I wonder how much of the *performance* of calendars/life maintenance/Instagramification of domestic life is because these are some of the only ways women (of means and privilege) get validation that the unpaid/emotional labor of domestic life is actually hard work. To have all that organization documented and shared publicly becomes a kind of KPIs for the home, a measurement and means of recognition in a culture that has chosen not to value the actual labor or end results. Especially in a society that sets an unrealistically high standards, refuses to acknowledge unequal playing fields, and rewards extra points to the appearance of effortlessness, these modes of performance demand an acknowledgement of the work and the worker that we're otherwise reluctant to provide-- an attempt to claim agency within a fucked up system.
Oct 12, 2022·edited Oct 12, 2022Liked by Anne Helen Petersen
“Depending on the institution, a lot of those demands have to do with 1) ongoing, chronic, debilitating budget cuts, diminished public funding, and the imperative to educate more students with less; but also 2) the foundational transformation of higher ed into a “business” with corresponding structures and profit imperatives.
To be clear, these changes yield net negative outcomes on the quality of instruction and quality of life for basically everyone in higher ed.“
This is a side note comment but one I had to make as someone in higher ed. I think there’s something else going on in regards to why there’s a bigger demand for time. We have a lot more standards regarding accreditation than in generations past, and a lot of that has to do, I think, with the fact that more people of color attend college than ever before, and therefore as funding has declined for public institutions, the need to “prove” your institution does a good job had gone up. When college was largely for white men, and a handful of white women, we required much less proof from institutions about their effectiveness.
The upside of this is that there are real measures put into place that absolutely change institutions for the better, and especially for people of color and other marginalized groups. The quality of instruction is, I would argue, broadly higher now at every single institution in the country than it was 30 years ago.
This is a real area of interest of mine, and one I probably should write about. And it’s not what your piece is about. But I see these assumptions all the time and feel compelled to say something.
This is one of the reasons I'm so frustrated about covid + virtual school killing snow days. I miss the idea of time where there *might* be a sudden festival, and no one would know for sure, but everything might be cancelled and your time was your own again. (For kids, but also for grownups before at-home laptops kept work going!)
"I felt extravagant with my time, as though the snow were fairy gold, only able to be spent before sunset before it melted away into mush—and soot-stained crags where the plows had passed. Even before I spotted the first, industrious shovelers coming out, soft and cartoonish in their coats, the day felt like a gift held in common. I expected that each quiet house held a carnival of cocoa, pillow forts, and blankets.
The enforced pause of a snow day is celebratory, but it’s also a stress test of our ability to weather the interruptions that are not shared. If our society can’t handle a snow day, then how will employers be prepared to be compassionate to the worker who has a burst pipe or a child with the flu? If the loss of a day’s wages sends a family spiraling into poverty, we have already left them too close to the brink. Their lack of breathing room was already suffocating them."
Thinking about the "uncalendar" idea - that's kind of what I aim for when I set up Calendly for my students to schedule meeting times with me. I very deliberately limit the windows in which I am "schedule-able" in order to protect my time.
I also wonder if this is related: last night, at my kid's chamber orchestra performance, I mentioned to another parent that I played violin, too. And I got the response that I get literally 100% of the time in these sorts of conversations: "Oh, professionally?" And I always have to kind of awkwardly say no, not professionally, I'm actually a writing professor. Same thing happens when I talk about being "a knitter" - I get immediate questions about whether I sell my knits. It just feels like we can't conceive of adults doing things that are coded as "hobbies" unless they're done as a profession in exchange for money, like there's something socially weird about being a pretty good and very dedicated violin player and knitter and both of those things just being for the sheer joy of it instead of part of capitalism. And probably not-coincidentally, those are the activities where I feel "crip time" is most alive in my life; it's not that I don't have goals (both for pieces I want to learn on violin and for projects I want to knit), but there's no fixed timeline to them, they take however long they take.
"Or what about a calendar that was simply, as one reader imagined, oriented around protecting time, instead of filling it? What would an un-calendar be?"
I just realized I have one of these. My husband and I share a Google calendar for family stuff. But we have an entirely separate paper calendar that doesn't have time increments like the Google one which we use for more polychronic things. It started out as birthdays and commemorations mostly, but I now realize that it has evolved into marking times when I will be stepping away from my family responsibilities. Work trips, fun trips, date nights, days when I'm running races, times when I'm meeting up with friends or going to sit at on a bench and stare at a book, etc. I write those events across the entire day and then feel free to walk out the door at a time of my choosing. I honestly don't know if my husband even looks at this calendar that much, and I know my kids don't. So I guess the calendar is only for me, to feel like I've been given permission to step away on those days. I hate that I need that, but at the same time I acknowledge that I do.
In K-12 public ed, as a high school teacher and union officer, I have used the shared digital calendar to nail admin for grievances/contract violations so many times. I love it. It’s like bread crumbs to finding new and even dumber administrative overreach.
I love you Anne, and how this post hits so many feelings I've had these past several days as I've been working to create my template Emotional Labor/Mental Load workbook to share with you all!! (I have to say I was amazed by the overwhelming interest and response last week!)
For starters, I did not get as much done this weekend as I had hoped because time became polychronic - I had a surprise visit with out-of-state family on Friday, worked 20 hours at my paid job on Saturday and Sunday, dealt with the fallout of accidentally getting "glutened" Sunday night (I have celiac disease) and being sick through Indigenous Peoples Day while solo parenting my 3 year old. What struck me is how initially in my mind the only one of those events that felt like a "legitimate" excuse was the paid one valued by capitalism, which is completely ridiculous. My whole weekend had value and it's stupid to beat myself up over it not going according to my monochronic plan (especially since nothing is monochronic about time with a 3 year old!) Even if I had the most organized shared online calendar system in the world, my spontaneous visit with my aunt and uncle wouldn't have been on there, and it was a big highlight of the weekend.
I had to laugh at the images of the mega planner systems, especially the Busy Mom Binder, because on the surface that's what my very plain workbook appears to be. The difference, though, is that I tried 40 million other systems and none of them ever worked for me because they were all too static. Bath and Kitchen Laundry must be done on Fridays! Check off all of the boxes on your daily plan or else you are a failure! Instead I treat it more like a diary - loosely plan ahead and then write what actually happened without judgement, if for no other reason than so the information can live on a spreadsheet instead of taking up energy in my brain ("OMG Did I pay the utility bill!? Have I bought my brother a birthday gift yet!?")
My former therapist wanted me to do something like this workbook years ago, and I resisted because it felt like more work. I don't want to micromanage my life to exhaustion - plus, with my chronic health issues, I can't do that if I want to be able to function. It wasn't until I shifted my mindset to be like "use this primarily for removing running thoughts from your brain and reducing anxiety with the secondary benefit that it makes the invisible work visible" that I finally could do it.
Anne, I love your challenge to reconceive time as protecting it rather than filling it. It reminds me so much of a good friend of mine in middle and high school, who openly turned down plans in order to prioritize time to relax. "Sorry, I can't go to the mall with you Saturday, I'm watching TV" was her prioritizing herself in the way she needed. She didn't care about her TV more than me - she cared about protecting time to relax so that she wouldn't burn out.
I'm still going to plug away at my template and will share it when I get the core pages done and then keep working on it as a work-in-progress. I also plan to share it freely (but will set up a Buy Me A Coffee page if anyone would like to send me money as a thank you).
Relatedly: I’m 99% sure that the entire basis of credit hours/full load is based on a 40-hr work week and nothing else. I cannot find any evidence whatsoever that 2-hrs for every 1 hour spent in class is efficient for learning. We literally designed a system based on a standard work week, and then we are shocked when people cannot attend full time because they have to work. The arbitrariness of how much work constitutes a credit hour always amazes me.
Interesting read. It makes me want to stab my eyeball out with a toothpick when people assume that just because your calendar is not blocked off that you want to have meetings with them on Zoom on non-urgent matters and at 4 p.m. after having worked an 8-eight hour or 10-hour day already depending on project deadlines. I also think in our hybrid situation that people have not fully transitioned to recognizing when non-urgent things should just wait until you are in the office together and don't need to be calendared. On Monday, I replied to someone "I've already talked to so-and-so about that who is on this invitation for that very issue." I would think someone would understand that this means "Please talk to him and stop sending me this invitation to a Zoom." Instead, he re-sent the invitation and then said "I saw you were free at 4 p.m." That struck me as disrespectful.
In academia, but not an academic. I am creatively depleted and mentally exhausted by the emphasis on "service" and "responsiveness" that is demanded of people who do what I do - that we demand of each other. Your bullet point about creative work suffering inside of monochromic time resonates. Many thoughts.
Fascinating. I will throw in some comments about resisting computer technology as a form of control in academia. That is probably true for many faculty, particularly those under 65. But give a break to those of us who are older (I am 74) and have real trouble wrapping our heads around all the new ways of organizing our lives.
I am part of an advisory group of 12 or so working on a book about the history of the arts in our university. In our numbers we have two people in their 40s, two techies in their 70s, and the rest of us are English majors in our mid-to-late 70s. We are all relatively computer literate, but it seems to be along different lines according to our backgrounds (academics, administrators, writers).
When we started it seemed like every week someone had a new organizational system or app for this or that and we all wasted valuable time trying to get up to speed. We are not sit on our asses retirees—we are all involved in other projects—so whatever time we have is valuable. We have finally settled in on basic communication and organizational tools—and yes, it does include email.
It is *wild* to me that our current construct of time has been in use for less than 150 years. I recently learned that France was the last European country to implement it, and the concept/measurement of time was a hotly debated topic!
I forgot to set my alarm, woke up a half hour late, spent the next 20 minutes in bed reading this newsletter, and now I’m not even tempted to hurry. Thank you.
As a reasonably organized and somewhat tidy person, The Busy Mom Binder is horrifying. Look at all the things you're *supposed* to be doing, according to that thing!
Reading this unlocked a memory of a job I had nine years ago, when I made the jump from arts nonprofit to startup because I thought it would be a nice change. One of the tenets my boss insisted on was NO MEETINGS EVER. I specifically questioned how this would work before taking the job, and he said they just dealt with issues on the fly, NBD.
What this actually looked like was him calling stressful non-meeting meetings or having us come into the one non-open space in the office to discuss something, rendering the experience very "come into the principal's office."
It was a power move, and yes he was probably one of my worst bosses. His desire for no meetings came directly from how many meetings he had when he was an employee, and it broke his understanding of how to be a good manager (or a manager at all).
In my life, I feel like a lot of the urge for a daily schedule comes not from work but from having small children, where either you're trying to get them on a schedule or to protect their schedule, in the interest of everyone's emotional wellbeing. Even now with older children, routines and timing are important, especially for sleep and food.
I'm actually finding myself really resistant to the idea that calendar culture is bad (or maybe I'm missing the point)! I think that scheduling in 15 minute blocks is silly and untenable in most situations, but making plans with friends and keeping them? Dealing with logistical issues before they're problems? Having children who (mostly) go to sleep at bedtime and get up in the morning? Blocking time for my Peloton rides because I'll make time for them if they're at 7 pm but not if they're whenever?
I think part of my resistance is that I'm seeing a lot of the things on the "what mono time doesn't get" list that I don't know how to have in my life without scheduling or planning. I have long, meandering conversations with my college friend because we calendar monthly calls and protect the time. How else can two women with demanding careers and five children between them living half a country apart maintain a friendship?
The fun (wrong word?) parts of the "what mono time doesn't get" - rest, conversations, creativity, spontaneity, etc. - only seem accessible to me if I'm scheduling and calendaring to make sure that there's space for those things to happen.
I wonder how much of the *performance* of calendars/life maintenance/Instagramification of domestic life is because these are some of the only ways women (of means and privilege) get validation that the unpaid/emotional labor of domestic life is actually hard work. To have all that organization documented and shared publicly becomes a kind of KPIs for the home, a measurement and means of recognition in a culture that has chosen not to value the actual labor or end results. Especially in a society that sets an unrealistically high standards, refuses to acknowledge unequal playing fields, and rewards extra points to the appearance of effortlessness, these modes of performance demand an acknowledgement of the work and the worker that we're otherwise reluctant to provide-- an attempt to claim agency within a fucked up system.
“Depending on the institution, a lot of those demands have to do with 1) ongoing, chronic, debilitating budget cuts, diminished public funding, and the imperative to educate more students with less; but also 2) the foundational transformation of higher ed into a “business” with corresponding structures and profit imperatives.
To be clear, these changes yield net negative outcomes on the quality of instruction and quality of life for basically everyone in higher ed.“
This is a side note comment but one I had to make as someone in higher ed. I think there’s something else going on in regards to why there’s a bigger demand for time. We have a lot more standards regarding accreditation than in generations past, and a lot of that has to do, I think, with the fact that more people of color attend college than ever before, and therefore as funding has declined for public institutions, the need to “prove” your institution does a good job had gone up. When college was largely for white men, and a handful of white women, we required much less proof from institutions about their effectiveness.
The upside of this is that there are real measures put into place that absolutely change institutions for the better, and especially for people of color and other marginalized groups. The quality of instruction is, I would argue, broadly higher now at every single institution in the country than it was 30 years ago.
This is a real area of interest of mine, and one I probably should write about. And it’s not what your piece is about. But I see these assumptions all the time and feel compelled to say something.
This is one of the reasons I'm so frustrated about covid + virtual school killing snow days. I miss the idea of time where there *might* be a sudden festival, and no one would know for sure, but everything might be cancelled and your time was your own again. (For kids, but also for grownups before at-home laptops kept work going!)
I wrote about this a little for Breaking Ground: https://breakingground.us/snow-days-and-slack/
"I felt extravagant with my time, as though the snow were fairy gold, only able to be spent before sunset before it melted away into mush—and soot-stained crags where the plows had passed. Even before I spotted the first, industrious shovelers coming out, soft and cartoonish in their coats, the day felt like a gift held in common. I expected that each quiet house held a carnival of cocoa, pillow forts, and blankets.
The enforced pause of a snow day is celebratory, but it’s also a stress test of our ability to weather the interruptions that are not shared. If our society can’t handle a snow day, then how will employers be prepared to be compassionate to the worker who has a burst pipe or a child with the flu? If the loss of a day’s wages sends a family spiraling into poverty, we have already left them too close to the brink. Their lack of breathing room was already suffocating them."
Thinking about the "uncalendar" idea - that's kind of what I aim for when I set up Calendly for my students to schedule meeting times with me. I very deliberately limit the windows in which I am "schedule-able" in order to protect my time.
I also wonder if this is related: last night, at my kid's chamber orchestra performance, I mentioned to another parent that I played violin, too. And I got the response that I get literally 100% of the time in these sorts of conversations: "Oh, professionally?" And I always have to kind of awkwardly say no, not professionally, I'm actually a writing professor. Same thing happens when I talk about being "a knitter" - I get immediate questions about whether I sell my knits. It just feels like we can't conceive of adults doing things that are coded as "hobbies" unless they're done as a profession in exchange for money, like there's something socially weird about being a pretty good and very dedicated violin player and knitter and both of those things just being for the sheer joy of it instead of part of capitalism. And probably not-coincidentally, those are the activities where I feel "crip time" is most alive in my life; it's not that I don't have goals (both for pieces I want to learn on violin and for projects I want to knit), but there's no fixed timeline to them, they take however long they take.
"Or what about a calendar that was simply, as one reader imagined, oriented around protecting time, instead of filling it? What would an un-calendar be?"
I just realized I have one of these. My husband and I share a Google calendar for family stuff. But we have an entirely separate paper calendar that doesn't have time increments like the Google one which we use for more polychronic things. It started out as birthdays and commemorations mostly, but I now realize that it has evolved into marking times when I will be stepping away from my family responsibilities. Work trips, fun trips, date nights, days when I'm running races, times when I'm meeting up with friends or going to sit at on a bench and stare at a book, etc. I write those events across the entire day and then feel free to walk out the door at a time of my choosing. I honestly don't know if my husband even looks at this calendar that much, and I know my kids don't. So I guess the calendar is only for me, to feel like I've been given permission to step away on those days. I hate that I need that, but at the same time I acknowledge that I do.
In K-12 public ed, as a high school teacher and union officer, I have used the shared digital calendar to nail admin for grievances/contract violations so many times. I love it. It’s like bread crumbs to finding new and even dumber administrative overreach.
I love you Anne, and how this post hits so many feelings I've had these past several days as I've been working to create my template Emotional Labor/Mental Load workbook to share with you all!! (I have to say I was amazed by the overwhelming interest and response last week!)
For starters, I did not get as much done this weekend as I had hoped because time became polychronic - I had a surprise visit with out-of-state family on Friday, worked 20 hours at my paid job on Saturday and Sunday, dealt with the fallout of accidentally getting "glutened" Sunday night (I have celiac disease) and being sick through Indigenous Peoples Day while solo parenting my 3 year old. What struck me is how initially in my mind the only one of those events that felt like a "legitimate" excuse was the paid one valued by capitalism, which is completely ridiculous. My whole weekend had value and it's stupid to beat myself up over it not going according to my monochronic plan (especially since nothing is monochronic about time with a 3 year old!) Even if I had the most organized shared online calendar system in the world, my spontaneous visit with my aunt and uncle wouldn't have been on there, and it was a big highlight of the weekend.
I had to laugh at the images of the mega planner systems, especially the Busy Mom Binder, because on the surface that's what my very plain workbook appears to be. The difference, though, is that I tried 40 million other systems and none of them ever worked for me because they were all too static. Bath and Kitchen Laundry must be done on Fridays! Check off all of the boxes on your daily plan or else you are a failure! Instead I treat it more like a diary - loosely plan ahead and then write what actually happened without judgement, if for no other reason than so the information can live on a spreadsheet instead of taking up energy in my brain ("OMG Did I pay the utility bill!? Have I bought my brother a birthday gift yet!?")
My former therapist wanted me to do something like this workbook years ago, and I resisted because it felt like more work. I don't want to micromanage my life to exhaustion - plus, with my chronic health issues, I can't do that if I want to be able to function. It wasn't until I shifted my mindset to be like "use this primarily for removing running thoughts from your brain and reducing anxiety with the secondary benefit that it makes the invisible work visible" that I finally could do it.
Anne, I love your challenge to reconceive time as protecting it rather than filling it. It reminds me so much of a good friend of mine in middle and high school, who openly turned down plans in order to prioritize time to relax. "Sorry, I can't go to the mall with you Saturday, I'm watching TV" was her prioritizing herself in the way she needed. She didn't care about her TV more than me - she cared about protecting time to relax so that she wouldn't burn out.
I'm still going to plug away at my template and will share it when I get the core pages done and then keep working on it as a work-in-progress. I also plan to share it freely (but will set up a Buy Me A Coffee page if anyone would like to send me money as a thank you).
Relatedly: I’m 99% sure that the entire basis of credit hours/full load is based on a 40-hr work week and nothing else. I cannot find any evidence whatsoever that 2-hrs for every 1 hour spent in class is efficient for learning. We literally designed a system based on a standard work week, and then we are shocked when people cannot attend full time because they have to work. The arbitrariness of how much work constitutes a credit hour always amazes me.
Interesting read. It makes me want to stab my eyeball out with a toothpick when people assume that just because your calendar is not blocked off that you want to have meetings with them on Zoom on non-urgent matters and at 4 p.m. after having worked an 8-eight hour or 10-hour day already depending on project deadlines. I also think in our hybrid situation that people have not fully transitioned to recognizing when non-urgent things should just wait until you are in the office together and don't need to be calendared. On Monday, I replied to someone "I've already talked to so-and-so about that who is on this invitation for that very issue." I would think someone would understand that this means "Please talk to him and stop sending me this invitation to a Zoom." Instead, he re-sent the invitation and then said "I saw you were free at 4 p.m." That struck me as disrespectful.
In academia, but not an academic. I am creatively depleted and mentally exhausted by the emphasis on "service" and "responsiveness" that is demanded of people who do what I do - that we demand of each other. Your bullet point about creative work suffering inside of monochromic time resonates. Many thoughts.
Fascinating. I will throw in some comments about resisting computer technology as a form of control in academia. That is probably true for many faculty, particularly those under 65. But give a break to those of us who are older (I am 74) and have real trouble wrapping our heads around all the new ways of organizing our lives.
I am part of an advisory group of 12 or so working on a book about the history of the arts in our university. In our numbers we have two people in their 40s, two techies in their 70s, and the rest of us are English majors in our mid-to-late 70s. We are all relatively computer literate, but it seems to be along different lines according to our backgrounds (academics, administrators, writers).
When we started it seemed like every week someone had a new organizational system or app for this or that and we all wasted valuable time trying to get up to speed. We are not sit on our asses retirees—we are all involved in other projects—so whatever time we have is valuable. We have finally settled in on basic communication and organizational tools—and yes, it does include email.
It is *wild* to me that our current construct of time has been in use for less than 150 years. I recently learned that France was the last European country to implement it, and the concept/measurement of time was a hotly debated topic!
I forgot to set my alarm, woke up a half hour late, spent the next 20 minutes in bed reading this newsletter, and now I’m not even tempted to hurry. Thank you.
As a reasonably organized and somewhat tidy person, The Busy Mom Binder is horrifying. Look at all the things you're *supposed* to be doing, according to that thing!
Reading this unlocked a memory of a job I had nine years ago, when I made the jump from arts nonprofit to startup because I thought it would be a nice change. One of the tenets my boss insisted on was NO MEETINGS EVER. I specifically questioned how this would work before taking the job, and he said they just dealt with issues on the fly, NBD.
What this actually looked like was him calling stressful non-meeting meetings or having us come into the one non-open space in the office to discuss something, rendering the experience very "come into the principal's office."
It was a power move, and yes he was probably one of my worst bosses. His desire for no meetings came directly from how many meetings he had when he was an employee, and it broke his understanding of how to be a good manager (or a manager at all).
Time (and its misuse) is a cudgel.
In my life, I feel like a lot of the urge for a daily schedule comes not from work but from having small children, where either you're trying to get them on a schedule or to protect their schedule, in the interest of everyone's emotional wellbeing. Even now with older children, routines and timing are important, especially for sleep and food.
I'm actually finding myself really resistant to the idea that calendar culture is bad (or maybe I'm missing the point)! I think that scheduling in 15 minute blocks is silly and untenable in most situations, but making plans with friends and keeping them? Dealing with logistical issues before they're problems? Having children who (mostly) go to sleep at bedtime and get up in the morning? Blocking time for my Peloton rides because I'll make time for them if they're at 7 pm but not if they're whenever?
I think part of my resistance is that I'm seeing a lot of the things on the "what mono time doesn't get" list that I don't know how to have in my life without scheduling or planning. I have long, meandering conversations with my college friend because we calendar monthly calls and protect the time. How else can two women with demanding careers and five children between them living half a country apart maintain a friendship?
The fun (wrong word?) parts of the "what mono time doesn't get" - rest, conversations, creativity, spontaneity, etc. - only seem accessible to me if I'm scheduling and calendaring to make sure that there's space for those things to happen.