From time to time, I tell my husband that I am a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I then itemise all the things I have done that day and all I have to do the following one, writes Lucy Kellaway
The list is interminable: articles to write, tiresome messages to read and send, a dodgy pilot light on the boiler, a child's sports kit that has been carelessly left on the bus. And on and on. When I have finished, he always says, in a magisterial sort of way: "You lead a very happy and very full life. You wouldn't want it any other way."
This falls well short of the response I'm aiming for, which is: "You are a marvel!" or at least: "Can I make you a cup of tea?" Yet what is even more annoying about it is the suspicion that he might be right. My busyness may not be the thing that is about to push me over the edge. It may be the thing that keeps me sane.
This suspicion grew last week as a result of reading CrazyBusy, a self-help guide for those who have too much to do. The subtitle, Overstretched, Overbooked and About to Snap, held out some hope that the author, Dr Edward M Hallowell, might understand me in a way that my husband evidently does not.
According to Dr Hallowell, this busyness thing is endemic. Almost everyone is too busy. We are all running faster and faster on our pointless, addictive wheels of busyness and we have become inefficient, frazzled and fractious. We are so busy responding to random demands that we are losing sight of things that matter. We have stopped thinking and are wasting our lives.
Dr Hallowell realised just how very bad things had got one day when a patient walked into his consulting room and asked him if it was normal that her husband puts his BlackBerry down next to her when they have sex.
"That this woman had no idea that her husband's behaviour was unacceptable, if not insane, was the moment when I knew for sure that we had created a new world," he writes.
Reading this was the moment when I knew for sure that busyness isn't such a huge problem after all and that a lot of sentimental tosh is talked about it. First, the bedroom habits of this couple. The gadgets that they have close by them while they copulate are up to them. I don't see anything wrong with having a BlackBerry at one's side in bed, and I bet lots of people do this. There have been telephones in bedrooms for a long time - these are surely more obtrusive, since they ring.
More generally, though, the whole thesis is wrong - busyness is not the curse of modern life that Dr Hallowell suggests. Although I am crazybusy myself and do spend a large amount of my time distracted and losing things and sending pointless messages, I see no evidence that this is messing with my priorities.
By my bed I have Northanger Abbey (which one could argue was just as much a barrier to intimacy as a BlackBerry). The book serves as a reminder of what people used to get up to before they were crazybusy.
In Jane Austen's time, there was another, even more worrying social compulsion that afflicted the middle classes: crazyidleness. In Bath (which was wildly stimulating in comparison to the countryside), the women thought nothing of doing nothing all morning and then every afternoon going to the pump room to watch others doing very little. And far from such stillness clearing the mind for great thoughts, Mrs Allen only ever worries about whether to wear the sprigged muslin or the plain.
Neither were their lives any better for being spared the mindless rush of technology.
On the contrary: the painful scene in which Catherine waits an hour for the charming Mr Tilney, only then to be whisked off by the charmless Mr Thorpe, need never have taken place had Mr Tilney just sent her a text saying "c u l8er".
A slightly more up-to-date example of the superiority of busyness is presented by a friend who is a successful working mother and who last weekend went to a health farm to escape her manic lifestyle.
Was it lovely, I asked, when she got back? No, she said. Enforced idleness was pointless and depressing, especially when she had to sit still and have a foul-smelling oat face pack applied to her cheeks.
Dr Hallowell would take a dim view of this. He would say that she was an addict facing withdrawal symptoms: that our busyness makes us hamsters on a wheel and when we climb off the wheel we are useless, giddy and hopeless.
Yet there is another, better, explanation. Being crazybusy is still much better than sitting around with porridge on your face. I can think of five reasons for this:
l Being busy means you get things done and this is one of the biggest pleasures in life. The saying "if you want to get something done, give it to a busy person" is quite true.
l Crazybusyness makes you feel important, which is always nice.
l Being crazybusy is exciting. Dashing around doing things raises the heartbeat agreeably. And if, as Dr Hallowell warns, it is a drug - then so what? It doesn't have the side-effects of crack cocaine.
l Being busy encourages the right sort of thought. I have nearly all my flashes of inspiration (such as they are) when I'm doing something else - talking to someone, cycling, putting the clothes into the tumble drier.
l Being very busy discourages the wrong sort of thought. It crowds out thoughts like: what am I doing with my life, what is the point of me as a person and I'm going to die soon. And that is its single greatest blessing.
It is why, now, when I am thinking of all of the things to be done today, I am reminding myself that these thoughts are a security blanket to protect my soul. - ( Financial Times service)
