Our proper function is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
Jack London
Good Morning,
I trust everyone had a wonderful weekend!
It’s fitting that I share that our family dog Layla Holiday passed away just before Christmas. She was a beautiful 13-year-old English golden retriever that was certainly a part of the fabric of our family and was a fixture by my side, always. It’s interesting, how sometimes it takes a life alteration to prompt reflection on topics such as the shortness of life, the challenges of change, and to think about where we are spending our time. I have started to write some reflections around Lessons from Layla that I’ll be sharing with my kids when they are older, but one of the lessons I think worth a timely share this morning is the problem with our culture of busyness.
We’re all on a stairway to heaven, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still “change the road you’re on.”
Stairway to Heaven, Led Zeppelin
Once upon a time, leisure was a sign of prestige. Today that idea has been turned on its head, and busyness is the new status symbol. Busy people are considered important and impressive, and employees are rewarded for showing how “hard” they’re working. I know I’m certainly guilty of being busy and as much as we think we have no time in our days, I do understand that this thinking is misguided.
In an article of Harvard Business Review, a story is titled, “Beware a Culture of Busyness,”, Kellogg professor Adam Waytz tackles this pervasive problem, starting with an exploration of why a jam-packed calendar has become a status symbol. “Busyness is not a virtue, and it is long past time that organizations stopped lionizing it,” he writes. Adam Waytz is a psychologist and the author of The Power of Human: How Our Shared Humanity Can Help Us Create a Better World. In his 2019 book, Adam recounts an anecdote about a man who immigrated to the United States and soon came to believe that the word “busy” meant “good” because when he asked people, “How are you doing?” they often responded, “Busy.” Nora Rosendahl, the chief operating officer of the performance coaching firm Hintsa, discovered the same thing when she conducted a small social experiment by documenting answers to the question “How are you?” over the course of a week. By her count, nearly eight out of 10 people said, “Busy.”
The reasons for the rise in “time poverty” (as social scientists have termed it) are numerous and nuanced, but simply put, busyness has indeed become a status symbol.
Research led by the Columbia marketing professor Silvia Bellezza shows that people perceive others who are busy….and who use products indicating they’re busy (like a Bluetooth headset for multitasking)….to be important and impressive. In addition, newly published studies led by the psychologist Jared Celniker have found that across the United States, France, and South Korea, people consider those who exert high effort to be “morally admirable,” regardless of their output.
As the sociologist Jonathan Gershuny notes, “Work, not leisure, is now the signifier of dominant social status.” Or as Gordon Gekko puts it more prosaically in the movie Wall Street, “Lunch is for wimps.”
As you head in to your busy week, I wanted to share 3 thoughts on how to reverse our busyness mindset
1) Train your mind to say no.
According to research by Morten Hansen, a professor at UC Berkeley and the author of Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More, learning to say no to more allows us to minimize our obligations and attain greater focus. Those of us with difficulty in saying no are more likely to experience stress, burnout, and even depression. Steve Jobs was a big proponent of this strategy. At the 1997 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Jobs dropped this timeless piece of wisdom about what true focus entails: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done.” We typically think taking on more projects or working more hours will lead to more productivity. Wrong. According to Hansen, "As you approach the 50 to 65 hour mark, the benefits of those additional hours start to drop, and once you're logging in 65 hours or more, your overall performance declines." Hansen says that if you're juggling too many tasks and you're using the multitasking method, it will actually put your performance and ultimately your job at risk. "Excellent work requires focus, and focus requires few," says Hansen.
2) Switch off the hustle mentality.
In a time when being busy is seen as productive and entrepreneurs everywhere model their work habits after the Silicon Valley hustle culture, it can be difficult to pull away and take a break. Now more than ever, people are experiencing real burnout due to overwork. Tesla CEO Elon Musk is famous for sleeping on the factory floor during "production hell" and considers working 80 to 90 hour weeks to be normal. Uh, no, Elon, that's not normal; it's completely nuts. What's normal is having a holistic lifestyle by putting limits on the number of hours you work so you can be a productive human being--in all facets of your life, including work. Productive working professionals set clear boundaries on which work priorities to focus on during a reasonable eight to 10 hour workday. Then, they work smart and efficiently to make sure it happens.
3) Build slack into your system.
Beyond the psychological factors, the major causes of busyness are constraints on time and resources. As the serial entrepreneur Seth Godin puts it, “Systems with slack are more resilient.” What does slack look like? Remembering your finite resources, your time, your energy and your capital. You need to focus on your resources and self-care. Being mindful of your health and well-being is crucial to counter hustle culture and minimize burnout. Your health comes first. Take short breaks throughout the day, exercise, eat well, have more walking meetings outdoors, take a day off to recharge, and definitely, without question, sleep more hours. Remember, self-care won't happen unless you intentionally make time for it.
“Never mistake activity for achievement.”
UCLA basketball coach John Wooden
And now, to the Markets
Volatility has resurfaced over the past month. It’s been most evident in the bond market, with yields having moved meaningfully higher (and prices lower), reaching levels seen in November of last year. The move on the equity side has been less pronounced, but the weakness still noticeable of late. The culprit? Renewed uncertainty and debate over interest rates.
Global economic data through the first few months of the year has been reasonably strong, defying many expectations for a softening in activity. In normal times, this kind of a backdrop would be cheered by most investors. But, recent developments have fueled concern that inflation, while trending lower, may remain stubbornly elevated and force central banks to raise rates further in order to cool demand.
Meanwhile, policy makers have started to offer some conflicting signals. The Bank of Canada indicated it was likely to soon pause with its rate tightening, and wait to assess how the economy was faring. More recently, the U.S. Federal Reserve suggested it wasn’t quite ready to take such a break. Instead, it telegraphed the need to continue to raise rates to get inflation convincingly under control. The bottom-line: investors are reassessing rate expectations, which has fueled the recent bout of higher volatility.
In our view, it’s important is to prepare portfolios for the potential scenario in which interest rates stay high for a long enough period of time to cause economic pain. Through history, most periods of rate tightening have ultimately resulted in slower growth, or outright recessions. We don’t expect this cycle to be any different. We do believe it may take some time to unfold. There are a few reasons why. First, consumers still have the wherewithal to spend. Cash balances remain elevated, although they are admittedly on a downward trajectory. Moreover, consumers remain very willing to spend and experience the kind of activities – trips, outings, shows, eating at restaurants, etc - they sorely missed during the pandemic period, regardless of cost. Most importantly, history has shown that it takes time for higher rates to work through the economy. The Canadian housing market is a good example. Canadians with mortgages make up about 35% of the country’s households (another 37% are renters and 28% don’t have mortgages).
Only a fraction of households (2%) have variable rate/variable pay mortgages that would see mortgage payments fluctuate with changes in interest rates. A larger share of households either have variable rate/fixed pay mortgages (10%) or fixed rate mortgages (23%), and neither of these see any change to payments over the term of the mortgage. In other words, the number of Canadian households that have been impacted thus far by higher rates over the past year may not be as large as one would think. The bigger challenge will unfold over the next few years as homeowners who either purchased a home or refinanced their home in the past five years may have to potentially refinance at much higher rates. In other words, it’s upon the refinancing that households will have a potential wake-up call and be forced to reassess and reprioritize their spending and saving. The scenario above is not guaranteed to unfold exactly as described, but it’s one we have to be prepared for. The trajectory of inflation and interest rates clearly remain very important to the economic and investment outlook over the next few years. We’ll continue to watch with great interest and recalibrate our own expectations as things evolve.
After one rambles through the maps for a time … some overall impressions begin to emerge.
John Noble Wilford
Elevate your consciousness
I referenced Steve Jobs earlier. Six years before his untimely death, Steve Jobs, facing his own mortality had impressed upon him the importance of living the best possible life. In the face of his looming death, something powerful shifted inside Jobs. He began to live each day as if it was his last….because it may have been. Thinking about the limited amount of time you and I have left on this earth isn't meant to be a downer. On the contrary, it empowers us to use that precious time in the most meaningful way possible. Jobs called facing his death "the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life." Almost everything, he said -- our fears, failures, and our pride -- "fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important."
“By acknowledging the shortness of life, you are able to channel your energy into truly living and to embrace the magic of being alive. Nothing lasts forever. We only have this one life, and the tragedy is that we wait so long to begin living it. We think that we have forever, but we don’t. Understanding that our stories must come to an end is what gives our lives meaning, transforms our perspective towards life and sharpens our focus on what truly matters. It gives us the opportunity to make adjustments; to use the time we have to become the person we want to be, the person we know we can be.”
Simon Alexander Ong
Steve Job’s left us with an important question we should be asking ourselves daily amid all of our busyness "Am I living the life that I want?”
As we head into the week, elevate your consciousness and understand where you are spending your finite resources, your time and your energy. Be willing to confront yourself and ask this same question when you start your day. you're being true to yourself, it can be frightening to admit you're not living the life you want, but it's the only way to ensure that despite your “busy” schedule, that you are spending your precious time intentionally and wisely.
As Zeppelin suggests in Ramble On “Now's the time, the time is now”
Your own life is an adventure, be sure you find time to enjoy the ride
Be well and enjoy the moments
Derek