Being Productive
Ellen Goodman
Casco Bay, Maine - The tide has come in and filled up the cove. A fat, fuzzy bee has worked the last rose-hip flower in front of the cottage. I have been sitting on the porch all morning, sitting and watching. It has taken me days to come down to this speed, to this morning of utter inefficiency. Only now am I finally, truly, totally unproductive. Able to just sit and watch
This has been a rushed, high-priority overnight express. FAX-it, sort of summer. It has been as scheduled as the airline timetable I carried in my pocketbook. By the time I left the city and office, I had reached a peak of impatience: The money machine at the bank seemed tortuously slow. The traffic was impossible. The long-distance number that I had to re-dial was annoying. Too many digits.
Without actually knowing it, I had upped the quota on my own production schedule. It had begun to seem important to do two things at once. To return calls while unloading the dishwasher. To ask for the check with coffee. To read a magazine in the checkout line. To use rather than waste time. The pace of work had taken over the rest of my life.
Now I look at newspaper photographs of Michael Dukakis speed-walking with reporters at his side, accomplishing two tasks at once - aerobic interviews - and I am amused. Somewhere, surely, there is a commuter learning Japanese on the way to work. A child is being car-pooled from one lesson to another by a parent worried about being late for gymnastics.
Sitting here, idle at last, I am finally conscious of the gap between being productive and simply being. At the wonderful, sensual luxury of being useless. And its rareness. Do we need vacations now to learn how to do nothing, rather than something?
In front of me, the sides of an orchid-like wildflower open and close in the breeze like some cartoon mouth from a disney character. I am amazed at the orange freckles that line its yellow throat. It is a wonderfully complex creation. I remember the line that accompanied that lush exhibit of Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings last winter. She wrote once: "still - in a way - nobody sees a flower - really it is so small - we haven't time - and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time."
Time. It is the priority and the missing element in our world of one-minute managers and stress clinics. But the artist knew it wasn't possible to sandwich in an appointment for awareness (from two to three this afternoon I will pay attention to the poppies) or to make friendship more efficient. They usually lose in the race of workaday life.
Not long ago, I read a report from Pittsburgh about how much time Americans waste in their lives. The average married couple spends only four minutes a day in meaningful conversation. If only our tasks could be accomplished more quickly, the researchers suggested, we would have more hours for the things and people we loved. Perhaps, But I am not convinced that inefficiency is our problem. Instead it may be the passion for efficiency. The solution to the time crunch is not to move at a higher speed. It is too hard to shift out of that list-making, speed-thinking, full-throttle life into idle, the gear of human beings. The faster we try to move, the farther we get from the rhythms of friendship and flowers. When we rush through errands to clear a small block of free time for ourselves or families, we may end up rushing through that "leisure" time as well.
The great myth of our work-intense era is "quality time". We believe that we can make up for the loss of days, or hours, especially with each other, by concentrated minutes. But ultimately there is no way to do one-minute mothering. There is no way to pay attention in a hurry. Seeing, as Georgia O'Keeffe said, takes time. Friendship takes time. So does family. So does arriving at a sense of well-being. This is what I learned on my summer vacation.
Copyright © 1988 The Boston Globe Newspaper Co., Washington Post Western Group, reprinted with permission.