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.
I think there are interesting ideas to unpack here. I started putting all my personal needs and caregiving responsibilities onto Google sun-calendars for two reasons. Primarily, to prevent me from “giving away” the time I need for self care and caregiving to other endeavors, which is easy to do when the schedule looks empty. It helps me to visually demonstrate to my time-blind ADHD brain that I really can’t take on any more new projects right now, because there isn’t any time left over after working for 8 hours and sleeping for 8 hours and keeping ourselves alive and well cared for (and hopefully having some fun) in the remaining 8 hours each day.
The secondary reason was to make clearly visible all the invisible labor that I do. It’s much easier to show my spouse why I’m overwhelmed, and easier to see where I’m overcommitted and need to ask for help. I feel like I’m finally learning to be honest about time, and learning to not constantly steal from my sleep hours to make things work.
Yep. There's a really good Atlantic article out now (https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/10/goop-wellness-culture-self-care-parenting/671699/) about the "wellness" industry and I think it's so fitting that the author refers to herself as the "inadvertent project manager of a four-person unincorporated company, my family." There's just so much to keep track of, and there are serious consequences if it isn't managed.
"This is all absurd, I can hear you thinking. No one needs to do all this stuff. But the thing is, if you don’t do all of it, it’s even worse. Then you have a baby (or two) who wakes up four times a night screaming, the sleepless anxiety of potentially life-threatening allergies that will be all your fault, a back that screams when you walk the 200 feet to the post office. We do the things we do just so we can make it through without falling apart. It’s a paradox, but it’s true."
Trust me, I wish I didn't have to create a project management system, but I do because if I don't become "a military commander of unyielding errands," then things don't get done and there are consequences. For the third time in recent months, my husband once again left the dishes in the sink for two weeks. When I sacrificed my lunch break to do them yesterday, I found a horrible surprise: mold everywhere. I mentally lost it. His response? "well, none of the dishes are mine..." Mine: "I don't care whose they are, the dishes are your chore that you said you'd do and once again I've nagged you over and over and you left me a disgusting mess!"
In reality, the whole system is broken, and I'm trying to fix it with project management as a way to survive. My current favorite "mental load" article is this one: https://threepointsrelationships.com/gen-xs-grand-disappointment/ The sad reality is that women have been expected to do-it-all while men have not. That's why women have all of these calendars and life maintenance tools while men do not. "Men were never asked to be more and do more they way women are. They don’t have the experience of having to be everything and do everything, to master every role and glide through each role transition with grace." Another quote: "Women’s adoption of assertive qualities has been stronger than men’s adoption of nurturant qualities…We don’t raise, nor have we ever raised, boys and men to be intimate partners, but to be strong, competitive performers.”
oof, your first sentence hit me hard. At one point, on Mondays I would leave the house at 7:15am to take a kid to OT, then back to his school, then I would go to work, and I just started filling my calendar with "out of the house" from 7am-9pm because on those days, I was, and I needed something to acknowledge the work I was doing. I have my kids' bus pickups on my calendar because those do mark work that I'm doing every morning, and their bus drop-offs mark the end of time I have to do things without them around. I have a desk calendar on the side of our fridge that I fill with my work schedule and all the kids' stuff because I need that visual acknowledgement that things are happening, and work is being done. My husband works remotely and never puts his schedule on there, but it's been the same for over two years and won't change any time soon, whereas mine changes weekly and I'm also the one who's planning all the kid stuff (even if he ends up being the one to take them to the practices).
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.
Whew, accreditation is so complicated, both the nitty-gritty of it and the ideology of it, right? I have been part of the process (it was one of my tasks one year as a graduate student at the University of Texas) and it was onerous to everyone involved, but I also understood the importance; I have also watched the process play out in my mom's math department at a small state school in a state where the governing body would like to totally defund higher ed if they could get away with it, which also complicates the process significantly. I think it's so important but I also see how for-profit schools game the system and exploit the higher ed aspirations of underserved populations — and I wish there was even more focus on regulating those schools alongside the credentialism focus (I know there's more under this administration, but whew)
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."
It's spread into other things, too, I think. My family all got Covid in February of 2022, and my 5th-grader's teacher made life a bit difficult because we had to fight her for time for my kid to catch up on work. She assumed that we were "just quarantining" and could have accessed all the work over Google Classroom. But we were all sick, including my kid, and I personally was incredibly sick! There's just an assumption now, at least in our district, that kids can do the work when they're sick or on vacation. But . . . they're sick or on vacation!
I still distinctly remember my third grade teacher expecting me to turn in a big project the day I got back from being sick since that was the day it was due. And thinking "lady, I was sick! I can't do homework while I'm sick, that's the point!" I turned it in the next day and she took 10 points off for it being late. Still annoys me decades later.
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.
I do love that about Calendly. Outlook allows you to select your work hours, but they can't be flexible by day. That would go a long way to protecting time - I'm available these hours on Monday and no hours on Friday, etc. It's so frustrating, and it seems like one of the most requested features.
"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).
I'm so sorry that your weekend exploded, including sickness. But also that you had a fun polychronic visit! You are absolutely right, you shouldn't beat yourself up over the non-paid events - life - that happened to make your life full and real. I absolutely hear you. I am one of those who are clamouring to see your template which you should complete if and when you feel like it, not because we are begging you for it, although I will buy you a coffee.
I just want to say that I see you and I too beat myself up over things that are out of my control as if I haven't managed my time properly. It may be true that I haven't prioritized well, but it's also true that I devalue my own self-care which makes what I manage to accomplish weird and disorganized and never satisfying. Anyway. You are amazing for everything you do, and I mean EVERYTHING.
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.
I'm slowly figuring this out. I work in the comm dept of a nonprofit and the production work of everything that I do (CONCEPTS, leaflets, posters, social media posts [including scheduling and writing the posts themselves], etc.) takes time -- so I'm going to try and block off 'production time' on my own calendar, just so I can function without getting scheduled into random meetings at 3 pm on Wednesday. Like ... just because I don't have a meeting scheduled doesn't mean that I'm available for everyone.
I've heard this referred to as "defensive calendaring". The trick is staying true to what it is you (and by "you", I mean "I") need to be doing rather than responding to everyone's emails or whatever. Sigh.
I'm in a similar role to yours, and I do block a few hours for myself every week. It often gets gobbled up by the kind of tasks that were never on my to do list to begin with. But usually by Friday, I have a few uninterrupted hours to do my ACTUAL WORK, and it is bliss.
I LIKE to work. I do not like feeling like every moment of my day has to be measurably productive.
Years pre-pandemic, I shifted my schedule Sun-Thurs. Sunday afternoons were so quiet in the office and I would get so much done without other folks around and, crucially, the week ahead would go much smoother with certain tasks already crossed off.
I still have my Sundays and (surprise!) WFH has been so nice to do work without other people and office noise around. We also have a new-ish CEO who has been ... an adjustment. I'm not looking forward really to the two days/week they want us in.
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.
My mom is a retired academic who is not great with tech, and I would say that her experience was that over the last decade or so of her career, every year brought some new form of tech that was imposed on her without consulting her as to her needs and was often buggy as hell for the year or two it was used before being replaced with a new buggy platform. She was expected to learn all these more or less independently, or with help from an IT person usually just out of college and not very good at or interested in teaching skills to people who struggled with them, and it was a major drain on the time and energy that she wanted to be spending updating her syllabi and meeting with students and so on. And I mean, my mom was a tenured professor at a very good liberal arts college.
A lot of the technology shifted labor to her even as someone accustomed to not relying on department administrative assistants very much. Instead of printing out their papers and turning them in, for instance, students submitted papers online, and she (as a person habituated to reading things on paper) had to print them out herself.
Similarly when I was in grad school, a new online job search portal shifted the job recommendation letter schedule from one where faculty could block out time say every two weeks to do all their letters to one where deadlines were constantly coming up at unpredictable times -- and a couple of my advisors' letters were reliably late as a result.
This is such a good point: "...every year brought some new form of tech that was imposed on her without consulting her as to her needs..."
I teach in a user-centered design program. In class, we talk about this problem almost every week. But it rarely seems to affect our decisions about policies, tools and curriculum.
In weird, backwards way it has also caused a lot of chaos in my own department. Our current leadership includes several people who struggle with new technology. Instead of learning the university's standard tools (Google Calendar and Zoom), they use their own tools instead (Some combination of Outlook, iCalendar and Teams).
I'm sure it's made their lives easier. But everyone else has to monitor more channels, learn more tools and work harder to keep up with appointments and communication.
Yes, this issue of shifting labor is an important part of the story, absolutely. I see this with things like Concur--individual faculty are supposed to use this somewhat glitchy and opaque system to file expense reports, and because they're not actually trained in it, half the time the report gets flagged and sent back because something's missing or wrong. Versus, you know, having a department admin--who actually knows all the line-item account numbers and who handles the budget on a daily basis--do it correctly the first time. Understaffing in those administrative support roles meets a sort of techno-optimism from higher-ups (apps and software imposed without consultation, like you say: Concur! Panopto! Turnitin!) and this is the result.
I'm an academic librarian (and a millennial who has good digital literacy and computer skills) working in a public services reference role, and the vast majority of people I work with are digital natives – Gen Z and millennials – so I do operate with the assumption that most of them will have basic computer skills, because this is accurate. However, I have worked with older folks (and even people in my own generation) who really struggle with basic tasks (things as elementary as typing, knowing how to google something, how to go to a known website without googling the name of the site, how to open something in a new tab, basic use of a word processor, etc.) and it's been incredibly eye-opening for me as I re-evaluate how I can teach basic 21st century research methodologies to someone who barely knows how to use a computer. So much of what is necessary for students today relies on basic computer literacy.
I do rely a lot on annotated screenshots and step-by-step instructions, and do my level best to be as patient as possible and anticipate needs, meet people where they are, etc. But it's hard to know what to do when someone has enrolled in a university program and doesn't know how to open Word or use Google.
That said I really appreciate you making these points; if we really believe in intergenerational dialogue and working together effectively, we have to do things in a sensible way. I hate innovation for its own sake, especially when that "innovation" is just another online platform that no one uses or that doesn't really work.
My mom is 84 and starting to have some cognitive decline as well as vision issues, and she's always been averse to new technology. Every time Yahoo Mail changes up their interface she forgets how to send messages because stuff gets moved around on the screen or icons replace words. I wish she could opt into keeping an arrangement that works for her. Same with the bank.
Ironically, she doesn't seem to have issues with buying stuff online, which tells me that the sales portals have figured out that it makes sense to make things easy for the users.
The frustration with the endless WebEx/Teams/BlueJeans/Skype/etc updates of 2010-2020 was pretty universal - even my grad students got caught in that. It is always worse whenever you involves multiple institutions, all using different platforms.
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!
Haha why am I not surprised to hear this. All my French colleagues routinely take 3-4 weeks off in July-August, are often late or do not make scheduled meetings, and do not have evening meetings period. I’m trying to learn their ways..
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.
This is so, so, so true.
I think there are interesting ideas to unpack here. I started putting all my personal needs and caregiving responsibilities onto Google sun-calendars for two reasons. Primarily, to prevent me from “giving away” the time I need for self care and caregiving to other endeavors, which is easy to do when the schedule looks empty. It helps me to visually demonstrate to my time-blind ADHD brain that I really can’t take on any more new projects right now, because there isn’t any time left over after working for 8 hours and sleeping for 8 hours and keeping ourselves alive and well cared for (and hopefully having some fun) in the remaining 8 hours each day.
The secondary reason was to make clearly visible all the invisible labor that I do. It’s much easier to show my spouse why I’m overwhelmed, and easier to see where I’m overcommitted and need to ask for help. I feel like I’m finally learning to be honest about time, and learning to not constantly steal from my sleep hours to make things work.
Yep. There's a really good Atlantic article out now (https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/10/goop-wellness-culture-self-care-parenting/671699/) about the "wellness" industry and I think it's so fitting that the author refers to herself as the "inadvertent project manager of a four-person unincorporated company, my family." There's just so much to keep track of, and there are serious consequences if it isn't managed.
"This is all absurd, I can hear you thinking. No one needs to do all this stuff. But the thing is, if you don’t do all of it, it’s even worse. Then you have a baby (or two) who wakes up four times a night screaming, the sleepless anxiety of potentially life-threatening allergies that will be all your fault, a back that screams when you walk the 200 feet to the post office. We do the things we do just so we can make it through without falling apart. It’s a paradox, but it’s true."
Trust me, I wish I didn't have to create a project management system, but I do because if I don't become "a military commander of unyielding errands," then things don't get done and there are consequences. For the third time in recent months, my husband once again left the dishes in the sink for two weeks. When I sacrificed my lunch break to do them yesterday, I found a horrible surprise: mold everywhere. I mentally lost it. His response? "well, none of the dishes are mine..." Mine: "I don't care whose they are, the dishes are your chore that you said you'd do and once again I've nagged you over and over and you left me a disgusting mess!"
In reality, the whole system is broken, and I'm trying to fix it with project management as a way to survive. My current favorite "mental load" article is this one: https://threepointsrelationships.com/gen-xs-grand-disappointment/ The sad reality is that women have been expected to do-it-all while men have not. That's why women have all of these calendars and life maintenance tools while men do not. "Men were never asked to be more and do more they way women are. They don’t have the experience of having to be everything and do everything, to master every role and glide through each role transition with grace." Another quote: "Women’s adoption of assertive qualities has been stronger than men’s adoption of nurturant qualities…We don’t raise, nor have we ever raised, boys and men to be intimate partners, but to be strong, competitive performers.”
oof, your first sentence hit me hard. At one point, on Mondays I would leave the house at 7:15am to take a kid to OT, then back to his school, then I would go to work, and I just started filling my calendar with "out of the house" from 7am-9pm because on those days, I was, and I needed something to acknowledge the work I was doing. I have my kids' bus pickups on my calendar because those do mark work that I'm doing every morning, and their bus drop-offs mark the end of time I have to do things without them around. I have a desk calendar on the side of our fridge that I fill with my work schedule and all the kids' stuff because I need that visual acknowledgement that things are happening, and work is being done. My husband works remotely and never puts his schedule on there, but it's been the same for over two years and won't change any time soon, whereas mine changes weekly and I'm also the one who's planning all the kid stuff (even if he ends up being the one to take them to the practices).
You are doing a lot of work to keep a lot of lives thriving and it deserves it be acknowledged as work!
yes!!
“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.
Whew, accreditation is so complicated, both the nitty-gritty of it and the ideology of it, right? I have been part of the process (it was one of my tasks one year as a graduate student at the University of Texas) and it was onerous to everyone involved, but I also understood the importance; I have also watched the process play out in my mom's math department at a small state school in a state where the governing body would like to totally defund higher ed if they could get away with it, which also complicates the process significantly. I think it's so important but I also see how for-profit schools game the system and exploit the higher ed aspirations of underserved populations — and I wish there was even more focus on regulating those schools alongside the credentialism focus (I know there's more under this administration, but whew)
I would definitely read your writing about this.
And yes, same!!!!
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."
It's spread into other things, too, I think. My family all got Covid in February of 2022, and my 5th-grader's teacher made life a bit difficult because we had to fight her for time for my kid to catch up on work. She assumed that we were "just quarantining" and could have accessed all the work over Google Classroom. But we were all sick, including my kid, and I personally was incredibly sick! There's just an assumption now, at least in our district, that kids can do the work when they're sick or on vacation. But . . . they're sick or on vacation!
I still distinctly remember my third grade teacher expecting me to turn in a big project the day I got back from being sick since that was the day it was due. And thinking "lady, I was sick! I can't do homework while I'm sick, that's the point!" I turned it in the next day and she took 10 points off for it being late. Still annoys me decades later.
As it should — that’s awful!
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.
I do love that about Calendly. Outlook allows you to select your work hours, but they can't be flexible by day. That would go a long way to protecting time - I'm available these hours on Monday and no hours on Friday, etc. It's so frustrating, and it seems like one of the most requested features.
My Outlook calendar is mostly just blocks of time marked off called "BLOCK" to keep time free.
"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.
Lehrer you brilliant labor commie
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).
I'm so sorry that your weekend exploded, including sickness. But also that you had a fun polychronic visit! You are absolutely right, you shouldn't beat yourself up over the non-paid events - life - that happened to make your life full and real. I absolutely hear you. I am one of those who are clamouring to see your template which you should complete if and when you feel like it, not because we are begging you for it, although I will buy you a coffee.
I just want to say that I see you and I too beat myself up over things that are out of my control as if I haven't managed my time properly. It may be true that I haven't prioritized well, but it's also true that I devalue my own self-care which makes what I manage to accomplish weird and disorganized and never satisfying. Anyway. You are amazing for everything you do, and I mean EVERYTHING.
Thank you so much, Sera! Your comment made my day!!
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.
Ooooh there's a parallel track here where a standard workweek assumed that there was a FT stay at home person to handle food/cleaning/etc.
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.
I'm slowly figuring this out. I work in the comm dept of a nonprofit and the production work of everything that I do (CONCEPTS, leaflets, posters, social media posts [including scheduling and writing the posts themselves], etc.) takes time -- so I'm going to try and block off 'production time' on my own calendar, just so I can function without getting scheduled into random meetings at 3 pm on Wednesday. Like ... just because I don't have a meeting scheduled doesn't mean that I'm available for everyone.
I've heard this referred to as "defensive calendaring". The trick is staying true to what it is you (and by "you", I mean "I") need to be doing rather than responding to everyone's emails or whatever. Sigh.
'staying true to what you/i need to be doing rather than responding to everyone else' -- yup; this is a good guiding principle.
I'm in a similar role to yours, and I do block a few hours for myself every week. It often gets gobbled up by the kind of tasks that were never on my to do list to begin with. But usually by Friday, I have a few uninterrupted hours to do my ACTUAL WORK, and it is bliss.
I LIKE to work. I do not like feeling like every moment of my day has to be measurably productive.
Years pre-pandemic, I shifted my schedule Sun-Thurs. Sunday afternoons were so quiet in the office and I would get so much done without other folks around and, crucially, the week ahead would go much smoother with certain tasks already crossed off.
I still have my Sundays and (surprise!) WFH has been so nice to do work without other people and office noise around. We also have a new-ish CEO who has been ... an adjustment. I'm not looking forward really to the two days/week they want us in.
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.
My mom is a retired academic who is not great with tech, and I would say that her experience was that over the last decade or so of her career, every year brought some new form of tech that was imposed on her without consulting her as to her needs and was often buggy as hell for the year or two it was used before being replaced with a new buggy platform. She was expected to learn all these more or less independently, or with help from an IT person usually just out of college and not very good at or interested in teaching skills to people who struggled with them, and it was a major drain on the time and energy that she wanted to be spending updating her syllabi and meeting with students and so on. And I mean, my mom was a tenured professor at a very good liberal arts college.
A lot of the technology shifted labor to her even as someone accustomed to not relying on department administrative assistants very much. Instead of printing out their papers and turning them in, for instance, students submitted papers online, and she (as a person habituated to reading things on paper) had to print them out herself.
Similarly when I was in grad school, a new online job search portal shifted the job recommendation letter schedule from one where faculty could block out time say every two weeks to do all their letters to one where deadlines were constantly coming up at unpredictable times -- and a couple of my advisors' letters were reliably late as a result.
This is such a good point: "...every year brought some new form of tech that was imposed on her without consulting her as to her needs..."
I teach in a user-centered design program. In class, we talk about this problem almost every week. But it rarely seems to affect our decisions about policies, tools and curriculum.
In weird, backwards way it has also caused a lot of chaos in my own department. Our current leadership includes several people who struggle with new technology. Instead of learning the university's standard tools (Google Calendar and Zoom), they use their own tools instead (Some combination of Outlook, iCalendar and Teams).
I'm sure it's made their lives easier. But everyone else has to monitor more channels, learn more tools and work harder to keep up with appointments and communication.
Yes, this issue of shifting labor is an important part of the story, absolutely. I see this with things like Concur--individual faculty are supposed to use this somewhat glitchy and opaque system to file expense reports, and because they're not actually trained in it, half the time the report gets flagged and sent back because something's missing or wrong. Versus, you know, having a department admin--who actually knows all the line-item account numbers and who handles the budget on a daily basis--do it correctly the first time. Understaffing in those administrative support roles meets a sort of techno-optimism from higher-ups (apps and software imposed without consultation, like you say: Concur! Panopto! Turnitin!) and this is the result.
I'm an academic librarian (and a millennial who has good digital literacy and computer skills) working in a public services reference role, and the vast majority of people I work with are digital natives – Gen Z and millennials – so I do operate with the assumption that most of them will have basic computer skills, because this is accurate. However, I have worked with older folks (and even people in my own generation) who really struggle with basic tasks (things as elementary as typing, knowing how to google something, how to go to a known website without googling the name of the site, how to open something in a new tab, basic use of a word processor, etc.) and it's been incredibly eye-opening for me as I re-evaluate how I can teach basic 21st century research methodologies to someone who barely knows how to use a computer. So much of what is necessary for students today relies on basic computer literacy.
I do rely a lot on annotated screenshots and step-by-step instructions, and do my level best to be as patient as possible and anticipate needs, meet people where they are, etc. But it's hard to know what to do when someone has enrolled in a university program and doesn't know how to open Word or use Google.
That said I really appreciate you making these points; if we really believe in intergenerational dialogue and working together effectively, we have to do things in a sensible way. I hate innovation for its own sake, especially when that "innovation" is just another online platform that no one uses or that doesn't really work.
My mom is 84 and starting to have some cognitive decline as well as vision issues, and she's always been averse to new technology. Every time Yahoo Mail changes up their interface she forgets how to send messages because stuff gets moved around on the screen or icons replace words. I wish she could opt into keeping an arrangement that works for her. Same with the bank.
Ironically, she doesn't seem to have issues with buying stuff online, which tells me that the sales portals have figured out that it makes sense to make things easy for the users.
The frustration with the endless WebEx/Teams/BlueJeans/Skype/etc updates of 2010-2020 was pretty universal - even my grad students got caught in that. It is always worse whenever you involves multiple institutions, all using different platforms.
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!
Haha why am I not surprised to hear this. All my French colleagues routinely take 3-4 weeks off in July-August, are often late or do not make scheduled meetings, and do not have evening meetings period. I’m trying to learn their ways..
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.