The Extra Hour

You don't have to use it wisely

Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash

Hello Team CCC! Happy Monday! I’m writing this on Sunday night, feeling slightly unmoored by the UK time change - is it bedtime yet?! I would like to gently and sleepily remind you that I’m interviewing Lil Anolik about her new book DIDION & BABITZ - (I know a lot of us are keen on this one!) It’s for the School Of Life, it’s all online and you can get tickets here. This week’s You’re Booked podcast guest is the wise and warm Liane Moriarty, and you can listen here. It’s a total heart-filler of an episode.

And my new book READ YOURSELF HAPPY is available for global preorder here. Thank you so much to everyone who has been in touch to tell me they’ve preordered, it’s the very best way to support an author (and the very best way to show some love to Future You!)

This week, I’ve been thinking about time, our complicated relationship with productivity and what we should ‘do’, if anything, with this ‘extra hour’…

I often think of Will, the protagonist from About A Boy by Nick Hornby, and his complicated relationship with scheduling. Will doesn’t have a job – he doesn’t need one, because he has inherited the royalties of the Christmas song his father wrote. (Of course the inheritance is not without its complications – it turns out that living off Christmas does not make you exponentially jollier.) But Will is haunted by a vague sense of unease. He'd like to get a job, or volunteer, or do something more substantial with his days. But his hour-long units are all too readily accounted for by Neighbours, and Countdown, and afternoon baths.

Like Will, I’m haunted by an uncomfortable sensation that I really could – and should – be doing more. Unlike Will, I need to earn a living. The heaven and hell of doing what I do – writing novels, mostly – is that there are very few fixed parameters in one’s working day. Before the pandemic, if I was talking to people I didn’t know about being self-employed and working from home, they’d gasp and say ‘But how do you get any work done? What stops you from sitting around in your pyjamas eating biscuits and watching Homes Under The Hammer all day long?’ And I’d say ‘Well, I’m not a big property person, my drug of choice is Ina Garten or Ree Drummond on the Food Network – and Say Yes To The Dress is hardly ever on Quest any more, that helps a lot…I mean, I am extremely self-disciplined and I never watch TV in the day, I just have BBC Radio Three on quietly, in the background.’

I was thinking about work, procrastination and productivity anxiety because here in the UK, we’ve just had our Extra Hour. The clocks changed at 2AM this morning. (I think that means 2AM became 1AM, and I’d like to suggest that we start calling it the Spice Girls hour, which would prevent confusion among the people who argue ‘It must be fall forward. Because when you fall, you go forward.’) But is it an Extra Hour in bed, or an Extra Hour of writing? Or doing something wholesome and virtuous, like reading, or walking, or running? Maybe an Extra Hour in bed that has been earned after an especially arduous week of work?

Obviously, I can’t talk about productivity culture and our relationship to work without acknowledging that there is a sizeable gulf between someone who is juggling, say, childcare and hospital shifts, and me, swaddled in blankets on my sofa, trying to write lines for people who only exist in my imagination. But we’re all exposed to similar stimulus, when it comes to work and productivity culture.