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In the early days of my obsession with eBay, a comically aggressive message was often added to the description of items offered for sale: no timewasters please.
What’s that all about? I said to myself. Sounds a bit strung out. Back then, I was less knackered and overstretched. “Chillax mate!” muttered the old me, perplexed at the defensive, irascible tone of these harassed sellers.
Around the same time, during a busy afternoon in the FT newsroom, I was equally taken aback by a colleague doing something similar in person. Faced with the conversational advances of a fellow hack telling him about some problem, he simply rejected the approach.
“I just don’t have the bandwidth,” he firmly stated. He actually held up a hand to ward them off and got on with his own work. Wow, I thought. Ruthless but effective — and probably quite male, too.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how the Miranda of yesteryear reacted. I was noticing how others set boundaries assertively. It struck me as rude. But I failed to see it was addressing a phenomenon that it is wise to protect yourself against: things that take up your time when you don’t have enough of it.
Now it’s different. Emails and SMS messages have, since those innocent times, been joined by WhatsApp groups and social media notifications that make keeping on top of work messages a round-the-clock marathon. Looking after elderly parents has created a tsunami of admin, to which my kids’ school has piled on a hefty serving of mad apps to communicate, separately, everything from homework assignments to vaccinations and absences.
It’s all a colossal faff. And I’m not alone. A recent poll found that Britons spend 1.52bn hours as a nation on admin every year and it’s burning a big ole hole in our productive time — not to mention speeding us to digital burnout as well.
The worst affected are women in middle age — probably because we are taking care of admin on behalf of the young and the old. Does it make me feel better to know my overwhelm is typical? Possibly not — I’m not sure there is safety in numbers if they denote the hours of time spent on this nonsense. To quote Peter Finch in Network: I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.
What’s the solution? According to Cal Newport and other prophets of reclaiming your resources for what matters, it’s best to turn it all off. Just opt out — of emails, social media and the whole digital enchilada. Maybe set a bounceback message, but don’t promise to read any of it. Life is out there waiting for you to live it, and work also needs you to get properly stuck in, with no distractions.
Most of us, however, don’t have the luxury of disappearing even for a day. The impossibility of truly logging off gives rise to droll suggestions on social media for how to manage a bulging email inbox. How about a weekly ballot to choose one that gets a reply, the rest get deleted? If only!
But there is a better approach. It even worked for me for a few years, until the digital onslaught gathered force. Simply do what’s urgent. Learn how to discern the things that actually need your attention, and deal with them straight away. I would recommend this over the tyranny of to-do lists, where medium-term tasks become dreadful psychological burdens.
In the news industry, this is the norm. Follow up right now, make that phone call, write the damn thing down, find the information and pass it on. Then you move on to the next task. When people dither in a newsroom, it’s unusually irritating. More than that, it seems a bit of an affront — hence my colleague’s refusal to engage all those years ago.
And who had the worse manners in that exchange, really? This is something I’ve returned to. Now, I think setting boundaries is entirely necessary. That doesn’t mean I would dare tell a co-worker I don’t have the bandwidth, not least because women are expected to be nicer.
But I’ll certainly be less thoughtless about other people’s time. No more expecting a response to pointless messages, such as the one I sent to the editor of this column with the silly joke about email ballots. There’s nothing wrong with sharing a bit of levity in the working day. But neither is there anything wrong with ignoring it. As she wisely did. “No timewasters please!”
miranda.green@ft.com
