In my lifelong pursuit to be less boring, I have tried all kinds of tactics: watch more Oscar-nominated movies, make a website, use my phone less, use my phone more, take more photos. One such tactic has been remarkably effective so far: Be generous with my time.
“I mean, look at my calendar!”
This all started when I made the personal vow to never talk about my calendar. To anyone. Ever. Nothing is more boring to others than amount of things on my schedule this week. Don’t talk about my workload, don’t show people my (quite impressive) color-coded calendar on my MacBook, and don’t, for the love of God, recite my to-do list verbally. Boring people do these things, I hypothesized. Talking about my busy schedule is satisfying in the moment, and perhaps makes me sound important. But more likely makes me sound like an asshole, and certainly makes me boring to talk to.
This experiment went swimmingly. For months, I never discussed the precise number of errands I needed to run, and frankly, not a soul asked. That’s something interesting I learned: People don’t tend to ask about things when there’s a 100% chance of a boring response. For example, nobody ever asks “What kind of contact lens solution do you use?” because they don’t expect a riveting answer. For the same reason, you will never hear someone conversationally asking “Can you list all the meetings on your schedule in the next 8 hours?”.
“Sure, maybe, that sounds fun…”
A few months into my successful ban on calendar-talk, I decided to take this experiment a step further: never give the allusion that I am busy. My busy-ness, I once wrote in my $20 Moleskine notebook, is not anyone’s concern except mine. This was based on my hypothesis that appearing busy is a hidden form of being boring. I reasoned that if people think I’m too busy, then they are less likely to invite me to go to the movies, leading me to watch fewer movies, preventing me from sharing experiences with other humans, who in return will have less to talk to me about. Thus I will be considered more boring. And I desperately don’t want that.
Although having more work than time is inevitable, showing the world just how busy I am is optional. Just be generous with my time. Throw time at people liberally, even when I don’t want to. Stay a few minutes late at work. Chat with friends after class. Volunteer. Send emails. Care about people’s problems, even if I have to pretend.
The issue is that, I’ll admit, I am really busy, so it’s really easy to appear busy, even ignoring the obvious things like saying “I’m so busy”, or looking at my watch mid-conversation. Here’s a list of a few things off the top of my head:
- Being late to things
- Not responding to messages (I’m particularly guilty of his one)
- Receiving an invitation and saying “sure maybe”, clearly with no intention of ever going
- Not being prepared
- Cancelling on plans at the last minute
Being generous with my time has led me to spend two hours fixing my boss’s iPhone. I volunteered to teach music to the cast of the musical I’m in because that’s what a generous person would do. Sure, I’ll help someone debug Swift code after a computer science club meeting! Wanna get coffee? I’d love to. Interestingly, all of these things are relatively boring in the moment, and generally I’d rather be doing other things. But throwing out a few minutes here and there makes me seem approachable, kind, and spontaneous over time. Over time. This is a long term plan. But I’m already beginning to see the positive effects.
Conclusion
When I feel strongly about things, I tend to get a little too pushy (that’s a negative trait I may discuss another day). A few weeks ago, I was trying to schedule a time to meet up with a friend. She hesitated and said she wouldn’t be available all week. Because I had been mulling over the idea of generosity, I pushed her on this. “Really, not even an hour? You got the time, live a little,” I said rudely. I pushed her until she blurted, “Jeez Andrew, some people are just more busy than you!”.
I apologized, but because I’m a jerk I was thrilled. I had fooled her. My experiment is working.
We live in a world where people say dumb things like “time is money”. But that’s not true. My time is the cheapest thing I have. Why not throw it out liberally? I’m not losing anything, certainly not money. The danger is worsened time management and heightened stress, but honestly, I’ll stress and procrastinate regardless. Might as well be generous along the way.
