Community building series #2: "How do you find the time?"

Post 2 in a longer series exploring common issues in community building and how we might approach them.

This is part 2 of a community-building series. Please see Part 1 here.

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

“Let me check my diary” is a sentence that I want to banish into the darkest, deepest bowels of the underworld. It is fine in a work context, but when I find myself using it to schedule time with people I love in my personal life, it feels like some kind of wicked curse. I don’t miss much about my youth but I do long for the sense of timelessness - when I didn’t need to check my diary to know when I was next going to see my mum, my best friend, or my siblings - they just fit seamlessly into the deepest grooves of my life. I miss just “hanging out” by doing mundane, daily things - burning my wrists over the stove while learning to make roti with my mum, weekend sleepovers with my cousins, giggling with my friends on the walk to school, doing homework with my siblings. As I grew a little older, the routines themselves changed but the easy pattern of communal life remained. I didn’t have to consciously schedule time to see anyone - the weekly party nights, the early Sunday mornings spent cooking with my mum, the long walks with my sisters and cousins, the same tub of ice cream at my friend’s house when I was having a shit day, the same kind, knowing hug from her mother when we all descended to her house, the same annual religious feasts and festivals, all of it was simply the background routine of my life.

Slowly, so slowly that we scarcely noticed, the routines started to fade. Time moved on. We stepped into adulthood and into our “real” jobs, moved away for cheaper or better housing, partnered up, settled down. New, private rhythms took shape, and with them came the need to schedule time to simply see each other. What had once been assumed—a feast, a party, a casual dinner at a certain time of year—became a stressful act of coordination, squeezed between competing obligations as we worked around conflicts and clashes. Of course each individual change was reasonable, even necessary: a big work deadline, a job posting overseas, a pregnancy, falling in love and juggling new commitments. But collectively, they were almost the death knell for our shared life, which slipped right through our fingers before we could grasp it.

I remember when I first noticed it. Early on in my shiny new grown-up job, while sitting in one of those airless open-plan offices, I was struck by the sudden realisation that I saw more of my boss and my colleagues than any of my loved ones. What’s more, work was taking up so much of my time and mental capacity that I was no longer even as excited to make plans with loved ones - it felt more like a chore than the blessing it is. That is when this chilling dread first settled into my body and it has never quite left. I am extraordinarily grateful for most of the gifts of modernity but the knowledge that I may forever spend more time in an office than with any of the people I truly love (including the one I have vowed my life to) filled me with an existential horror - it felt to me like an abomination, some kind of malign, murky upside-down world. I decided there and then that I was simply not going to accept this state of affairs. But how to actually change it while retaining an acceptable material standard of life? Me, my friends, my siblings, all needed jobs, housing, etc. We had various degrees of responsibility to others in our lives and competing care and work commitments. We couldn’t afford to just quit our demanding jobs. How would we also keep our ties with each other when there were so many other demands for our time and our diaries? Of course, some bonds were naturally ripe to fall away anyway - many people only journey with us for a season for life rather than for the lifetime ride. But what of the people who we wanted in our lives all the way to our own funerals?

That night, I came home and started to think about how to structure my life to see more of the people I actually love. For a long time, I overscheduled everything to make sure I remembered to make time for social obligations. I had post-it notes and calendar entries committing myself to do everything from calling my mother on my walk to work, to visiting my friend on the weekend even if I wanted to lie in. This has its place as an interim band aid, and when all else fails, I would still rather use this method rather than slowly watch my friendships and connections dissolve into the ether. If I have to, I will wake up at 5am to fit in everything else I have to do and still retain a slice of time to see my loved ones. But I have always felt this restless dissatisfaction and unease with it as a long term, permanent solution. For one thing, very soon, we started to realise that despite our best intentions, were now having to schedule time in 1-2 months in advance to guarantee we could squeeze each other in, and now the overscheduling was getting stressful in and of itself. For another thing, I am extremely sensitive and need a lot of time on my own, so the constantly full diary was draining some of the joy I felt in maintaining these relationships anyway.

On a deeper level though, my real issue with this model is that all this diary management simply cannot foster the type of embeddedness that really is at the heart of a thriving community life. I don’t want work-life balance, I want work-life-care-community integration. I don’t want to fit my loved ones and other meaningful pursuits around my work-life. I want them to be the heart of my life, and for paid work to fit around that. I want to retain some of the unthinking shared rituals and rhythms of life that make community life a given, rather than something that needs to be booked in the diary.

I am a highlighter girl through and through - naturally organised and generally very productive. “Efficiency” could be my middle name. But I have never come across a single productivity hack that has cracked this. I knew I would have to work towards a different model of life to build and sustain the kind of community life I desire. The “time management” book that most closely resembles my intuitions on this is Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. I recommend this to anyone and everyone who will listen. Burkeman starts his book off with the simple, brutal truth about time management: Time is finite and uncontrollable We only get 4,000 weeks alive on Earth if we are fortunate enough to live to an average lifespan of 80 years old. That’s it. The “live forever” tech bros may yet change this, but at the time of writing, the 4,000 week rule remains true. (Whether or not the capacity to live forever would be desirable or not in and of itself is a whole other question - I’d like to write about it separately). We will never be able to do everything we want and see everyone we want, no matter how many productivity tools we use. (As a side-note, one helpful thing I realised when reading Four Thousand Weeks is that my relatively fast pace at work was only leading to more work: completing the project / responding to the email earlier than expected just leads to more and more work, rather than more free time. I no longer hand in anything ahead of time even if I have finished it early. I schedule my email replies even if I have prepared them earlier).

Another very poignant part of the book for me was Oliver’s meditation on how convenience culture (such as food delivery services) often makes us more efficient, but at the expense of the slower, more meaningful parts of our lives. I notice this in my own life when I take advance of time-saving tools. I grew up without a microwave or kettle and now regularly use both when I have a busy day. But my favourite days are still the lazy Saturday mornings when I can brew fresh tea on the stove slowly and leisurely, taking in the smell, just like I did with my mum throughout my youth. During the week, when I have to use a kettle, I feel rushed and stressed. Similarly, last year, for the first time in my life I found myself using meal-delivery services as both my husband and I were hit with family illnesses at the same time. Many of our friends also lovingly cooked for us throughout this period, for which we were deeply grateful. But during other weeks, we lived off perfectly proportioned meal plans - it was efficient for sure, with every last macro planned out carefully according to our weight, size and fitness goals. But it also felt utterly soulless. Now that things have settled down, I am beside myself with the sheer joy and excitement of once again being to slowly and lovingly cook a meal that I know will light my husband right up. I don’t want to take this romanticism of domestic chores too far - I am, for example, extremely grateful for the washing machine and the abundance of food in my local shops and supermarket. No amount of love for my husband has, to date, translated into a desire to slaughter my own meat, grow my own crops, or to beat and wash his clothes by hand after walking miles to get to the local river as my grandmother did. But the other extreme also makes me feel like some kind of colourless, aimless ghoul - efficient but already dead.

Oliver Burkeman also notes the brutal truth about visiting our loved ones. Let’s take our parents: If you are an adult who is living far away from your parents into your 30s and you visit them 2-4 times a year, you might only have 20-40 visits left. That’s it. That’s if they’re also in their mid-60s and live to 80-85. Some people may not want to be closer to their parents, but the point holds true for anyone you hold dear who you don’t see more than a few times a year. One day, there will also be a final time that you will pick up your child or have a deep talk with your best friend. Everyone will have a different reaction to this state of affairs - for some people, this is fine. They’re happy with the people they live near, and / or don’t feel the need to see friends or family very often. Perhaps they are deeply moved and fulfilled by their job, so don’t mind spending more time on their work or with their colleagues than anyone else. Or perhaps they don’t need much company at all. But for those of us who cherish our other community ties, this poses us with a grave challenge. How should we respond?

For decades, I have held the following vignettes in my mind for the kind of structure I wanted my life to eventually have, in order to easily accommodate community ties:

Photo by Juli Moreira on Unsplash

1. My mum’s kitchen, the hub and hearth of our communal life. Warm and full of delicious smells and rapturous laugher, it was the place where her friends and relatives gathered together to cook, to work and to socialise - all at the same time. Sometimes they would pop over spontaneously, so my mum always had snacks in the freezer and a pot of tea ready to go at any moment. Other times, they would meet up in planned, regular intervals during which they would do a lot of the hardest or most tedious tasks of the year together. Often I would join them along with my other siblings and the other children. For example, around once or twice a year, we would all sit around the kitchen table eating, talking, joking and giggling as we peeled, chopped and blended an entire year’s supply of ginger-garlic. Ginger-garlic paste is a stable feature of most Indian dishes so having this to hand in the freezer is always much easier than having to make it by hand every time. At more regular intervals - every week - my mum would go to the market and buy spinach, and we would sit around washing, preparing, picking it. Every year when Ramadan rolled over, the aunties would be back in our home kneading, rolling and filling samosas. Children and the less skilled (i.e me) were included too - the tasks reserved for them included things like “gluing” the edges of samosas and spring rolls together. Hanging out and working were not distinct activities. They were the same thing.

   

   Photo by Lars Groenendijk on Unsplash

2. The year I spent living in Menton, a beautiful coastal city on the French Riviera during my degree. Calling this place “beautiful” is a criminal understatement. Everything about my time in this slice of heaven on Earth was postcard-worthy. When writing to my loved ones during this time in my life, I often described it as feeling like I was living inside a postcard. It wasn’t just the breathtaking nature of the landscape, although that was stupefying enough - after all, I had come from a gritty urban world, fenced with barbed fire, into a luminous otherworld of rolling mountains, cloudless blue skies, and the immense majesty of the Mediterranean Sea. My “commute” to university was a magical walk through the cobbled, narrow streets of the Old Town, soaking in the glory of the morning sun as it kissed the mountain tops and bounced off the sea. And the food, oh the food - to this day, I miss the food culture - the scent of freshly baked bread every morning, the aroma of coffee rising into the air as the sleepy town stirred awake, the trips across the border to Italy for fresh pasta and groceries. All of that was simply divine - but it was also the ease and rhythm of social life which I cherished so much. I had brought a French SIM card upon arrival but I soon discovered that I barely, if ever, checked my phone. Soon, I stopped taking it out with me. All my new friends lived within walking distance of me and there was no need to text each other to meet up - we would simply meet each other after school / work at the beach as a matter of routine. There were no planned timings, we just knew that whenever we got off whatever we were doing, the beach would be waiting for us. On weekends, friends would simply knock on the door and check if I was home and vice versa. This could be for something as simple as checking if I wanted to go grocery shopping with them or seeing if we might all fancy a day trip into Italy. If we were all home, often we would eat dinner or lunch together. On Friday nights or Saturdays, we would spend long, messy hours in the kitchen cooking pizza together. I don’t think the words “diary” or “calendar” were uttered once, either in French or English.

   

   Photo by Stefan C. Asafti on Unsplash

3. The “village” model that I wrote about here and which I will write about again soon from another perspective (of eldercare, childcare and dependency).

I have thought long and hard about how to adapt some of these models to the very urban, modern life that I have now, and that I cherish. I have ultimately concluded that the “full-fat” all-trimmings version of the type of community life that I want to create will need to involve:

• Moving to an affordable location where most of my friends, siblings, family and loved ones can move near me. I want to live within walking distance of most people that I love the most so that our rhythms and routines coincide, rather than conflict. Fortunately, most of them have also signed up to this endeavour and we have spent years building up our financial and other circumstances to be able to achieve this.

• Having a more flexible pattern of work. I want my home, not my company’s office, to be the central hub of my work life - the place where financial work, care, socialising, cooking, etc, all come together. This will entail all or some of the following:
  (1) Using our prime earning years to build a minimum level of sufficient wealth so that we do not need my full-time income when we move - for example, at least paying off a home;

  (2) Finding less conventional forms of income-generating work. The second part is far more unpredictable given the development of artificial intelligence, so we have focused more on the first requirement;

  (3) Being able to work remotely; and

  (4) Pooling more collective resources together, rather than relying on single, atomised households. For example, some groups have decided to live more communally in shared households, rather than relying on just one or two incomes, while others have benefited from community-based loans and networks.

This is a long-term process, so while we are working towards it, here are some of the interim measures I have adopted:

• A big focus for both me and my husband in our early career years was to maximise our potential to work remotely (yes, even pre-pandemic!).

• I have also negotiated flexible working hours before accepting any job offer. I'm sure it has cost me some jobs but overall, I have aimed to work at a very high capacity so that I always remain an easy bet for jobs and promotions. I turn down any and all jobs which would require me to move further away from loved ones. This may not always be possible - in dire times, we may need to move to wherever we can find work, but if that happens I want to be 100% sure that it is because there is no other option to keep the lights on.

• I am extremely strict about what I use my annual leave for. I don’t use it in the way that most of my colleagues do. For example, I rarely take leave for an actual holiday unless it is for a wedding or something of that nature. This is an easy trade-off for me because I don’t actually enjoy or feel a need to travel extensively. I’m aware that many others love travelling or they have loved ones and family overseas, so they would need to find other solutions with different tradeoffs. However, for me, this is simply not a concern. I realised a while ago that my “bucket list” doesn’t actually consist of exotic or overseas travel (although I would perhaps long to taste real Italian pasta or eat moules-frites across the Mediterranean sea last time!) I could die happily without ever seeing most of the wonders of the world or most popular holiday destinations - what I value and love is right here. What I envision myself doing if I know I’m doing to die is quitting my job to simply spend more time eating, drinking, socialising, dancing and just being with my loved ones. That’s it. So, why not just use my holiday time to do that right now, sans any terminal diagnosis? All my annual leave revolves around doing this. For example, I buy extra leave whenever I can. Around once a month, I take an entire Friday off to spend the full day with my closest friends (“Anita” from the previous post). She has worked a 4-day week since having her daughter, so I try to join her on her non-working day. Not only do I get to see more of them, I also get to see their daughter grow up.

• Sometimes all the social obligations overwhelm me, so I’ll often book a random Monday morning off just to lie in, stare at the walls, and have time to myself. I try to keep at least some weekends free to just do nothing and recuperate. When I do get overwhelmed with how many social touch points I have, I try to remind myself that it is a blessing to love and be so love, and that one day I will miss all the people I am making plans with.

• I try, where possible, to “re-routinise” (is that a word?) time with loved ones, rather than rely on scheduling. Just like I use automatic direct debits to save money and “pay myself first”, I give my prime “time-estate” to my loved ones automatically: I have a standing “date night” with my best friend which happens at the same time every month, a bi-weekly cook-day with my mum, a standing weekly day with my husband, etc.

• Just like my mum and her friends do many of their chores together - combining socialising and domestic work - I also do the same with my friends and siblings / cousins. This won’t work for everyone and it also won’t work for all tasks. There are some things that I just need to do on my own and vice versa for my friends. However, I can do other things quite happily together in a more social way. For example, I have a regular bi-monthly day with my cousins where we complete all my home organising together: the deep clean, the piled up shredding, etc. My cousins are weird creatures and really enjoy this kind of home-organising, so we make a whole day of it. Likewise, I am the weird kind of creature who likes and is very good at financial planning and life admin, so for all my friends who struggle with this, I go over to theirs and we do their budgeting together. Despite everything I have said above, I prefer cooking on my own but many of my friends do cooking prep together - and we think of prep as a year-long cycle, which helps with overall “time management” (more on the granular details of that in future posts, if helpful). I host regular book clubs and attend others. I am missing a regular party / feast night, so that is what I am working together next. Essentially, we have tried to recapture the easy, unthinking routine of the kind of communal life that has slipped away. This only works if it can accommodate and maybe even help with everyone’s individual obligations - so kids, messy lives and difficult chores need to be welcome, present and accommodated for. For example, on my monthly Friday visits to Anita, we spend the day with her daughter and then we have our adult conversation over dinner once she is asleep. Our husbands then join us for the adult part of the night. We might “hang out” after that by doing the cooking, laundry or other tasks together, combining chores, work and social life.

• We also try to have a lot of grace and forgiveness for when these routines fall away in exceptional times.

These examples won’t work for everyone. Even in my own life, the specifics change as people’s circumstances and my own circumstances ebb and flow. What we do have is a shared commitment to working out what we can sustain during each new season of life, and a shared desire for this to be a priority in our lives while we work towards full-fat community life.

I have seen or read others who make much more immediate, drastic changes: most recently, a priest told me he is leaving the local church because he is moving back to where his in laws are - in Australia. He and his wife have realised as their young children are growing up, that any summer could be their last summer with their grandparents. In a recent article for The Free Press, Athur Brooks wrote something similar:

“That’s why we had a big family meeting a couple of years ago and decided that rather than traveling to visit one another, we would all move to the same area—even to the point of three generations living in one house (mine and Mrs. B’s).” In another article, he wrote:

“It’s hard for me to commute to my job in Boston, but it’s a lot worse to commute to your grandkids.”

No matter what we choose to do, we will be giving up something. But the key is to make our sacrifices consciously, rather than unthinkingly: What do we want to prioritise in our lives? Which jobs, which relationships, and at what cost? The fact that we have limits can be freeing, because those very limits force us to choose and pursue what we find meaningful. Every path we choose closes off another, but that can be a good thing. I’ll be honest, I rarely get “FOMO” (fear of missing out)” and I think it’s because I have what Oliver Burkeman calls “JOMO” - the Joy of missing out. He describes it as:

“The thrilling recognition that you’re free to focus on a handful of things that matter, precisely because you’re not doing everything else.”

I know what I am missing out on (e.g travel, jobs overseas, lie ins, TV, movies), but I don’t feel fear because I know why I am choosing to miss out on these things. It’s easy to turn down the fancy promotion in New York for the knowledge that I am only ever a stone’s throw away from the joys of my mum’s biriyani, my friend’s precious toddler, my date night with my best friend, and the life we share together. Now the challenge is to actually prioritise enjoying these things in our day to day lives and creating the structures that can bind us together. What a gift to have such a joyful challenge to pursue.