You may be to busy to read this (Part 1)

I always feel like I'm too busy. And I am busy, but what's weird is I feel that way even when I'm not doing anything. I guess it's because no matter what I'm doing (or not doing) there's always something else I could (or should) be doing at the same time.

For example, I'm now sitting and thinking about whether I should be doing something rather than actually doing it. In fact I'm writing about thinking about what I should be doing. And thinking about writing about thinking about what I should be doing and then writing about it. Wait a second. Now not only am I not doing anything but my head is starting to hurt.

Logical traps aside, I do wonder (1) why people fill up their to do lists with more than they can possibly do, and (2) was it always like that?

Number 1 is the bigger question, and I'm not even ready to think about starting to think about it, if you know what I mean, so let's start with number 2. I've read things like Little House on the Prairie and Pride and Prejudice and it appears to me that those people spend a lot of time doing virtually nothing. But is that how they felt? Were they calm, or did poor beautiful and perfect but blind Mary and that feisty Elizabeth Bennet feel like their days were too full to keep up? It seemed to me that things were slower when I was younger. There were fewer interruption because phone calls only happened at home and in offices and they were expensive (everything in the house would screech to a halt if someone called "long distance") and there was no other way to communicate except by mail or face-to-face. Most of the modern life accelerators were invented or introduced during my lifetime- FedEx (1971), fax machines (around 1975- here's a photo of 3 of them- the white thing is a rotating cylinder on which you placed a sheet of paper. It also had a phone receiver that you put in an acoustical modem to send the signal. It took a mere 6 minutes per page), e-mail (early 1970s), personal computers (early 1980s) and cell phones (late 1980's).

There were certainly fewer things to do. I lived in New York where there were 7 TV channels, the most anywhere. Lots of people had no TV at all. So I guess we did whatever we were doing for longer periods of time [let me interject my mother's favorite 'little Frank' stories. I was allowed to watch 30 minutes of TV on school nights, so I told my mom I wanted to watch 8 minutes of one program, 5 minutes of another, 4 minutes of another and so forth. She said no. I guess I was always a multitasker.] It definitely took a lot longer to prepare dinner before frozen food and microwave ovens. I know I always felt too busy to clean my room, but beyond that I don't remember.

Enough ancient history, but it seems hard to argue that all of the present day's communication immediacy doesn't make things, well, at least seem more immediate. Whether the immediacy is actually necessary or whether things are actually more urgent than they used to be is a bigger question that I will look at in part 2 of this post.