想对抗倦怠感，你需要的不是“躺平”
There’s a Better Way to Reclaim Your Time Than ‘Quiet Quitting’
LAURA VANDERKAM
2022年9月21日
笔记导读
languish v.被迫受苦，受折磨；If someone languishes somewhere, they are forced to remain and suffer in an unpleasant situation.◆ Pollard continues to languish in prison…波拉德继续受牢狱之苦。
brim v.充满；充溢；If someone or something is brimming with a particular quality, they are full of that quality. ◆ The team were brimming with confidence before the game. 该队在赛前信心十足。
tranquility n. 平静;安静;安宁
双语全文（官方翻译）
This summer, there was much discussion of the concept of “quiet quitting” — meaning, essentially, doing the bare minimum at work. And perhaps that’s not surprising: After more than two years of pandemic uncertainty, employee stress levels are at all-time highs, and people are still languishing. When you’re exhausted and overwhelmed, it feels like something needs to give — and for many, that seems to be the pursuit of excellence at work.
今年夏天，人们对“躺平”的概念做了很多讨论，从本质上说，这个概念的意思是只做最低限度的工作。也许这并不奇怪：在疫情中经历了两年多的不确定性后，员工压力水平达到了历史最高水平，人们仍然萎靡不振。当你精疲力竭、不堪重负时，就会觉得需要放弃一些东西——对很多人来说，放弃的似乎就是在工作中追求卓越。
But is taking your foot off the gas the answer? I’d argue it isn’t. As a writer focused on time management, I’ve come to realize that the opposite of burnout isn’t doing nothing, or even scaling back. It’s engagement. As counterintuitive as that seems, adding energizing activities to your schedule just might make life feel more doable.
但是，把脚从油门上拿下来就是答案吗？我认为不是。作为一个专注时间管理的作家，我开始意识到，能对抗倦怠的不是什么都不做，甚至不是缩减工作量。能对抗它的是参与。虽然这似乎违反直觉，但在你的日程安排中增加充满活力的活动，可能会让你感觉生活更有劲头。
That’s what I found when I ran a time-satisfaction study with more than 140 busy people for a book I was working on. At the beginning of my project, during the spring of 2021, they spoke of feeling exhausted and tapped out. “Life feels very chaotic with so many different balls in the air,” one person told me. “My work to-do list is never-ending,” another said. Someone else lamented feeling “like I need a few more hours each day in order to have time to manage family and life.”
我正在写一本关于140多名忙碌者对时间满意程度的书，这就是我在研究中的发现。我的项目开始是在2021年春天，当时他们说自己感到精疲力尽。“生活感觉非常混乱，事务繁杂，”一个人告诉我。另一个人说：“我的工作待办事项清单好像无穷无尽。”还有人抱怨说：“我每天都需要多几个小时来管理家庭和生活。”
The participants applied nine time-management strategies over the course of nine weeks. But instead of asking them to scale things back or draw stricter boundaries between work and life, most of the strategies I taught people were additive. I had them build in regular physical activity. I had them make space for little adventures. And when it came to leisure activities, I asked them to put “effortful before effortless” — to choose those that require action over those that are passive (even something as simple as reading a novel instead of binge-watching a TV show).
参与者在九周的时间里应用了九种时间管理策略。但是，我没有要求他们减少事务，或在工作和生活之间划出更严格的界限，我教给他们的大多数策略都是做加法。我让他们进行有规律的体育锻炼。我让他们为小小冒险腾出空间。当谈到休闲活动时，我告诉他们“努力比不努力更重要”——选择那些需要行动的活动，而不是那些被动的活动（甚至是读小说而不是长时间看电视剧这种简单的选择）。
I also introduced them to the principle of taking “one night for you” — committing to doing something you enjoy, apart from work and family, for at least a few hours each week. As with quiet quitting, this might sometimes mean leaving work a little earlier than usual, but the point is not to do less; the idea is that joining a choir, a softball team or anything else with expected attendance nudges you to figure out the logistics, arrange the child care if necessary and go — even if life seems too busy to contemplate such a thing.
我还向他们介绍了“一个属于自己的晚上”原则——承诺每周至少花几个小时做一些工作和家庭之外，你自己最喜欢的事情。与“躺平”一样，这有时可能意味着比平时提早一点下班，但重点不是要做得更少；这个想法是，加入合唱团、垒球队或任何有预期出勤率的活动，都会促使你理清后勤安排，必要时安排好孩子的照料，然后就去——即使生活似乎太忙，没时间考虑这样的事情。
And it worked. Over the course of nine weeks, participants came to feel that their schedules were brimming with activities that they had actively chosen and that they could look forward to — and as a result, time felt more abundant. Their satisfaction with how they spent their time overall rose 16 percent from the beginning of the project to the end. When asked about how they spent their leisure time “yesterday” after nine weeks, participants’ satisfaction rose 20 percent. They even reported making more progress on their professional goals — pretty much the opposite of quiet quitting — as their increased energy and engagement spilled over into all areas of life.
而这也是有效的。在九周的过程中，参与者开始感到他们的时间表里充满了他们主动选择、可以期待的活动——结果是，时间感觉更充裕了。从项目开始到结束，他们对自己如何利用时间的总体满意度上升了16%。九周后，当被问及如何度过“昨天”的闲暇时光时，参与者的满意度上升了20%。他们甚至报告说，他们在职业目标上取得了更大的进展——这与躺平几乎是相反的——因为他们增加的精力和投入溢出到生活的各个领域。
We each have the same 168 hours every week. But time is also all about the stories we tell ourselves. When life is full of have-to-dos, with only brief periods of downtime in between, we can feel beaten down by responsibilities. But add things we actually want to do, to compete with those have-to-dos, and time feels different. We feel a bit more in control of our lives.
我们每个人每周都有同样的168个小时。但时间也和我们给自己讲的故事有关。当生活充满了必须做的事情，中间只有短暂的休息时间时，我们会被责任击垮。但如果加入我们真正想做的事情，让它们与那些必须做的事情竞争，我们对时间的感觉就不一样了。我们会对自己的生活产生更多的掌控感。
Hannah Bogensberger, a participant in my time study, found this to be the case. As a busy software engineer raising three young children with her husband, a nurse, her days were full and work often slipped into nights and weekends. Adding anything else didn’t seem like an obvious path toward time satisfaction. But she agreed to try taking one night for herself — a weekly Tuesday tennis match with her sisters, and later, a regular class.
汉娜·博根斯伯格是我这项时间研究的参与者，她发现情况正是如此。作为一名忙碌的软件工程师，她和身为护士的丈夫一起抚养着三个年幼的孩子，她的日程很充实，工作经常被挤到晚上和周末。添加其他内容似乎并不是获得时间满足感的明显途径。但她同意试着给自己留一个晚上——每周二和姐妹们打一场网球，后来又加上一个固定课程。
“For one hour a week, all my ruminations are quieted,” she told me. When she returned home for the first time after her hour of tennis tranquility, her husband told her, “You look like you’re glowing.” Playing tennis made Ms. Bogensberger feel “recharged” for the rest of her week, she told me, and she has found she’s also more attentive to family as a result. “I think when I wasn’t consistently giving myself true leisure, there was a bit of resentment,” she said. “But now, knowing there is blocked off, protected time on the calendar has eased that.”
“每周有一个小时，我所有的胡思乱想都被平息了，”她告诉我。当她通过网球休息了一小时后第一次回到家时，她的丈夫对她说：“你看起来容光焕发。”博根斯伯格告诉我，打网球让她在一周剩下的时间里感到“精力充沛”，她发现自己也因此更关心家人了。“我认为，当我没有坚持给自己真正的闲暇时间时，会有一点怨恨，”她说。“但现在，知道日历上有了受保护、可以把其他事情排除在外的时间后，这种情况得到了缓解。”
Another study from a few years ago found that university students who were asked to help edit at-risk high school students’ essays for 15 minutes later reported having more free time than subjects who were allowed to leave the lab 15 minutes early. Logically, this doesn’t make sense, since those who left early had more free time. But the people who spent time in the rewarding, engaging activity of helping others felt that their time was less scarce.
几年前的另一项研究发现，与那些被允许提前15分钟离开实验室的受试者相比，被要求花15分钟时间帮助学业有危险的高中生编辑论文的大学生报告的空闲时间更多。从逻辑上讲，这是说不通的，因为那些早离开的人有更多的空闲时间。但是把时间花在帮助他人这种有益的、参与性的活动上的人，会觉得自己的时间不那么匮乏。
Put simply, when we put time into what we find energizing, our inner narrative changes. We no longer feel like life is a slog.
简而言之，当我们把时间花在让我们觉得自己有活力的事情上时，我们的内心叙事就会改变。我们不再觉得生活是一种苦役。
That was certainly the case for Kathleen Paley, a mother of two and a lawyer at a firm in Washington, D.C., who I interviewed for my book. She said that she had gone through a dark period of feeling that her whole being was consumed by work and family. She described a sense, familiar to many working parents, that “every bit of you, as an individual, has to be put on the back burner for a while.”
凯瑟琳·佩利就是这样一个例子。她是两个孩子的母亲，是华盛顿特区一家律师事务所的律师，我为写书采访过她。她说自己经历了一段黑暗时期，感觉自己的全部精力都被工作和家庭占据了。她描述了一种许多职场父母都熟悉的感觉，那就是“作为个体，你的每一点都必须暂时放在次要位置”。
But instead of quiet quitting, loud quitting or phoning it in at home, Ms. Paley took on something she was passionate about: She began volunteering with the Fairfax City Economic Development Authority, doing projects that were completely different from her job and family responsibilities. She helped organize Restaurant Week in Fairfax and figured out ways to promote its small business incubator.
但佩利并没有躺平、辞职，或者敷衍了事地对待家庭，而是做了她热爱的事情：她开始在费尔法克斯市经济发展局做志愿者，做一些与她的工作和家庭责任完全不同的项目。她帮助组织了费尔法克斯的“餐厅周”，并想出了推广其小型企业孵化器的方法。
She found doing this work so much more energizing than the TV she used to watch after the kids went to bed, and in her excitement, her time seemed to multiply. Ms. Paley was eventually voted in as the chair of the development authority. And she did all this while still doing well at her job and being an active member of her family. Committing to something she was passionate about renewed her energy for everything else she was doing.
她发现做这份工作比她过去在孩子们睡觉后看电视令她更有活力，在兴致勃勃中，她的时间似乎成倍增加。佩利最终被选为发展委员会主席。她在做这一切的同时，仍然在工作中表现很好，仍然是家庭积极的一分子。致力于自己所热爱的事情，为她在做的其他事情注入了活力。
To be sure, there’s no reason to cram things into your schedule out of a sense of obligation, and depleting pursuits should be eschewed. But when you’re feeling overwhelmed, committing time to something that feels wonderful could be a better bet than simply doing less.
可以肯定的是，没有理由出于责任感而把事情塞进你的时间表，而且应该避免消耗精力的事情。但当你感到不知所措时，可以把时间花在一些让你感觉很棒的事情上，这可能比只是少做一些事情来得更好。
