I’m working on two bathroom renovations at our beach house right now. And when I say “I’m working,” what I mean is that we’ve hired a general contractor and a decorator to do the heavy lifting, and I give a thumbs up or thumbs down when presented with choices. We originally planned to tackle this project next fall. But the contractor called a few weeks ago to say that another client didn’t get their permits together in time for their spring calendar slot. If I could hustle and make selections quickly, he could renovate both bathrooms by Memorial Day.
I immediately agreed. But people think I’m crazy to move this quickly. Yesterday, when I was at a tile store, the salesperson’s eyes widened when I told him what I was looking for. “What’s your deadline?” he asked. “Friday,” I said. (Yesterday was Tuesday.) “This is exactly how I planned our wedding 27 years ago,” I told him. He was speechless. But I was thrilled. I love a tight timeline.
We didn’t plan our wedding in a week. But at a time when most couples took at least 12 months to plan a wedding, our four-month engagement raised a few eyebrows (and probably started a few pregnancy rumors). We got engaged in February and got married in June. We planned a fabulous wedding in four months because we had four months. If we’d had a year, it would have taken a year. But I don’t think it would have been a nicer wedding. Those four months taught me a lesson I’ve lived by ever since: most efforts expand to the amount of time we have for them. (Apparently this is called Parkinson’s Law.)
Back in 1996 when I got married, there was no Pinterest or Etsy or The Knot. Thank God. But there were wedding magazines and I carried around a dogeared paperback called Bridal Bargains that became my wedding planning bible. (Don’t judge the book by its cover. It was an incredibly helpful resource and went through 11 editions before finally going out of print!) Both the book and the magazines were full of checklists — pages and pages of tasks and to-dos important to the impending nuptials. Once we realized that we were going to do this at warp speed, I tore out those checklists and started crossing off things that weren’t going to work with our timeline. No need for a save-the-date card, we’d barely have time for engraved invitations. No need for bridesmaids’ dresses — we’ll skip the wedding party (after all, they don’t actually do anything and never made sense to me anyway). A wedding dress takes six to eight months to order and alter? Fine, I’ll just buy one bridesmaid’s dress in white. That’ll give us more money to put towards an open bar.
At the time, I was a book editor and volunteered on the organizing committee for the Virginia Festival of the Book. I met another volunteer who had recently gotten married and she told me all about her wedding. She even showed me photos (in an actual photo album! Remember, it was 1996). The cake was cool, the menu looked mouth-watering, the invitations were lovely, and her dress fit perfectly. So I hired her caterer and her baker. I ordered my invitations from her stationer. And I hired her tailor to customize the simple white dress I bought. It all came together very quickly.
I find having fewer choices liberating. In fact, the bigger the decision, the fewer choices I want. And I’m not alone. It’s called choice overload or overchoice, and it can lead to analysis paralysis and decision fatigue. (Interestingly, it’s also a distinctly American phenomenon.) We see it in every decision we make, from big things like choosing a mate or college, to much smaller conundrums like deciding which show to stream or coffee to drink. (To understand the phenomenon better, watch psychologist Barry Schwartz’s fascinating TED talk about the paradox of choice here.)
This week, as I choose everything from sink vanities and toilets to tiles and hardware, I welcome the constraints of a tight timeline and a firm budget. When I visit a website, the first thing I do is sort for “in stock/ready to ship” items. I get a perverse thrill out of watching my options dwindle. It provides a certain amount of clarity. And every time I add another filter (finish, size, style), I sharpen the focus.
I don’t mean to romanticize a lack of agency or control. As Schwartz explains, “Autonomy and freedom of choice are critical to our well-being, and choice is critical to freedom and autonomy.” But we have more choices than ever before and we’re not any happier. In fact, research shows that if you have an abundance of options, you typically end up less satisfied with your final decision than if you’d had fewer options to begin with. Ah, the irony.
I can think of two more examples where loving limits has served me well. The first is rather simple and a bit obvious. My wardrobe is mostly black clothing (with some white, gray and denim sprinkled in). I do this for a few reasons. #1. I’m blond and I look good in black. #2. All my separates work well together so I don’t have to spend a lot of time and energy thinking about what to wear. It’s that simple, and it works for me. I haven’t gone full Elizabeth Holmes with a closet full of black turtlenecks, but I understand the appeal.
The second example comes from an epiphany I had when I went back to work full-time about a decade ago. I was struggling to imagine how I could keep doing all the household chores I’d done as a stay-at-home mom on top of 40 hours of paid work. The answer? I couldn’t. My household work had expanded to the time I had to do it (read: all day, every day). In order to accommodate paid work, I’d have to cut back on the free labor I was providing my household. I offloaded some of it to my husband and my kids, but I also just gave up some of it. My domestic duties had expanded because I was available. (This is a slippery slope. To hear more about my thoughts on women being the default everything, read The Sticky Floor.)
Having to be in an office 40 hours was a new limit. Instead of doing laundry many times a week, I did it once a week, on the weekend — and stopped doing the wash for my oldest son and husband. I prepped meals on the weekend or early in the morning and the dog walker would pull the crockpot out of the fridge when she walked our pet mid-day. I cut way back on volunteering at the kids’ schools (which had benefitted from plenty of my free labor), and I got my husband to cover some of the dentist appointments, doctor visits, and kids’ sick days, which I’d handled 100% on my own for more than a decade.
It was at that consulting job that I was introduced to the startup mantra: “Perfection is the enemy of progress.” It’s overused, I admit, but people say it ad nauseam because there’s some truth in it. When flawlessness is the goal, every decision could end with disaster. On the other hand, when progress is the goal, every decision is an opportunity for forward momentum. Every choice is a chance for incremental improvement. And that’s good enough for me. Part of learning to love limits is accepting that there’s no such thing as a perfect bathroom, a perfect wedding, or even a perfect mate. It’s liberating.
So how do you do this in your everyday life? Here are a few tricks that work for me:
Timebox efforts. Not everyone has the resources for a compressed engagement or a speedy renovation, but you can set time limits for other projects. When I write my weekly newsletter for my small consulting business, for instance, I set a timer and force myself to finish it in an hour. (By contrast, writing this newsletter takes about eight hours and I let it because it’s more important to me.) When the kitchen needs tidying up, I give myself 20 minutes to do as much as I can, which means I skip dusting open shelves and wiping down the inside of the fridge, so it’s not perfectly clean, but it is cleaner.
Embrace minimalism. Whether it’s your wardrobe, your meal rotation, or your linen closet, less is almost always more. My friend Kate is so dedicated to this philosophy that she reads Essentialism (a minimalist bible of sorts) every single year.
Audit your life. Yes, Marie Kondo-ing your stuff is helpful. But take a hard look at your calendar, your relationships, and your hobbies and habits, too. You can’t do all the things with all the people.
Rinse and repeat. You can apply this principle to several aspects of your life. Here’s how my friend Vicki does it with family meal planning: Monday is for grilling, Tuesday is Mexican fare, Wednesday is comfort food, Thursday is Italian, and Friday is always pizza night. Kids love this kind of routine and it makes life easier for you.
Do less digitally. Restricting your digital life is another helpful limit. One of my kids recently gave up Instagram and says he’s so much happier. Using the “focus” feature on your iPhone imposes limits on your attention so you can give your attention to what matters. You can also create dedicated calendar blocks to remind you to respond to email or check Twitter once a day for a limited amount of time. If you lack willpower, consider using a tool like OneSec, which forces you to do a quick breathing exercise before opening a social media app on your phone. It helped me a lot.
Build professional nboundaries. Every job is different, but there are probably ways you can prevent your work from dominating your life. These kinds of limits are especially important if you work from home. Set clear expectations about your working hours by updating your Slack status or adding a line to your email signature. Stop working on weekends (read “How My Wife and I Took Back Our Sundays” for inspiration). Use all of your PTO.
Be a satisficer, not a maximizer. This one is especially helpful for those of us who shop online. The word satisficer is a portmanteau of “satisfy” and “suffice.” Satisficers make the best decision as quickly as possible. Maximizers painstakingly consider every option. Here’s the kicker: Satisficers are happier. So, do a little research and read a few reviews, but don’t go overboard. And don’t compare your choices to the choices other people make.
Stop second-guessing decisions you’ve already made. This is a tough one, and I’m including it here as a reminder to myself. It applies to everything from shower tile and vacation destinations to career choices and baby names. We make the best choices we can with the information we have at the time. Period.
Also on my mind
This essay about Ann Patchett culling her possessions made me think about this amazing thing my friend Katherine did with her maternal grandmother’s jewelry. Katherine painted an old bulletin board the same color as the wall where she wanted to hang it. Then she used industrial staples to pin down the jewelry in the shape of a heart. “It’s not in a frame or behind glass,” explains Katherine. “So I can touch the jewelry and feel more connected to my grandmother.”
This week’s kerfuffle over Michelangelo’s David being shown to a sixth-grade art class reminds us once again that the writers of the Simpson’s were really good at predicting the future.
I have very mixed feelings about pets. They add so much joy to our lives, but they’re also so much work. This story about Bunky the frog reminded me why we open our homes — and our hearts — to so many creatures.
The women in your life deserve better Mother’s Day cards. Gus & Ruby, a New England-based design and print studio, delivers. Here’s the card to give your mom if you were a difficult teen, a card for two-mom households, and then there’s this one for the friend who is missing her mom.
That’s one way to get a ticket to the Eras tour.
Three years after the pandemic, saying women have the “left the workforce in droves” is like saying “everyone has left New York.” As Jessica Grose pointed out by sharing this fact sheet, the numbers say otherwise.
In case this wasn’t on your social media feeds this week, I give you “What to Write After Another School Shooting” by the brilliant Kate Baer.
I found both the Ezra Klein podcast episode about how men and boys are struggling and Ann Helen Petersen’s essay in reaction to it fascinating. Klein’s conversation with Richard Reeves, author of Of Boys and Men lasts for 1 hour and 58 minutes and covers everything from the academic achievement gap between boys and girls in elementary school to “deaths of despair” (deaths from overdose and suicide, 75% of which are men), so there’s a lot for Petersen to react to. To quote a bit from her:
So what’s going on here? Reeves calls it passivity, or drift in ambition, and I think that’s right. But I also wonder: what if men — and more specifically, white men who aren’t first- or second-generation immigrants — have always been this passive when it comes to their future? What if they’ve never really had to cultivate “ambition,” at least not in the way we think of it now, because a modicum of success was, by some measure, their birthright? What if the “decline” of men’s ambition is just less unquestioned access to power and privilege?
The 2023 list of James Beard Restaurant Awards finalists. Good luck getting a reservation.
This is why I love Aldi!