Something to Read
https://www.wired.com/story/question-productivity-coronavirus/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
I know that the last thing y'all want right now it something else to read, but Firefox, in all it's nosy, article-suggesting glory, recommended this article to me which was a surprisingly good read. I thought I'd share, because one of the biggest battles I'm having right now is trying to not quantify my self-worth with how much or little I'm getting done at home. Even if I didn't get much done outside of work on my least productive days, at least I used to be able to say "I went to my job." But now, it seems like I'm turned all the way on or all the way off - sometimes I've been working 12 hours days, and sometimes I hit the minimum requirements for the day and feel really guilty about giving up. Personally, I don't think it helps I don't have a desk in my apartment - there's no real way for me to completely separate my work time from my relaxing time, other than to try to and stay away from working in bed. How are y'all dealing with feeling less productive during the times you used to allot for work? Strategies? Last semester I tried to Pavlov's dog myself into being able to focus while burning a fall-scented candle, and let me tell you, that was a total fail. I've also tried about every productivity app you can get for free...what I think I really need is for someone to follow me around and clean up my messes so I stop getting distracted by chores, lol.
Preach, Mika!
ReplyDeleteThis article really resonated with me. Just last night, I was working at around 3am wondering to myself if it’s ok to send emails to students at that time or if it sends the wrong impression – that I’m either a total insomniac or available to them 24/7. Even though many aspects of teaching fall outside the typical 9-5 working schedule, it is so hard to know how much (or little) to do to remain productive while working 100% from home.
I have had so many conversations lately with friends who are used to going to a physical place every day for work and are finding it difficult to know where work ends, and life begins. In this “new normal” they have taken to proving themselves essential and responsible by putting in way more hours than they normally would. Ordinarily, they would take mental breaks at work to get coffee or chat with co-workers, but now it feels like every second should be accounted for. Are we supposed to feel guilty for throwing in a load of laundry during the day or napping during lunchtime if our work doesn’t suffer? Even though that is sort of a rhetorical question, the answer in my mind is that no, we shouldn’t feel guilty, but we often do. I thought this passage from the article was particularly poignant:
"Frantic productivity is a fear response. It’s a fear response for 21st-century humans in general and millennial humans in particular, as we’ve collectively awoken from the American dream with a strange headache and stacks of bills to pay. My whole generation learned relentless work was the way to cope with the rolling crisis, with the mood of imminent collapse and economic insecurity that was the elevator music of our entire youth—the relentless tension between trying to save yourself and trying to save the world, between desperate aspiration and actual hope."
We have certainly been conditioned to fear the implications of losing our jobs, going into debt, relying on others to survive, etc. and it’s not natural or healthy for anyone. More than anything, this article gave me a little comfort that I’m not alone in my working-from-home productivity fears.
Thanks so much for sharing.
--Mary
Hi, Mary,
DeleteI'm glad I could give you a little comfort! Reading everyone's replies made me feel a little less alone, too. The point you made about worrying whether to respond to students at 3am - i really feel that. One of the hardest things (and best things) about the corona virus shutdown is all the emails I've been getting from my students. They'll email me at all hours of the night now and I've had to just stop replying past 11, because otherwise I feel like the emails never end, lol.
Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteI don't know about you, but I wasn't some automaton perfectly managing my schedule and accomplishing everything on my to-do list during the non-plague times. My productivity waxes and wanes at the best of times.
If I have a quibble with the article, it's that it presents the alternative to "productive" work as "personal" work. Instead of starting a business, we should be happy that we're cleaning and child-rearing and whatnot. Those are all important things, but there's at least a third alternative, and that's doing nothing.
I will admit there's been days when I have done nothing but shower, eat, and work on a jigsaw puzzle. Maybe that's not literally nothing, but it's definitely not taking care of the every-growing pile of laundry in the corner, and there may or may not have been a few extra days' worth of pitiful beard growth on my chin.
One of the big things I've learned writing poetry is how often the right course of action is to put the poem down and come back to it later. The subconscious does a lot of good work, and sometimes we get in our own way. We don't have the luxury of putting off grading for years, but I do think we should be OK with not getting that done today.
Yeah! Exactly! Nothing is something. Why try and force yourself to be productive when doing "nothing" is actually what's needed? If only I hadn't let western civilization creep in and then subsequently believe it's whispers that work and production are what must be done not just in a practical, but in an ethical and moral sense as well. There's a balance there. We're not machines.
DeleteMika,
ReplyDeleteI hope that you are doing well. Thanks for sharing this article, I really enjoyed reading it. I don't think there is anything wrong with creating "minimum requirements" like you discuss and just focusing on those. I think that creating a reasonable list of objectives for the day can help to hone in on what really needs to get done while avoiding the tendency to want to sit on the computer for 12 hours trying to be super productive and then getting burned out.
My strategy for trying to stay productive during this time is to take lots of breaks between completing tasks. For example, when I started grading research papers the task felt daunting because I was trying to be super productive and efficient. While it is certainly important to get grades done in a reasonable time, I have found that focusing too much on efficiency takes the fun out of reading student writing and makes the process exhausting. I started by just focusing on one paper at a time and devoting what I had decided was an appropriate approximate time to reading and grading it. Then after that paper was done I would celebrate by doing something different and/or fun (for example making dinner or chatting on the phone with a family member). Although this process isn't the most efficient, it helped me to really focus my attention on the student's writing and give more intentional feedback. After my "break" was over, starting the next paper didn't feel as daunting because I knew that I wasn't going to have to sit down for 4 hours straight grading paper after paper, but could instead just focus on one and then do something else.
I also wanted to highlight this quote that I thought was really great from the article:
"Cooking, cleaning, emotional and community management, all of which most of us are doing more intensely as we’re living together in lockdown, are work—they just don’t count on the ledger of human worth because the economy refuses to value them in its reckoning of what does, because most of it has been done in private, by women, for free. Making breakfast, making the beds, making sure your friends and family aren’t losing their absolute minds is work that matters more than ever and will continue to matter in the coming decades as crisis follows crisis."
So, even if it doesn't seem like it right now, I think that we are all putting in more work than we know.
Thanks for the great post!
-Taylor
Hi, Taylor! I hope you're doing well, too. I miss getting to see pictures of your cats growing! Thanks for sharing what you've been doing to stay on top of things - maybe it might be helpful for me in these last two weeks to try and switch between my own stuff, grading, and something fun. I have been taking little breaks for coffee or to play with El, but maybe longer breaks are needed!
DeleteMika,
ReplyDeleteOne day last week I was feeling bad about how little I was getting done, and a friend told me that productivity is ableist, and we're in a damn pandemic. While this is a little simplistic (we still do have to get our work done at some point), it's something I needed to hear. It's ridiculous to be measuring our days in productivity at this time.
Something that's worked well for me is creating a list of 5 school-related things to complete every day. Some days I think about working beyond that, but a lot of times I don't let myself, because it's an agreement I've set for myself, and I want to teach myself that I can trust the agreements I've set for myself.
I've also been giving myself unplanned days off during this time. If I wake up on a Tuesday and I'm feeling anxiety and existential dread and I can't focus on workshopping for my fiction class, for example, I call it, and I let myself take a day off. I'll admit that this scares me sometimes--if I take a day off, will I want to always cut myself slack and create a habit of not getting anything done? But almost always I wake up the next day ready to get things done.
The semester is almost over. Let's be kind to ourselves. We've almost finished a year of grad school!
-Shelbi
“Laziness is the only sin out of the seven big ones that seems to count in the moral metric of the modern economy, and what other word is there for that edge-panic impulse to simply delete your email address and spend time doing small, gentle things that make being alive hurt a little less?”
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this article, Mika; it put into words a lot of the feelings I’ve been accumulating recently. I’ve been avoiding the internet, cause it’s constantly guilt-tripping me for not using this time to learn an amazing new skill or workout routine.
I related to the sticky note coping mechanism more than I wanted to admit—my to-do list has definitely become a measure of my well-being lately. And I’ve never been one to place more restrictions on myself than the already-implemented class or work schedule, so now that I’m responsible for managing my own task completion, I constantly feel like I’m failing. Even when I get everything done I had set for that day, I always feel like I could or should be doing more. It’s an invisible and haunting anxiety that comes from buying into the idea of productivity as a measure of self-worth.
I’ve been observing a trend of reaching for normalcy rather than embracing the change and discovering new things about ourselves and our lifestyle. I’ve been trying to give myself permission to “waste time” and “procrastinate,” and celebrate the little victories like washing my curtains or doing the dishes or spending quality time with family—and above all, remind myself that not everything has to be related to school or work.
Jessie
Ah, that last paragraph is SO TRUE. I think that somehow getting to a place of normalcy is exactly what we need to be doing. In the past few days, I have been "wasting" more time (that whole metaphor says a lot about our culture, I think) and really all it did was make me more productive and just healthier mentally speaking. That's an easy thing to forget in the FTL speed world we live in. Especially for me (who loves school so much) it was great to be reminded that there are other things too. Thanks!
DeleteWoah, now! That was some pretty good stuff. Thanks so much for sharing this article!
ReplyDeleteI think that this is so true for myself right now. Really the last thing I want to be doing right now is being productive, yet at the same time I feel like I want to be incredibly productive. Yet, the productivity I want has nothing to do with getting my own school done, or, heaven forbid, grading. What I want is time to get a grip with the situation, to contemplate meaning of life and human existence kind of stuff. I want to be productive in a creative sense and a revolutionary sense. I want five seconds to think about how the world could change when we come out of this and how it should change (and how we should actively create that change ourselves).
In all honesty, I haven’t really had the time for “productive procrastination,” as Will would call it because I want to do right by my students. There are deadlines that can’t be moved at all because of university policies (which aren’t wrong in and of themselves). It’s really a matter of doing what must be done in terms of what I am ethically going to be satisfied with, rather than the fear of losing my job. Unfortunately, this all simply means my own school has just about been swept out the window till this point, leaving me with the other ethical dilemma of forcing all the grading on my professors in the ever-so-slim crunch time before sweet, sweet freedom. Oh what an interesting crossfire we grad students are in!