Every year I am overwhelmed by emails to read and shows to watch. This year will be different
Earlier this week, Americans celebrated the holiday of Thanksgiving. Originally created by Abraham Lincoln, the idea behind the holiday is to take a day – the last Thursday in the month of November – and gather with friends and family around a table groaning with food to offer thanks for blessings and the sacrifice of previous generations. It’s part bank holiday, part family tradition and part patriotic celebration.
And yet, as these things often go, it’s also a time to eat to excess, bicker with relatives and laze around the house, usually in proximity to a glowing television. In other words, it’s the perfect American holiday.
Recently, though, a friend of mine told me what her holiday plans were. “I need to catch up on stuff,” she said to me. “I’m way behind on some important things.”
For a moment, I thought she was talking about work-related tasks. (She’s a lawyer; they get paid by the hour so they tend to work a lot of hours.) But then she elaborated: “I’m way behind on my Game of Thrones episodes, and I’m still trying to finish the third series of The Walking Dead. I have a year’s worth of Downton Abbey episodes to catch up on, and I plan to skim the first year of Stranger Things on Netflix so I can be ready for the next episodes when they premiere.”
All in, she figured she was looking at about 90 to 100 hours of television watching – what she referred to as “television obligations” – which meant that the TV would be on from the beginning of the holiday, Thursday morning, until the wee hours of tomorrow night.
“That’s just the kind of person I am,” she said. “I need to complete things. Once I start a show, I’m in for the duration. It’s not like I enjoy watching them, but not watching them is too stressful to think about.”
Television shows, like emails and texts and letters from elderly relatives, are now showing up on our lists of “Things to Do”. Many of us have digital video recorders chock-full of recorded television shows – whole years’ worth of episodes and series – that nag us each day. “When are you going to watch me?” they seem to ask as you scroll through the lists of ready-to-watch episodes.
The answer, for most of us, is never. Some, like my friend, will feel the crushing sense of obligation for every unwatched item on the scrolling list. They will feel emotionally attached to each series. I know some people – we all know a few like this – who can’t bring themselves to just erase an unwatched show, as if it’s a sign of weakness or failure to “quit” a show mid-series. There are even people who will spend their entire Thanksgiving holiday trying to “catch up” on their DVRs.
I’m not immune to that feeling. I am an indiscriminate recorder of television shows and a DVR hoarder of old movies. I will also buy pretty much any book out there as long as it’s available in an electronic version. If I hear a song I like, I’ll instantly click on Apple Music or Spotify and download the artist’s entire songbook. I clip articles from the web and tell myself I’ll read them “later, when I have a moment”, vaguely aware that I will never have a moment, and even if I do I will have long forgotten why I saved the article or what it was supposed to mean to me. What this all means is that my phone, DVR, hard drive and electronic reader are always packed with data files, always slowed and sluggish by the sheer amount that’s loaded onto them. It also means that when I do have that moment – which is rare – I’m paralysed by the sheer volume of available choices.
A business acquaintance of mine has a solution to all of this. Each year around this time he clicks through his email inbox, which is always packed with unread emails and unanswered queries. He’s a high-profile figure in a glamorous industry, so he receives – no joke – dozens and dozens of emails a day, and they stack up like firewood week in and week out, until his inbox is overfull and the little red badge on the email app on his iPhone, the one that announces how many unread emails are awaiting attention, shows “11k”.
He surveys this inventory and feels the stress building up – the tightness in his chest when he realises that there’s no way ever to catch up, that there are more emails to answer than he has days left on Earth. And when his breath is getting shorter and the tension in his jaw is almost unbearable, he solves the problem.
He erases all of his emails. Just like that. He declares what he calls “email bankruptcy” and wipes away a year’s worth of unanswered obligations, of nagging messages, of things he hasn’t handled – and isn’t ever going to. His jaw unclenches, his breath returns to normal and he relaxes in the glow of just giving up. What’s worse, he tells me, is that he knows that none of the erased messages were urgent. None were necessary. He has done this for years and has yet to regret it.
This year, I told myself, I’m going to do the same thing, but I’m going one step further. I’m going to zero out my DVR, erase my Kindle, remove all of the music from my phone and clear away my email inbox. I’m declaring multi-device bankruptcy, and I urge you to do the same. By the time you read this, the Thanksgiving holiday will have been restored to its original purpose: fighting with relatives, eating and napping.
Rob Long is a writer and producer in Los Angeles
On Twitter: @rcbl