On this season of How to Keep Time, co-hosts Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost explore our relationship with time and how to reclaim it. Why is it so important to be productive? Why can it feel like there’s never enough time in a day? Why are so many of us conditioned to believe that being more productive makes us better people?
Produced by Becca Rashid. Co-hosted by Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost. Editing by Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smerciak. The executive producer of Audio is Claudine Ebeid; the managing editor of Audio is Andrea Valdez.
Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com.
Megan, we have agreed that we live in some sort of shared reality. So what is that, and does that exist anymore? Oh my goodness. Did it ever exist? These are the questions of being human. Real is what has an impact, what makes a difference in our lives. I'm so interested to learn more about how things like reality television and influencers and deepbakes and even magic, how they all impact the way that we trust. What are your findings when it comes to how our brains respond? If if Andrea, AI is getting so advanced and so much more integrated into our everyday lives. How do we navigate as our digital and physical worlds collide? If you were an urban planner, basically, for the Internet, what would you advise us to do? I think you're going to see different kinds of resistance, because that's the thing about a city is that, you know, what does it mean to maintain morality in a way of recognizing the dignity and humanity of the collective? Meghan, we've got 6 episodes to examine what's authentic, what's fake, and what lives in the murky middle. Our time is limited. Our capacities to maximize it by whatever metric is limited and we have to learn to live as finite and mortal beings. I'm Andrea Valdez. And I'm Megan Garver. From The Atlantic, listen to how to know what's real, coming this May.
I write in my bed on my laptop. I write on the sofa. I was unable to stop ruminating on the smallest things that happened to me until I wrote them down. At which point, I could then be free of this kind of obsessive, like, you know, thinking and rethinking. Ansaer is also the author of many nonfiction books, and she's a professor of creative writing at Antioch University. Her practice of writing everything down in this diary made me wonder how are all the ways that we play with time and Yeah. The ways that we try to preserve it by documenting how much is that really helping us hold on? And I know we we want to keep time, though. Can we? Can you describe the style of a typical entry in your diary? In the beginning, in the very beginning, when I was in my teens, the entries were very emotionally overwrought. It really was just sort of your, like, you know, toxic waste dump of teenage feelings, which I think, you know, was a fairly universal experience for teenage diarists. Over the years, I I began writing in present tense. I stopped using the pronoun eye I log the date, the year, month and day. So there are, you know, there are some formal habits that have become somewhat fixed over the years. You know, a lot of diarists or people who journal to the extent that you do are sought out later in life and later in history for their reflections on a specific moment in history or a moment in time. Oh, no. Nobody would care. Like, really, there's there's no historical moment captured in my diary. My heart sinks when I think of the prospect of having to, like, represent the past Right. To the people of the future because, like, no, it's just gonna be like, here's what I was thinking about and this person I was obsessed with and
When you travel. You know, like, I've I travel overseas, and I'm jet lagged. And the time is all messed up, and I wake up in the middle of the night, and then I can't go to sleep. Or you just start falling asleep, you know, in the middle of the day. Mhmm. You're so far away. Like, wait. What time is it even? And you can't control it. I I love how I'm I'm just napping, and you're traveling the world. Yes. But I have napped like you described too. There are all these ways that I experience these weird lags in my space and time, not just with napping. But sometimes, if I'm really tired, like, a song sounds slower to me. Like, the beat feels like it's delayed in some way. Or if I'm really caffeinated, it feels faster. And same thing with time, like, maybe I'm just getting older, or it feels like time is moving faster. But I I hate to tell you this, Becca, but I think you may just be getting older because, you know, time feels like it moves faster for me year to year. And then sometimes I'll look at, myself in the mirror, you know, after looking at a photo, and I'm like, okay. That hair didn't used to be that color quite so much. Right? But it doesn't feel like much time has passed. You know? There's a kind of, like, fun house mirror effect with time's passage, where you think you look a certain way in time, but it turns out you're all wonky. Right. It reminds me when I used to go home as a college student, and my little brother, who's 6 years younger than me, looked like a different person every year I visited. And now, the way I see my parents aging, it's like I You're aging at the same time. It's not just them. It's also you. Mhmm. But you don't have that that sense of it inside your own head, That you need some reference from outside of your body to remind you. Oh, yeah. Time. Jana, are you a timely person? Do you think of yourself as a timely person? I very often on time. I really am. But I can also
I need and my body needs. You know, I've gone through dozens of phases with my self care routines, but none have ever been rest for rest's sake. It's this is something I know I have to do, or I'm already sick. I'm already stressed out. And especially during the workday I mean, you know this, Ian. I don't drink water. I stress This is an ongoing no problem. Problem. Yeah. Absolutely. We're we're trying to get you to hydrate. We're getting better at it. Like, the little things to just get up from my desk, take a break And go get some water. Go get some water. Like, the most basic thing. Rest at work feels so inappropriate in a way. Interesting. Even knowing when I need the rest or knowing how to do it in a way that feels genuinely restorative and not just to keep working. Studies tell us that the average knowledge worker loses about 2 hours a day to overly long meetings to, you know, inefficiencies or distractions caused by technologies or poor processes. I am shocked to hear this. It Totally sounds normal. And so if you can get a handle on those three things, meetings, technology, and distractions, you can actually go a long way. And so that means doing things like having better meeting discipline around the length of meetings, agendas, all that stuff that we all know we ought to do, but, but all too rarely don't. It also means very often redesigning the workday to be more conscious about how you spend your time and having better boundaries between, say, deep focused work versus podcast recordings versus time with clients. And then finally also thinking about how you can use your technology in 2 ways. First of all, to eliminate distractions, number 1, and so that's that involves things like setting up particular times of day when
Uh-huh. So it's like a I don't know if that it has a direct relationship, but, like, a meal in sequence where you get a soup and then you get either rice or pasta or something. Mhmm. And then you get a main course with a side and dessert. Oh, it sounds so good. It's not only the gastronomical practice, which is interesting on its own, but also if you have office workers that go to a place like this in groups of 4 or 5 Mhmm. Sit together and are sharing a table for an hour or 2, the the the social engagement in that office is different Of course. Than when everybody's sitting in their cubicle and their office. But I think that the embedding of social practice in the day makes a big difference in this case, for the 9 to 5 or 9 to 7 worker. In Mexico, we have become more of a victim of the corporate culture the minute we have lost the ability to have that kind of social gregarious launch. Oh my gosh, Becca. I I just had yesterday a supposedly social gregarious lunch with a friend in from out of town. And the whole time, we were still, like, looking at our watches. I was like, oh, you wanna make sure you get back from your meeting, and I was checking to make sure I wasn't gonna be late. So it's really difficult. We're still at work even when we take the time to eat that way. I mean, I think one of the things Nacho is is pointing out is that it's it's too big a burden to ask people to create Mhmm. That time for themselves. You need to make space for it socially and culturally. There has to be a kind of common understanding that, you know, hanging out with your friends or even your coworkers in a different way is important. And that that's just how your day plays out rather than, oh, how can I figure out how to finagle a a way to be social with the people who are important to me? Right. And as Nacho was saying, this multiple course lunch and these additional hours that people give themselves
