Archive for February, 2009

I am incredibly disheartened by the president’s proposed budget… as we move ever closer to the point where a majority figures out it can vote itself goodies paid for disproportionately by a minority, and so we lose most checks on the system. But I suppose it doesn’t do much good to wallow in my despair over it. Instead, I’m going to focus on the one bright note — the series of tea parties being held all over the country today and tomorrow to protest the wasteful spending. Yep, folks are gathering in front of city halls and state legislatures to complain about the stimulus package and the budget. And yes, since many of these folks are libertarian types, they weren’t too happy about big government (TARP, prescription drug benefit, etc.) under George Bush either. Government spending as a percentage of GDP continues to rise — time to throw some tea overboard and get mad.

I’m pleased to announce that I am signing a contract with Portfolio (Penguin’s business imprint) to write a book called 168 HOURS, scheduled to be released in summer/fall 2010.

The book looks at how successful people spend their time. We all start off with the same blank slate — 168 hours — each week. But some people manage to do a lot more than others with those hours. Specifically, I want to look at how people achieve career breakthroughs in the middle of already full personal lives (e.g. raising kids, running marathons, doing extensive volunteer work).  How do they allocate those 168 hours against all these priorities?

While this book is prescriptive, I am, primarily, a journalist. And so I approach this project from the perspective of finding stories of people who love their lives, and also looking at various misconceptions about time. We think that it’s hard to balance work and family, for instance, but the reality is that with 168 hours a week, there’s abundant time for all your core competencies. You can sleep 8 hours a night (56 hours a week), work 50 hours a week, and still have 62 hours left over for other things like nurturing your family members, training for a triathlon, etc. Indeed, if you look at the reality of how Americans do spend their time, you’ll see that there’s really no conflict between work and family at all. Stay-at-home moms, on average, according to the American Time Use Survey, only spend 31 minutes per day playing with their kids. They spend 6 minutes reading with them. You can definitely beat this in 62 non-working hours per week. The point is, most of us, in the workforce or not, do not spend our hours in ways that reflect what we want to be doing in life. This book is about people who do.

I am looking for stories about such people with full lives, and how they took their careers to the next level. Please let me know if you have suggestions of people I should interview.

I just got back from an easy 5-mile run along the East River here in New York. The weather, today at least, is warm enough to enjoy running outside again, and just in time. I have been getting monstrously tired of treadmill monotony and (particularly annoying for me) the Robert Gibbs press briefings playing on CNN in the gym.

I began running in earnest a little over 4 years ago. Before, I thought I was in reasonably good shape. I walked, hiked, used the elliptical machines. Then I started running and realized I was fooling myself.  The past 4 years have been a fairly steady advance in endurance and speed. I ran through my pregnancy with Jasper and emerged faster on the other side (and, incidentally, wearing my size 2 non-maternity jeans within a week of giving birth!)

But for me, running isn’t just about weight control. I’ve learned that it has massive benefits for my writing.

Joyce Carol Oates penned an essay in 2000 called “Writers: See how they run” about just this phenomenon. “On days when I can’t run, I don’t feel ‘myself’; and whoever the ’self’ is I feel, I don’t like nearly so much as the other,” she wrote. Most importantly: “The structural problems I set for myself in writing, in a long, snarled, frustrating, and sometimes despairing morning of work, for instance, I can usually unsnarl by running in the afternoon.” There is something about jogging that jogs thoughts loose in the brain, makes ideas come together and (just as critical) gives you the energy to tackle seemingly intractable problems.

Running trains the physical muscles, but also the psychological endurance muscles. Just as you attack a 10-mile run 1 mile at a time, you attack a novel a chapter at a time, or even better, 1000 words at a time (just run to the next lamp post, then set another target). These daily victories over the lazier, weaker self that would give up because giving up is easier remind you, as a sub-6 minute miler once told me that “you can do anything as long as you stick to it.”

I know it is dangerous to become too dependent on one form of physical exercise for keeping you sane. Runners can get injured, which would be depressing enough without adding the sense of having lost your discipline to the injury. But writers often rely on something to get themselves through their projects. As Anne Patchett wrote in the winter issue of O at Home, “James accepted too many social invitations. Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald all hit the sauce. Woolf had to fight off madness itself. I have a tendency to polish silver. All in all, it could be worse.”

Likewise, you can do much worse than lacing up your shoes and going for a run.

I spent much of this week hoping that this horrible stimulus bill would not pass — that our president would prove sensible, would calm the Democratic hordes in the House and rewrite the bill in a way that would, you know, actually stimulate the economy. Instead, we are relying mostly on a Keynesian multiplier that may or may not happen (the idea that every government dollar spent will trigger more dollars spent). Much of it will not happen immediately, much of it is not terribly important (government building remodeling projects) and the tax cuts are small and one-off things.

This strikes me as a huge missed opportunity. Obama promised a tax cut to 95% of Americans. How about cutting a big chunk of the 25% tax bracket down to the lower 15% level? And the 28% down to the 25% level (or, heck 15% — a flat tax!)? This would immediately have put more money in the hands of middle-class Americans and broadly encouraged more work (in America, we rarely choose leisure when we make more money — kind of a strange phenomenon, but true). It would be easy to understand, systematic, and the government would not be picking winners. And it wouldn’t even involve tax cuts for the “rich,” which would be politically unpalatable.

As it is, the current stimulus brings to mind a dysfunctional couple that has struggled with debt in the past. It all comes crashing down around their ears. And so, they talk to each other about cutting back, doing without, living within their means. One party starts saving. But then the other looks around and decides to do something. Not a horrible impulse if it involves, like, getting a second job. But, alas, no. This partner decides that the bathroom needs remodeling. And goes out and spends big bucks on that — but not just that. Also an Oriental rug for the entry way, repaving a driveway that doesn’t need to be paved, new $400/yard designer wallpaper for the entire basement where no one goes, plus a shopping spree for clothes no one really likes, but since you’re spending money… I mean, yes, in theory, some of this could raise the price of the house when you eventually sell it, and some will make you feel better. If you feel better, you might, eventually, earn more money. But you’d think this particular partner had a major problem. And you would be right.

Denny’s made headlines earlier this week with its Tuesday promo offering a free Grand Slam breakfast to anyone who showed up at almost all its US locations. A Grand Slam retails for about $6.  Most customers remembered to tip, a USA Today reporter covering the promotion noted, so in essence, this amounted to a gain to each customer of $5 worth of merchandise.

Now, $5 is not a huge sum of money to save. It’s the rare coupon clipper who couldn’t save $5 with a few deft scissor strokes.  You can save $5 a month on gas by easing up on the accelerator, and most people would not get terribly excited if, say, a $40 sports radio were marked down to $35.

But Denny’s promotion was about something being “free,” and that changes the psychology a great deal. As Dan Ariely, a business prof, told USA Today, “Free is an emotional hot button. When free is concerned, there is no downside — or, at least, we don’t see the downside immediately. So we overvalue everything that is free.”

This is certainly the case with the Denny’s promo. Tales are legion of people waiting 40 minutes to over an hour — often outside in the cold — to get their “free” Grand Slam. I am not surprised. Several years ago, I was in San Francisco when a local company was doing a green lamp promo. You turned in any old lamp that was junked in your attic, and got a new free energy efficient one. People were lined up for blocks. A few weeks ago, I witnessed people standing in an hour-plus long line outside Saks Fifth Avenue, apparently waiting for a free gift the story was offering.

Yes, we overvalue what is free compared to the actual monetary savings. Would you line up outside in a cold Wal-Mart parking lot for an hour the day after Thanksgiving if they were only offering $5 off the cost of flat-screen TVs or Wiis? Of course not. We also don’t calculate the downside — mostly, the price of time. The US minimum wage is $6.55. After taxes for most people who earn minimum wage, this still comes out to more than $5 per hour.

The issue, as I discussed in my “Craig’s List Economy” post, is that we don’t believe time can be easily converted into money. So we tend to look for ways to save money within our certain set budgets — be they our salaries, wages, or even unemployment checks — and not for ways to expand our budgets by converting more time into money.  This may have been smart when the labor market was less flexible. But these days, even in a rough economy, there’s always some moonlighting project on Craig’s List that’s out there.

So anyway, what does this mean for people who are trying to behave in a rational fashion? If you love Denny’s, fine. Go on a day when the lines are shorter! As for this past Tuesday, from an economics perspective, it would be better to pay $5 at McDonalds for breakfast and do something more productive with the hour you save.

This is why, on occasion, I’ve paid $3 for an ice cream cone at Baskin Robbins on Ben & Jerry’s free cone day. I satisfy my sweet tooth, get my cone quick (because there is no one else at Baskin Robbins on B&J free cone day), and get to smirk at all the people waiting in lines around the block!

WNBA rookie of the year Candace Parker (who plays for the LA Sparks) announced that she was pregnant late last month. She’s due in the spring and plans to play this summer (the season runs September to June).

There is absolutely nothing odd about this. Women — especially athletic women who continue to be active during their pregnancies — can easily return to full form shortly after giving birth. Paula Radcliffe won the New York City marathon in November 2007 after having a baby earlier that year.  Sometimes such athletic moms return in even better shape (continuing to exercise with extra pregnancy weight is a bit like training at altitude). I suspect this will be the case with Parker. After all, if my calculations are right, she was pregnant in September — the queasy, tired stage of pregnancy that’s harder than anything you experience postpartum — and possibly even August when she was still playing hard.

And yet, some league officials and fans are expressing disappointment — as if this (married) young mom is letting the league down. Far from it. She’s showing that there is absolutely no problem with being a mom and an athletic star, just as there is no problem with being a doctor and a mom, a lawyer and a mom, etc. I expected better from people who claim to value women’s empowerment. The true cultural, feminist vanguard these days is women who are having their babies young, and building big careers with kids in tow.

I have a column in today’s USA Today about the DTV conversion saga. It’s called The Great TV Disaster, and you can read it here.

The gist? Some folks may lose their TV signals — eventually — but the real tragedy is that more of us don’t turn off the tube from time to time. From a public health perspective, our government has zero interest in making sure that no one misses a second of TV. And yet we just sponsored a NASCAR vehicle to spread the message…

I have been following, with great interest, the sagas of Pres. Obama’s nominees for various administration positions. I guess in his effort to create a diverse Cabinet, he wants all kinds of Americans represented. Tax cheats are Americans too.

Timothy Geithner’s nomination went through, despite the $30,000-plus in self-employment taxes he forgot to pay. Now it turns out that Tom Daschle has the same problem. Leave aside the issue of the car and driver, and not knowing that this was taxable income, rather than a public-funded job perk that this former Senate leader apparently assumed would follow him through life. According to this article, he also failed to report $80,000 worth of consulting income.

To be fair to Daschle, he’s not alone. Plenty of sole proprietors do fail to report their income, because in the absence of withholding or reporting, it’s easy to pull off. The IRS has studied the issue, and found that a whopping 57% of non-farm sole proprietor income goes unreported. When you pay your kid’s math tutor, for instance, you probably don’t issue a 1099. And so, some of these math tutors — and consulting former senators — decide that if there’s no form, there’s no income, or at least no income that should be taxed. Taxes are for the rich. Or the little people. Or people with W-2 income. Or something. But if you can get out of it because you’re betting the IRS won’t hear about it, why not?

The answer, of course, is that if everyone did what Geithner and Daschle did, the U.S. Treasury would soon go broke. If 100 million households elected not to pay $30,000, that would be $300 billion gone from the federal treasury. If 100 million households made the “unintentional error” of failing to pay $100,000, that’s $1 trillion gone, or approximately 40% of U.S. government receipts.

On the other hand, given that our law makers are now debating a $800+ billion stimulus package, maybe Daschle was just drawing a line in the sand about what he thought the stimulus should be. Every household should get to avoid paying $100,000 in taxes to the federal government. At least that would actually get the economy moving again! Call it the Daschle stimulus (though, Mr. Secretary, if anyone pays you royalties for use of the name…. that’s taxable income too).