Tag Archives: routines

Will in About a Boy with his “units of time” and all of our lives lived in 15-minute increments

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In the movie version of About a Boy, the adult character Will describes his life as lived in “units of time”:

Photo by Jordan Benton on Pexels.com

The important thing in island living is to be your own activities director.
I find the key is to think of a day as units of time, each unit consisting of no more than 30 minutes.
Full hours can be a little bit intimidating and most activities take about half an hour.
Taking a bath: One unit.
Watching Countdown:
Okay.
One unit.
Web-based research:
Two units.
Exercising: Three units.
Having my hair carefully disheveled: Four units.
It’s amazing how the day fills up.

In the movie, this looks somewhat depressing. Perhaps it is a coping mechanism. Will claims he is fine living alone but the story involves him finding value in relationships with several people who would not expect to have relationships with.

But what if all of us live in small increments of time that add up to weeks, months, years, decades. From the end of a recent article on declining social engagement in American life:

When Epley and his lab asked Chicagoans to overcome their preference for solitude and talk with strangers on a train, the experiment probably didn’t change anyone’s life. All it did was marginally improve the experience of one 15-minute block of time. But life is just a long set of 15-minute blocks, one after another. The way we spend our minutes is the way we spend our decades. “No amount of research that I’ve done has changed my life more than this,” Epley told me. “It’s not that I’m never lonely. It’s that my moment-to-moment experience of life is better, because I’ve learned to take the dead space of life and make friends in it.”

What if life is a series of 15-minute blocks where our choices with those blocks can add up to profoundly different outcomes? In the example above, start socializing each day in one 15-minute increment and see what it can lead to. This is the narrative in numerous self-improvement and habit books: build small new routines and change your life.

Keeping track of every 15 minutes in life would be laborious and could turn someone into a clock watcher rather than an active participant in life. Yet, time use does indeed add up and broad changes in time use – such as watching more television – can have big impacts.

Adapting “What Do People Do All Day?” for COVID-19

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Spotted on Facebook the other day: an alternative version of Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All D Richard Scaarry’s What Do People Do All Day?

It is relatively easy to focus on the big-picture issues with COVID-19 without thinking too much about how so many daily routines have changed. Kids tend to like routine and children’s books help explain what kids and everyone else do.

Additionally, Richard Scarry’s original connected daily activities to a number of larger schemes including how people make money, various modes of travel, the construction of roads and houses, and the production of food, water, energy, and wood.

Maybe this is part of why I am a sociologist: these quotidian activities all add to something as well as reflect larger social forces at work. If culture is “patterns of meaning-making” as sociologists of culture argue, then even the mundane things are worth something. When these daily patterns change, they might signal something momentous, whether it is through personal maturation or changed life circumstances or global pandemics. Similarly, a big question coming out of COVID-19 is how much the disruptions from several months of shelter-in-place stick with people. For example, will people want to commute as much? Return to an office for work? Consume as much? And children who have new routines may carry these changes through many years and subsequent experiences.

The value of stretching for athletes

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Henry Abbott at Truehoop looks at some recent research regarding stretching which suggests stretching before athletic events is not that helpful.

The question arises: why then do athletes go through a stretching routine before a game? I’ll throw out a possible answer: stretching is part of a routine that is psychologically helpful in preparing for a game. Even if stretching beforehand has limited value, as long as it is not harmful, it could help athletes feel like they are doing something worthwhile. Perhaps it helps improve their mental focus. For many, I assume it is part of an established routine that they were socialized into either at a younger age or by an expert. Since they have been doing it in the past, going through the motions helps them prepare.

Where this research could be used is with younger athletes. It is hard to break people out of established patterns but teenagers and kids could chart a new path that includes little or no pregame stretching and more postgame stretching. These younger athletes could then establish new kinds of routines that will be with them throughout their athletic careers.