My husband, Ed, has a Type A personality. He is not a procrastinator; he is a planner. He is not a fly by the seat of his pants kind of guy and he is not the guy that’s going to tell you that he hasn’t considered the inevitable, the probable or the fantastical, because he’s considered it all. His To Do List is created each night before he goes to bed and edited and rearranged each morning that he sits down at his desk or outside by the fire pit with his coffee to start his day. He is currently running his second automotive dealer development company, maintains all of the exterior maintenance of our home, cooks gourmet meals several times a month for our family, including the shopping for the ingredients, and he takes his responsibility for planning date night two times a month seriously. He is present and available for all four of his children when they need him. He recently started a new business venture in real estate and can now add “Landlord” to his many titles and accomplishments. Ed gets shit done.
My friend Michele also has a Type A personality. She
has at least three full time jobs at any given time, devoting her attention to
school systems in need, covering ground from Sturbridge to the Bronx and back,
and then out to Great Barrington and back again. She somehow manages to also
get her youngest son to hockey practice and games in Connecticut, a “short” forty-minute
drive to UCONN, and until just this past August was driving her middle son to
and from work at two different jobs, as well as his sports commitments. None of
those responsibilities includes the time she spends parenting a new college
student away down south and being a wife and companion to her husband and many
friend groups. Michele gets shit done.
I have two part-time jobs. One of those jobs is
seasonal and I am only “on the payroll” from May to October each year. I
usually work one day per weekend, from six to nine hours per shift. My other job
has me glued to my desk, work laptop and large monitor two to four days per
week, usually for two to three hours each day. Sometimes it’s more. Sometimes
it’s a lot less. Scattered around these responsibilities I clean my house, shop
online for my groceries from Shaw’s and household necessities from Walmart. I
paid for the yearly “Shaw’s for You” program, so I get my groceries delivered
on many days. The other days I am pulling up to the “Drive Up and Go” spaces and
someone else is putting my preordered groceries into the back of my car. Pick
up at Walmart is the same, with me simply punching in my space number and the
color of my vehicle before someone brings my items out to me in a tiny blue
open hand-truck type of cart. This is my idea of getting shit done.
During the pandemic I reconnected with a cousin that I
hadn’t been in contact with since I was in my early twenties. As we developed a
relationship through Instagram, we shared many things about ourselves that we
hadn’t known from living on opposite sides of the country and only getting together
during mini family reunions fashioned as a result of another cousin getting
married. We shared our mutual joy over finally getting over the personal stigma
of listening to books on audio. As an avid reader my whole life, and a “struggling”
author in the making, I resisted switching over to audio and listening to
books. It felt like cheating. It didn’t seem fair to call it “reading.” And I
worried most that it meant that I was lazy.
But the first time I finished an audio book and
realized that it allowed me to finally take in a story that had been a daunting
task in print, I was sold on the benefits of audio books. Add in that I listened
to this book while cleaning the kitchen after dinner, doing the dishes, folding
many loads of laundry, and vacuuming, there was really no reason not to
love audio books! I was still getting shit done and I was “reading”?! It
really was a win-win-win-win-win all around.
So, when my cousin asked me if I thought it was
cheating further, or some kind of ridiculous execution by Type A’s to be more Type
A by listening to podcasts and books on anything greater than 1.0, I had to
take pause and really consider the “why.”
Michele listens to audio books on 2.0 and I have
always laughed at her and figured it was just her Type A in overdrive and that
she was trying to prove something to herself, or to book club. I wasn’t sure
which demographic was her intended audience.
When I am not sure what I should be thinking about a
particular subject, I do what most people do:
I Google it. (When in doubt, Google. When you’ve considered both sides
of an issue and still don’t know what side to stand on? Google.)
And what I discovered was a video that questioned the very
benefits, stereotypes and judgments that were boggled up in my mind about listening
to books and podcasts at any speed faster than 1.0.
What I remembered is that I love to read. What
I acknowledged is that I often fall asleep while reading. What I connected to was
that I have always been a fast talker. (When I was a kid, my grandfather lovingly
called me “Shotgun” and would instruct me to slow down so he could take in my
story better.) What I realized is that we all want to get shit done. What
resonated is that most of us feel short on time to get any of it done, let
alone all of it. Even the leisurely stuff; the fun stuff; the relaxing, recharging
rejuvenating stuff – it all takes time and usually gets shoved to the bottom of
the To Do List and finally off the list altogether, being replaced by things we
prioritize at the moment.
I believe that most of us know instinctively that the little
things in life, the small pleasures, are what we hold most dear and what really
should stay at the top of the To Do List. Perhaps they are most treasured
because they are the relished joys that are dismissed because we view jobs,
money, status and outward success as the ultimate reward. At the end of our
days, most of us will admit that our interpersonal relationships and the acts
outside of work and what we do for the world held more importance and should have
had more of our time. Yet we still prioritize the extrinsic acknowledgments and
achievements over our personal successes and internal acceptance.
I am not a Type A personality. I have dreams and goals
and I am also a true procrastinator. I am the dog distracted by the squirrel. I
reorganize a drawer in my kitchen while putting away a pen and lose an hour on
a day that I swore I had no wiggle room to mess with. My To Do List never gets shorter.
It gets longer as I cross one thing off and add three more that popped up while
I was chastising myself about deviating from the list when I rearranged the
drawer. I get shit done. It’s just not always the shit that I thought I was
going to get done.
So, I currently listen to my stories on Audible at
1.5. I toggle back and forth on my podcasts from 1.5 to 1.75. It took me much
longer to elevate the podcast listening speed that high, than it did for the
reading speed. I am not sure why it was harder to listen to conversational talk
at a faster pace than to listen to a story told at a faster pace, but I
challenged myself until I could listen to both at an enjoyable 1.5. It feels painfully
slow and sounds weird when I roll the speed down to 1.0 when there is the
occasional statement that doesn’t make sense and I have to listen to it slower
to understand it. It does amaze me that the faster speed has become a normal
sound for me, and not an insane hyped-up, cocaine-addicted voice yelling in my
ear.
I listen at 1.5 because it lets me take in more of
what I love and what helps me get through the day. I listen at 1.5 because
there are so many stories in the world, and I want to enjoy as many of them as
possible. I listen at 1.5 because when I find a podcast I really enjoy I want
to take it in and keep it with me. “Dear Sugars” and “We Can Do Hard Things”
have gotten me through the housework week after week, walking the dog in the
rain, pulling weeds, shoveling snow and making spaghetti. (I can’t listen to a
story or a podcast while I follow a recipe because that requires too many brain
cells to pay attention to very different things, but I can multi-task during a
rote activity like boiling pasta and making a meat sauce.) I listen at 1.5
because I want to pack as much of what I like doing into my day as I can, and
on some days, the only thing that makes it onto the joy list is listening while
I get a chore done.
Listening at 1.5 is my way of having a Type A personality.