One evening after I had cooked a semi-complex dinner, HA commented that she had never known anyone to set so many timers and alarms. Yes, it’s true. When I’m cooking or doing yard work or just going through life, I have found alarms and timers to be enormously freeing. “Don’t you feel like your phone and computers control your life?” people have asked. Quite the opposite.
When I’ve put something in the oven or on the grill (even for less than three minutes) I can set a timer and then I’m completely free of having to think about it until the timer goes off. When I have complex schedules to which I must hue, having multiple alarms set during the week means I don’t have to constantly think about what day of the week it is and what’s happening next and don’t forget about the dentist on Friday and… Alarms, whether repeating standing alarms or calendar alarms or even just putting something on a to-do list is delegating the task of remembering it to a machine that will do a much better job than I will, and allow me to leave the stress of fretting about it behind.
For the last two decades, I’ve had a pretty irregular schedule. I often worked at different locations on different days of the week, along with things that happened, say, the second Tuesday of each month. My children had a parenting schedule that put them in different places on different days of different weeks. I found that I needed to schedule things like mopping floors (ugh) or I’d conveniently forget them. And, yes, I would schedule leisure time and physical activity time because you can’t just wait “until I have time” to do those sorts of things.
I have noticed, though, that between retirement and my children becoming adults that the number of things for which I need a standing alarm set has dropped precipitously. That, too, is a good thing.
—2p