The idea of the modern-day parlance "Rabbit Hole" comes from Alice in Wonderland, penned by Lewis Carroll in 1865. Curiosity gets the better of Alice when she follows a rabbit with a no-nonsense, Type A personality, clad in tweed I believe, who is "late for a very important date." Down the rabbit hole they both go and into a world foreign from Alice's own. With the world wide web's intertextuality, it is very common to find yourself down a rabbit hole by clicking on a link that takes you to a different subject and often to a different medium or sub-medium. You start off, for instance, with high-hopes reading a New Yorker article and then find yourself on YouTube watching a documentary of elephant sanctuaries in Thailand. And that is only one stop on the journey, point A to point B. Often times 90 minutes goes by and you are somewhere completely unrecognizable and you can't remember your original intention nor starting point. This phenomenon was captured brilliantly by Abbi and Ilana on Comedy Central's Broad City.
Then there are some internet users who eschew curiosity and intertextuality and surfing and just return to their warm and familiar sources: playing Angry Birds, checking out Reddit, getting stuck in Facebook or caught up in less savory pastimes: getting in too deep with on-line gambling, obsessively watching on-line porn. For most of these Rabbit Holes, the impetus is not so much curiosity but routine/addiction/oblivion. Drinking from the River Lethe where all is forgotten.
"Alice in Wonderland". Illustration from the cover and interior of the book Boys and Girls of Bookland from 1923, written by Nora Archibald Smith and illustrated by Jessie Willcox Smith. Public Domain
With so much more free time on most of our hands (and I'm speaking mainly to my retiree and child-free friends and readers), the day is pocketed with Rabbit Holes. Forget the helpless and hapless Alice for a second. I think, if you are anything like me, you once relished playing the role of the Rabbit whose goal was singular and his hop swift. It's not that I have nostalgia for being late to meetings but I do ache for the urgency of having someplace to go and something to do. [I am also missing and looking forward to the cooler weather in England so I too can sport some tweed.]
Of course, the Rabbit Holes I am referring to above all have an electronic composition to them (my hat is off to anyone whose idea of curiosity and Rabbit Hole is to pick up a new sport everyday). No, it's unanimous. We are creatures of the new electronic age.
For the sake of my argument, it's important that we distinguish between two types of Rabbit Holes. The first is the unforeseen or "Inadvertent Rabbit Hole" which we seem to fall into again and again unwittingly. The second and more empowering is the "Scheduled Rabbit Hole."
On LinkedIn, I had the privilege of taking a class called "Making a Better To-Do List." The supremacy of the "to-do list" is quite an Anglo-American way of tackling the day via goals and willpower but for me (like many of you), it is anchor to progress and productivity and frankly it just makes you feel good as you check off each task accomplished. I'm happy to share my pdf notes/summary from my "to-do list" class for anyone who requests it. Even in trying and chaotic times like these where we are stressed out on all levels yet we also face insufferable stretches of down time, a "to-do list" acts as a grocery list for structure, sanity, and satisfaction. It also acts as a recipe to ward off mental angst. But not everything in the "to-do list" is explicit; there should be a scaffolding around the to-do list in order to evade those "Inadvertent Rabbit Holes."
There was a book popular during that wave of pop science guides in the last decade. When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (2018), by author Daniel Pink, delves into the underemphasized importance of the correct timing for things, in our day and in our lives. For instance, I know that if I hop online first thing in the morning, my mood will be angsty and my day disordered. And because mornings are when I am strongest, I focus on my daily dissertation goals by reading just three printed academic articles or book chapters over coffee, roughly from 8 a.m. until noon. The fact that I print them out makes me self-confident of recognizing my scholarly needs even though it saddens me that trees are hurt in the process. 😓 Still I've succeeded in half the battle: knowing a few of my strengths and weaknesses. For strengthening actions, the first is making a reasonable to-do list the night before. The second is using the productivity of the mornings (my strong time) to tackle tasks of high-importance. And lastly I do this by eschewing all things electronic in the morning. That means not turning anything on until 12 noon, the hour when Mauricio and I have lunch together and listen to music or a political podcast via Spotify on my phone.
The whole idea of appropriate timing not only has salience at the personal level but also at the societal and institutional level. Do you know researchers have found that teenagers need much more sleep than they are receiving? Researchers urge schools to start a whole hour later because of this. I remember teachers at Milton High getting upset with all of us for barely keeping our eyes open for the first third of the day; hell, I remember being half-dead in the first few periods. It wasn't our fault, just a clash of biological clocks. It's not because we didn't want to learn or were trying to get on their nerves. We were just responding to physiological needs.
Night Owl Collective / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Night_Owl_Logo.jpg
Schools and workplaces may feel out of our control but with personal goal-setting the first part of the battle is knowing yourself. Are you part of the 20% of the world's population considered night owls? You likely already know that you work best and play best at night. This article from Buzzfeed supports the idea of night owls reigning supreme during this time of pandemic, overthrowing those cheery morning doves. Research also shows that most people who work a typical 9 to 5 shift at the office have a two hour slump (sometimes called a lunch coma) where their mind slips into a mini-siesta. This roughly 2 to 4 p.m. window might be a good time for you to do something rote or physical like washing dishes, folding laundry, collating documents or organizing bookshelves.
And if you are all too cognizant of your on-line vice or rabbit hole, then try to schedule it in or leave it for the end of the day. Timers help. There are also a number of productivity apps available to help you stay on track. And if you are the type who would like to avoid all of your Rabbit Holes altogether, try something different or radical. Take a walk or a jog or sit somewhere under a tree and close your eyes and try listening to what your neighborhood birds are gossiping about. One important point from my LinkedIn "to-do list" training is to start off each to-do item with a verb. Verbs have forward motion over rooted nouns. So: Do Something. Walk leisurely. Close your eyes. Breathe deeply.
