How “Busyness” Stops us From Meaningful Connection

“Efficiency is The Enemy of Social Life”

Photo by José Martín Ramírez Carrasco on Unsplash

On a beautiful early spring Saturday in March, I didn’t have much planned for myself and my 5-year-old twins, so I made an impromptu decision to take them to the farmers market. I sat and drank iced coffee as they played in a kid-friendly boulder area near the market near Durham, NC’s Central Park. I decided I was just going to enjoy the sunshine and consciously not look at my phone. So I just sat, and half watched the kids and looked around, and I saw... so many people I knew. In addition to chatting with some friends I ran into, I also initiated two really nice conversations with two couples I had never spoken to, but I recognized them as part of communities I’m invested in: one was part of our kids’ school, and the other was part of our synagogue. We stayed at the park for nearly two hours, and I left feeling so energized by the warm weather and all of the warm conversation.

This kind of leisurely, impromptu connection feels so special because it feels rare. Not only because there aren’t enough of these kinds of free public “third spaces” where you can just run into people, but often we don’t live lives where we hang around somewhere for a few hours, strike up conversations, and see who we see. We’re all so busy.

That’s because, for most of us, our lives are constructed around action and accomplishment, and rarely do we allow for the kind of open space needed to create connections in open-ended ways.

Even if we feel depleted over how we’re spending our go-go-go days, operating from a place of time scarcity and busyness might also make us proud. Our culture reveres busyness. In casual conversation, we compare notes about hectic after-school schedules. We tell tales of mad-cap “vacations” that include three cities in five days. If you are retired and you say you are “so busy!” that’s clearly a sign all must be going well for you. This “chosen” busyness is also an economic badge of honor for middle-class and above families. “I’ve just been so busy” has become an unquestioned excuse for any kind of flakiness or social lapse, like why you didn’t deliver on your volunteer commitments, RSVP for a potluck, or stopped showing up to your community’s meetings. But our busyness can have a real cost because it can stop us from having enough of the human connections we want.  

I recognize this busyness isn’t all about personal choice. I would also love to change some very real systemic pressures that make us feel time pressure in America, like income inequality, high living costs, a weak social safety net, and minimal access to affordable paid care. (I do believe, in the long term, changing these things is possible, but only if we break out of our isolated lives to come together to do something about it. I’ll be talking about this idea more throughout this newsletter in the coming months.)

I want you to make time and space for community. But unlike so many others, I will not teach a single optimization strategy, shortcut,  life-hack, or direct you to buy some magical time-saving product. 

Instead, I will invite you to face the reality that you do not have enough time for everything. You never will. There’s a billion-dollar productivity industry out there full of books, products, and workshops trying to convince you that if you listen to one more expert or buy or try one more thing, you’ll unlock the secret to “having it all.” The underlying message of this industry is that when you finally maximize your productivity and wipe clean your to-do list, you’ll arrive at a promised land where you’ll finally have time to do the things that bring you joy. I’m going to tell you right now that this is a lie. There is no “other side” where your to-do list disappears, and you experience a blissful nirvana. 

Building relationships and community connections is not always linear and rarely happens on a time-efficient schedule. It involves showing up, literally and metaphorically, over and over, for months or years, in a way that you can’t quantify or easily check off on a to-do list. As author Eric Klinenberg has said, "Efficiency is the enemy of social life." If being part of communities and having a rich social life with meaningful connections is something you want, you must be clear with yourself that this is a priority. That means that there may be other things that keep you busy that will have to take a back seat.

Breaking out of the mindset that you need to always spend your time in a productive way is undoubtedly a major challenge. In her book, Real Self Care, Dr. Pooja Lakshmin MD points out that being productive and crossing things off our to-do lists operates in our prefrontal cortex, our thinking brain. Whereas other parts of our brain, like our limbic system, are “where we experience connection, empathy, and other important emotions. ..... Instead of experiencing a healthy range of emotions, women who hyper-focus on productivity ping-pong back and forth between dread and relief.”

Dr. Lakshmin explains in her book the psychological impact of choosing to spend our time in ways that nourish us but aren’t “productive.” ”If you dial back from being goal-oriented and embrace your values, will you be less productive and accomplish less? The true but scary answer is yes, you will be less productive, and that's a good thing.”

Here’s what less “productive” time we spend on community building could look like: showing up to a planning meeting about raising money for your local library that was great the week before but today turned out to be boring. You might think “a better use of your time” would have been cleaning out your closet or running errands at TJ Maxx. But you go to the planning meeting again the following week because you told yourself and others that you would. Being less “productive” could look like an unexpected (but enjoyable) conversation with a new acquaintance after tabling for a cause at a city arts fair, which means you get home 30 minutes late and don’t finish your weekly meal prep. That throws gunk in the wheels of how you hoped to have an “efficient” week of cooking for your family. 

I want to validate that all of this is so hard. The doses of guilt we feel from our social conditioning to be “productive” can make us feel truly miserable. No one likes to feel like we are falling behind, even if we are working towards, in a longer-term way, supporting what we know are our important values around connection. 

I believe there are some concrete solutions to this. One major area that is ripe for freeing up time, especially for women, is domestic labor. It’s an arena of our lives we usually have more control over than our jobs, our government, or how other people in our lives behave. We often feel compelled to prioritize domestic chores and devote more time to controlling them because we actually do have control over whether our shoe rack is organized. We do not have control over how much paid parental leave we are going to get. In a world that can feel chaotic, lonely, and out of our control, maybe a random hour spent deep cleaning the oven is something we feel we have full agency over. When we’re done, we get both the satisfaction of the to-do list check-off and an imaginary gold star for meeting society’s expectations that teach us that cleanliness is morally valuable and that it’s a woman’s job to keep things clean. 

I love Anne Helen Petersen’s work on this, which has helped inform my thinking. You can read a few good ones here:

What Makes Women Clean

Who Gets "Quality" Leisure?

I want to teach people how to scale back how much domestic labor we do AND the guilt and stress we feel when we don’t do it. Part of that is unwinding why we feel so compelled to spend our precious time on it when we could spend time on things that meaningfully fulfill us, like being with people and community building.

In next week’s members-only post, we’ll be talking about what I think is a major enemy of having enough time to build connections, which is disproportionately done by women: CHORES!!! This is a very nuanced topic, and I’ll be leading an activity to help think through how to unburden yourself from domestic labor that DOES NOT require paid outsourcing or convincing a partner to do it instead. Be sure you are a member of the club so you don’t miss it!

The How to Find Your People Club is off to a GREAT start. Come Join us.

So let me know: have you noticed people talking a lot about how busy they are? Does “feeling too busy” stop you from participating in community activities? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

AWESOME EVENT ALERT! I’m thrilled and honored that the one and only Shannon Watts (the unstoppable force who founded Moms Demand Action) has invited me to join her in a Substack Live to talk about community building. You will get an email and a prompt to join us on the app Monday March 17th 3:30 EST/12:30 PT. I’ll also send out a recording afterwards if you can’t make it live. Yippeeee!

And one last thing to spark a little wonder and joy: please enjoy the incredible work of Yuliia Kovalchuk, an internationally recognized nail artist and Ukrainian refugee hoping to settle in the US. Refugees and immigrants have always made America great. 🇺🇸🇺🇦