The OffBeat #26: The Importance of "Garbage Time"

It's when real life happens

Jerry Seinfeld said this about parenting:

I'm a believer in the ordinary and the mundane. These guys that talk about "quality time" — I always find that a little sad when they say, "We have quality time." 

I don't want quality time. I want the garbage time. That's what I like. You just see them in their room reading a comic book and you get to kind of watch that for a minute, or a bowl of Cheerios at 11 o'clock at night when they're not even supposed to be up. The garbage, that's what I love.

“Garbage time,” as opposed to quality time, is unplanned and unoptimized. It’s not fraught with purpose, not filled with pressure or weighted down by expectations. It’s not measured or managed.

Garbage time is where real life happens. It’s through garbage time, over time, that real connections build. At work, garbage time looks like “shooting the shit” over Zoom or in person. Catching up on everyone’s weekends in the minutes before the meeting starts, turning a 1-1 into an agenda-less coffee walk. With friends and family, garbage time is chitchat on speakerphone in traffic, it’s lazing away the afternoon without plans, it’s even taking out the trash together on Sunday nights.

As a recovering perfectionist, I’m the first to appreciate crisply planned offsites, and meetings agenda-ed within an inch of their lives. And I hate feeling like my time is being wasted. I’m also guilty of chronic multi-tasking—doing a crossword on the NYT Games app while watching TV,  listening to a podcast on a walk—in order to wring as much productivity juice out of every hour of the day as possible.

But “life is to be lived and enjoyed, not just ‘done.’” Garbage time shared with others is full of possibility. It’s a gateway to spontaneity, to frivolity, even the mundanity that makes up everyday living; it produces, stratum by stratum, the true bedrock of connection.

Ideas to incorporate more garbage time into your routine:

• Bake time into your team meetings, 1-1 syncs and offsites to catch up on life

• Take every opportunity at work to “walk the floor,” roaming to get unscheduled and casual face-time with whoever’s around; if you’re virtual, this could look like joining remote social events your people team or ERGs have planned, or using a tool like Donut to randomize intros to folks across the organization

• Be fully present during unplanned shared stretches of time in your personal life—even just the car ride to pick your kid up from soccer practice, or the subway ride to get to your dinner date reservation—to take advantage of the opportunity for stratum-building

Have a great—and garbage-filled—week,

Allison