice, and the mastery of a skill would enhance her life. We don’t have a piano, but Jamie’s parents do, and they live right around the corner from us—right around the corner. (It’s just 106 steps from our building to their building. Eleanor counted.) My mother-in-law, Judy, is a music nut, and I knew she’d love to have Eliza dropping by their apartment to practice.

  I raised the piano lesson question with several of my friends. “The thing is, if you stick with something long enough, you get good at it, then you enjoy it,” a friend argued.

  “Well …” I said slowly, thinking. Was that really true?

  “And without a parent making you persist, you give up. I hated practicing the violin, so my parents let me quit, and now I really regret it.”

  “Do you think that you hate doing something for years, then you love it?” I asked. “That’s never happened to me, and it just doesn’t strike me as the way human nature generally operates. Also, the key to mastery is practice. If you hate practicing the violin, you’ll probably never get good enough to enjoy it.”

  She looked doubtful, but it was true: The sheer numbers of hours of deliberate training is the factor that distinguishes elite from lesser performers. Persistence is more important to mastery than innate ability, because the single most important element in developing an expertise is the willingness to practice, and while you can make a child practice, you can’t make a child want to practice. On the flip side, although we often enjoy activities mo
re when we’re good at them, facility doesn’t guarantee enjoyment, whether in work or play. In fact, being good at something can sometimes mask the fact that it’s not enjoyable. I was very good at lawyerly work, which I suspect delayed my realization that I wanted a different career.

  “Anyway, if you really want to play the violin, you could take lessons,” I pointed out to her. “I know adults who are learning to play instruments.”

  “Well, I’m not going to learn it now,” she said dismissively. Ah, it’s so easy to wish that we’d made an effort in the past, so that we’d happily be enjoying the benefit now, but when now is the time when that effort must be made, as it always is, that prospect is much less inviting.

  “Practicing builds discipline,” another friend pointed out. “If you don’t like practicing, then it’s an even better way to develop discipline.”

  I’m very self-disciplined, and it’s an exceedingly helpful quality to possess. But at the same time, I see the risks of self-discipline; I’m very good at making myself do things that I don’t want to do, but sometimes I’m better off not doing those things at all. Self-discipline for the sake of self-discipline seems an arid pursuit. As Samuel Johnson observed, “All severity that does not tend to increase good, or prevent evil, is idle.” In any event, school was supplying Eliza with ample opportunities to develop that kind of self-regulation. Should home also impose the discipline of required study?

  I could see the value of piano lessons, but on the other hand, I was a passionate believer in the value of free time, especially for children, including time that appears fairly aimless. Philosopher Bertrand Russell recalled his childhood days:

  In solitude I used to wander about the garden, alternately collecting birds’ eggs and meditating on the flight of time. If I may judge by my own recollections, the important and formative impressions of childhood rise to consciousness only in fugitive moments in the midst of childish occupations, and are never mentioned to adults. I think periods of browsing during which no occupation is imposed from without are important in youth because they give time for the formation of these apparently fugitive but really vital impressions.

  As an admittedly, and quite possibly excessively, Type-A parent, I wanted my daughters to use their time productively—but I also knew that valuable activities don’t always appear valuable. Walter Murch, the Academy Award–winning film editor and sound designer, recalled, “I’m doing now, at fifty-eight, almost exactly what most excited me when I was eleven. But I went through a whole late-adolescent phase when I thought: Splicing sounds together can’t be a real occupation, maybe I should be a geologist or teach art history.” One friend of mine continued to play with her dollhouse well into her teens, and now she’s an interior decorator. Another friend spent time in law school guiltily playing video games, then left law to join a video game company; what was the waste of time, his video games or law school? Elizabeth once told me with a sigh, “I just wish I’d spent more time watching TV as a child.” Because now she’s a TV writer! As a child, I spent countless hours taking notes on what I read, copying passages into blank books, and illustrating these quotations with pictures clipped from magazines—exactly the kind of work I do now on my website. Many people argue that children should be required to try many different kinds of activities, to help them develop interests, but do those activities actually create new interests, where ones don’t already exist? Was there even a risk of squelching a budding interest, by turning it from child-chosen play into a parents’ assignment?

  As parents, we want our children to use their time fruitfully and to make choices that will make them happy, and we want to see them safely settled in the world. But I recognize that my desire to keep Eliza and Eleanor productive and safe could be dangerous. “You’re better off being a professor/lawyer/accountant/teacher/married,” many parents advise. “It’s less risky.” I know many people who started out on a “safe,” parent-approved track, only to leave it—voluntarily or involuntarily—after they’d spent a lot of time, effort, and money to pursue a course that had never attracted them. Now that I’m a parent, I marvel at the encouragement my own parents gave me when I decided to leave law to try to become a writer; it’s painful to see your children risk failure or disappointment, or pursue activities that seem like a waste of time, effort, and money. But we parents don’t really know what’s safe, or a waste of time.

  So what should Jamie and I do: Insist on piano lessons, or let Eliza skip them?

  Perhaps Eliza would enjoy playing the piano if we made her take lessons, or maybe not, and maybe she’d gain in self-discipline, or maybe not. But there was another critical factor to consider: opportunity cost. This term from economics describes the fact that making any particular choice means forgoing alternatives. Practicing the piano for an hour meant renouncing all the other activities that might otherwise be pursued. What would Eliza do with her time, if she were unoccupied? She’d only know if we left her free to decide.

  The credential-hoarding, college-admissions-minded part of me wanted to see Eliza accumulate accomplishments, but the wiser part of me argued that one of the most important lessons of childhood is discovering what you like to do. If, before heading off to law school, I’d considered the activities that I’d always pursued in my free time, I might have started a career in writing sooner. I don’t regret what I did; I had a wonderful time in law school and loved my brief time working as a lawyer. But my legal experience easily might have been much less satisfying, or I might never have mustered up the courage to try writing.

  As children or adults, when we’re faced with unstructured time, with no obvious direction, no ready stimulation, and no assignments, we must choose our own occupations—a very instructive necessity.

  “Growing up, I was bored out of my mind,” a very creative friend recalled. “As a consequence, I had an incredibly rich inner life.”

  “Yes,” I replied. “Boredom can be important. That’s when you have to figure out what you want to do.”

  After a month of sporadic debate, Jamie and I decided to continue to “Guard our children’s free time”—from ourselves. We wanted Eliza to “Be Eliza,” even if that meant skipping piano lessons. We wanted her free hours at home to be an opportunity for exploration and choice. “See the child you have,” as the saying goes, “not the child you wish you had.” In the end, I agreed with Michel de Montaigne: “The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced.”

  And what does Eliza do with her free time, when she’s set loose in the apartment? Does she play chess against herself, perform chemistry experiments, write sonnets, organize bake sales to benefit an animal shelter? Nope. She spends hours taking pictures and making videos of herself, then spends more hours reviewing them. Whether or not this is what I think she should do, it’s what she does.

  “Do you want to take a class about making videos?” I asked. “Editing techniques, special effects, all that? Why don’t you join the after-school club where they make stop-motion movies?”

  “No,” Eliza shook her head. “I don’t want to have to learn along with a bunch of people. I like figuring it out myself and doing my own thing.”

  “Would you like to read a book about it?”

  “Sure,” she said. I got her a book about making videos on a Mac. And also a book about Cindy Sherman.

  SUFFER FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES

  Routine doesn’t deserve its bad reputation. It’s true that novelty and challenge bring happiness, and that people who break their routines, try new things, and go to new places are happier, but routine can also bring happiness. The pleasure of doing the same thing, in the same way, every day, shouldn’t be overlooked. The things I do every day take on a certain beauty and provide a kind of invisible architecture to my life. Andy Warhol wrote, “Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do it, say, twice or just almost every
day, it’s not good any more.”

  I wanted to harness the power of routine to accomplish some long-procrastinated tasks; what I do almost every day matters more than what I do once in a while. My First Splendid Truth holds that to be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth. While many of my resolutions were meant to add more feeling good to my life, I decided to devote fifteen minutes a day to rid myself of something that made me feel bad. Fifteen minutes! I could do anything for fifteen minutes.

  I knew exactly what I wanted to tackle first; I’d been stewing about it ever since I worked on my Shrine to My Family in September. My failure to cope with our family photographs was a constant, gnawing worry. I faithfully took photos and videos of our family, but I’d fallen far behind in turning them into a more permanent form.

  I’m a big believer in the importance of family photos. Recalling happy memories from the past gives a boost to happiness in the present, and looking at photographs of beloved people is an easy way to engineer a mood boost.

  Also, prompts like photo albums, mementos, and journals are excellent aides to memory. Looking at photographs helps people to recall memories more clearly and also to remember much more than what’s shown in the picture. I tend to forget huge swaths of the past, but looking at photographs helps me recall the little happy details that would otherwise be lost.

  When we were in Kansas City over the holidays, I’d arranged for a professional photographer to take our family photograph. It was expensive, but because family photographs are among my most precious possessions, this splurge gave me great bang for the happiness buck. Nevertheless, although I loved these high-quality heirloom photographs, the casual snapshots I took were just as important. They provided a kind of family diary, a record of our everyday life and its minor milestones and celebrations. I would never have imagined that I could forget Eliza’s excitement in showing off her newly pierced ears, or Eleanor’s toddler habit of constantly reaching for her belly button, yet when I caught sight of these photos, I realized with alarm that my memories had already started to fade.