Is this important?
And other questions I am asking myself as I am breaking with old ways of doing.
When I became a parent, I spent years finishing my PhD in what felt like stolen scraps of hours on a Sunday afternoons while my wife parented our baby. I wrote my dissertation fairly quickly and jokingly told colleagues they, too, could do this by taking a stack of $20 bills and inserting one into an incinerator every hour on the hour. That’s what it felt like writing under the 10 hours of childcare a week that my fellowship funding could generate.
That was a decade ago, and even when my kids went to school full time and I got that much-longed-after desk job with a salary, my working/waking days became more and more fractured.
Monitoring the housing conversations on Twitter. Endless two-factor authentication to do any simple task. Co-workers ducking their heads in the office door turned into endless Slack Notifications. Paywall. Paywall. Paywall. The school’s calling! Your kid’s sick. The timer’s ringing! Summer camps end at 3pm. Air quality alert! Shut the windows! Where’s the filters? Get the kids. Then the pandemic. Then endless, endless Zoom meetings. Endless. An endless void with changing faces. Mass death + scrolling. “Baba? Baba! Babbaa.”
We know this, yes? It’s not particular to me. Some people work different jobs — delivering food, caring for children, nursing — but they’ve almost all been spliced into endless fracture and interruption. We are in a particular bend in our winding descent through capitalist technoscapes and meeting at a rest stop on that road right now — Substack1.
But somewhere along the fracturing of attention, of communities, of literal people around me — I broke. Or rather, the choice was clear — either I was going to break into some more fragmented, agitated, unwell self, or I was going to break with the norms that were not working. And so I’ve changed. I’ve written about some of these changes here before. I am rarely on social media besides this orange rectangle. I now read books sitting on a couch for more than ten minutes at a time. I left in-house non-profit comms work and launched my own consulting business. I’ll share some other changes on here later in the year.
At the core of these changes is a visceral, thrumming attention to what’s important.
I don’t mean a change in what I value — the inherent dignity of human beings and our rights to live decent lives. Our relationships. Our loved ones. Creativity and connection. Honesty. Contributing to the shared work of making the world livable and just for all. Care for the earth and its creatures. Wonder. Curiosity. Those values and priorities remain consistent for me.
What I’m oriented to, now more than ever before, is how we spend our days. Specific to me is how I spend my waking working days. But this ripples out into how we all spend our days, because our lives are intertwined.
This orientation is deeply practical. Really? How.
For the last year or so, I’ve been a student of rebuilding new ways of working. Here’s a list of useful books I read during this reassessment period. I benefited from reading Christina Wallace’s Portfolio Life. And I was thirsty to read Slow Productivity: the lost art of Accomplishment Without Burnout last summer. The title itself seemed almost sinful per the Protestant working-class-midwestern child-of-the-boomers Christian tradition I was raised in. “Slow AND productive? I shall break it. It cannot be possible! I shall die.”2
I shall not die. Not from divesting from being classically, 1990’s/2010’s/1950’s-vibes productive. I want to think long, thoughtful thoughts. I want to work effectively to create something or solve a problem or support a big shared goal, then log off and weed something or talk to a human about whatever comes up. I have clawed back hours in my day by blocking out whole days for writing when I can. I do two things at once instead of three (like corresponding with work, being at a kids’ appointment, and trying to monitor breaking news). As I’m breaking with old ways of doing and building the next container, here are three questions that emerge loudly as I move through the days.
Is this an experiment?
As part of my rebuilding studies, I listened to Pippi Kessler and Hadassah Damien’s very helpful podcast/book “Have a nice life.” I appreciated the right messenger (my kind of people, rather than tech bros) encouraging me to take calculated risks as experiments to iterate what I want next. Since then, I have experimented with product design and drop ship printing. With a new podcast. With business ventures and names. I put my phone on restricted mode from 7pm to 7am. I started singing in circles with my friends. I experimented with publishing here once a month, then missed a month that I intended to post (see #3), and we’re all just fine.
Why is this happening?
In community spaces, there’s an acronym used to help us reflect before we speak using the acronym W.A.I.T (Why Am I Talking?). Why am I talking is a question we should ask ourselves before we raise our hands to speak. Do I just want to be heard and seen? Is what I have to say vital to the decision we’re about to make? Do I simply need to signal approval? Knowing why I’m talking can help me assess if I talk, how long I talk, and what I truly need to say.
So, similarly, I’m vibing towards an acronym that helps me pause and sort the hours of my day: W.I.T.H (Why Is This Happening?).I don’t mean an existential deep dive every hour of every day, but more a pause in attention to what is driving me or a group I’m working with to do something. Why is this happening? Did I choose it? Did we think x hours should be spent doing this when we made our plans? Does it truly need to be done? What’s driving it? What is the purpose, and does this get us to that purpose? W.I.T.H. helps me take a beat and assess if what I’m about to do needs to be done, and if it does, do I need to keep committing to do it? Which brings me to…
Is this really what I/we need to be doing right now?
There’s so much to do to protect each other and build the world we need right now. And it’s going to be a long slow/fast period. What’s my role? What can I do that needs to be done BY ME right now?
Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is adding a layer of paint or words or yarn onto what we will someday marvel at as a masterpiece. That’s what they should be doing right now, even if they’re doing it sitting next to their grandmother’s hospital bed or while riding a crowded bus to work (which they may also need to be doing right now). Sometimes I just need to lie in the sunshine. That’s what I need to be doing right now. Sometimes I don’t know what I should be doing, but by asking myself the question, I can usually feel what I DON’T need to be doing right now. There’s no RIGHT answer to this question, but asking it stops me from moving along the train of standard practice that has filled up my days with what feels increasingly like garbage.
To be clear, this means I’m saying NO a lot more. To things I once badly wanted to do. To people I care about. To projects that might be cool. To options and opportunities that might work out according to various metrics of success. I remember the first time someone said to me, “People break up. It’s okay.”
Nothing in my worldview before that sentence had normalized this obvious and common life event. Things change. We change. The world has changed.
I’m telling myself this and typing here where you listen in. You know this, right? We can’t keep doing like we’ve been doing. I can’t. So I’m changing. I bet you are, too.
WANT TO CHAT IT OUT IN THE COMMENTS?
What helps you remember what’s important, what you need to do next? What have you been brave about lately? Have you read anything that helped you shift your relationship to priorities or how you make decisions? I’d love to hear about it.
Which is like Livejournal of the good-old-internet-days, only with fancier design and user monetization.
This is generating what needs to be another post — what it’s like to break up with the Protestant Work Ethic. Stay tuned, I guess?