Shorten the work week

I opted to pause writing for a while this summer after a successful #1000wordsofsummer, partly to take a break and partly because my partner was getting foot surgery in July. I didn’t see how I could maintain both the time and mental space to be creative on top of the day job demands, the dog, and whatever other responsibilities I had to pick up around the house.

Though the surgery itself was relatively minor (no physical therapy or anything like that needed), Chris had to stay completely off his foot for over two weeks before slowly, gingerly, putting weight back on it. Even though the pain was overall more achey than hurty, the most he could do that was use crutches to carry himself from the bed on one end of the apartment to the couch on the other. It’s frustrating, to be rendered suddenly helpless. 

I anticipated walking the dog would be my sole responsibility while he recuperated, as would preparing meals, washing dishes, cleaning the kitchen, etc etc etc. I anticipated the extra time this would take. What I did not anticipate was how draining all of this could be. That worn feeling, not the kind of tired like I didn’t get enough sleep or I worked out really hard, but that feeling of being worn inside my bones.

It wasn’t just the physical labor that was so draining but the emotional and mental labor too. To constantly check in, to ask, to remember remember remember to do all these other little tasks, and ones that you’re not used to doing. None of this stuff was hard by itself (e.g. bringing him lunch) but they were just more that had to be slotted around all the other work and home and dog things. Together, they can crowd up your mind, like you keep shoving more and more stuff onto a shelf, and what was once tidy and organized is a heap of shit threatening to fall on your head. 

But as Pop said in Moonstruck, the greatest film of all time, everything is temporary.

That worn feeling passed after a couple weeks, once I recalibrated to a new rhythm, and Chris’s foot was healing well enough that he could start putting weight on it, and we could return to pieces of our old routine.

I can’t help but feel relief that we had no kids to also worry about, just a mouthy dog. Relief too that both of us could work from home, that we could afford to pay someone to clean the apartment, that we could order food. All of this eased the burden of both working a job and taking care of someone.

Friends, a couple, bought a house last year, an adorable brick one with a beautiful, huge backyard garden. They have a toddler and they both work fulltime. They want to cut back on work hours: maybe she goes part-time and he demotes himself from his leadership position so he can work four days instead of five. Caring for the garden and the house and a toddler, they said, is a lot of work, a lot of time and a lot of energy. A weekend isn’t quite enough to manage all the tasks needed to maintain and sustain their life plus give them time to rest, pursue hobbies, spend time with friends, to not work.

You might have heard about that study out of Iceland last month, that showed the positive affects of a four-day work week? This prompted a question to the CEO of my company in a meeting, if we would ever move to a four-day week. He hedged, of course.

What my company has been doing is Summer Fridays, and by that I mean half days on Fridays, not this fake summer Friday thing some do where you have to “make up” the hours during the week. We get a full half day. (Not too big a stretch to go down to a four-day week?!?!?!) Even if I don’t take the full half day, shutting off my computer at 3pm instead of 6pm feels like a blessing. I’ve been given the gift of time! I take the dog for meandering walks without rushing through the park to get to my next meeting, I check on my plants, I start dinner a little earlier. Every once in a while I’ll schedule a massage, but usually that extra three-four hours is spent doing some kind of dog, plant, or home care.

A thing my friend with the big garden observed that’s been rattling around in my head: the labor of thinking about the home tends to fall to one person. I’d wager that in the majority of cis-het relationships, that role falls to the woman. And I certainly feel that, felt that more acutely as Chris recuperated. That time was really temporary, a handful of weeks, but thinking about, caring for, working on the home and the general business of running a home? That’s much less so. It feels like it never ends.

The discussions on shorter works weeks can focus on how workers (knowledge workers, office workers) can be as productive if not more so in four days instead of five. That argument might help the bosses feel better about not losing productivity (and therefore, money) with one less work day. But that misses the point that we work outside of the office too. We have children and pets to take care of, homes to maintain. Work is required outside the office so that when we show up to the office, we’re able to do that kind of work too. These spheres are not separate, as this past year and a half as clearly demonstarted.

The fact that a four-day week or even permanent Summer Fridays is being openly discussed at work, and that there was not a definite “no” signals that at least in certain corners, productivity is being re-revaulated, as well as what kind of demands a job can make of you and your time. Though the 4-day week dicussions can focus on that crew, we should remember the doctors, nurses, nannies, caregivers, service workers and every kind of worker. Burnout is affecting everyone, everyone needs time to rest and to have a life.

It would be so great, wouldn’t it, to have a permanent half day or one full extra day in the week to do things that you need to do, but without the rush and stress and sometimes half-assing it when you try to shove those chores around other chores, around other obligations?

I like my job a lot and feel lucky that I found my way to a career that is creative and challenging and pays well. But I do not want to spend all my time thinking about that work. I’m fantasizing about what else I could do with permanent extra time beyond the routine/home tasks: volunteering, working on art projects, seeing friends and family, and writing of course. All those things are deserving of care and attention, just as much if not more so than our paid work.

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Let me work from home forever, please

I am a person who craves solitude, who needs it in order to function, both in that fill up / replenish energy way and to actually do my work.

So I have not been sad about the forced working from home the past year+. Before, I’d feel a pinch of guilt, wondering how far I could push my boss before they subtly hinted that they “missed” me in the office and would I be in for that Friday meeting?

I hope this past year means I won’t ever have to go back into an office again, except maaaaaybe on occasion. This might not be possible; office leadership has started talking about “when we’re all together again” and re-opening offices in September. They haven’t used the word “family” but that’s the vibe I get. Is everyone desperate to go back to an office, to work among many other people, but me? 

I get missing colleagues, I do miss IRL facetime with mine, and the impromptu coffee breaks and chatter about what you watched last night, or plans for the weekend. For me, the benefits of working from home far outweigh missing that facetime. Not seeing my friends and actual family, the sameness of these walls, that is what is making my nuts, is making me sad.  Not working from home.

I get that some professions are better suited for in-person (teaching, arts, jobs at labs, travel industry jobs and so on) but a design and ad agency? To some, the answer is “yes.” My office prides itself on being collaborative, of different disciplines (the visual designer, the product designer, a creative director, a content strategist, etc) shut into a glass-walled conference room and attacking a whiteboard with sharp lines and loose squiggles. As a researcher, I am sometimes in on these “working sessions,” and I love them. I love feeling part of the process, of making my own squiggle lines, of batting ideas back and forth. It is a needed break from the solo hours I need in order to plan research studies and analyze data. 

But I also see that we can collaborate just fine remotely. Maybe it does work better to be in person. I don’t know, it all depends on you, your team. It still feels strange to me to hear someone in leadership talk in such glowing terms about “being together.” We are colleagues, not a family. And I’m fine in my quiet office at home, and so grateful I have this space. And yet, I felt the energy of being together. I too, am tired of Zoom. 

Where to go from here? Wherever it is, I hope there is flexibility. I hope this year has shown us, especially our bosses, that we need more understanding about our colleagues’ lives. We’ve seen the cats clomping over the keyboard, the babies sitting in laps, kids peeking over their caregiver’s shoulder, heard the dogs howling at the front door. Feeling supported is what we need, not an arbitrary demand on where we do our work. 

I wonder about control, and how much of the general push to go back to in-person work is about bosses wanting more control over their employees’ schedules and work lives. Productivity software already exists for this (and thankfully not something I’ve used). And it’s a ridiculous idea, right? Why do we have such a hard time trusting our colleagues? Trust that we’re all trying, trust that we’ll meet our deadlines. Shouldn’t that be the starting point, an assumed thing? The energy of monitoring could be so much better spent cultivating a supportive work environment, and seeing employees as people with messy lives. Not productivity machines.

Anyways, there are good reasons to work from home and work in-person and crappy ones for both. What I want is for that to be acknowledged and to be able to choose where I work best. That’s what most of us want, to be trusted to make the decisions that work best for us. 

This post was inspired by Anne Helen Petersen’s newsletter Culture Study. Her newsletter is one of my faves for the interviews with fascinating people you didn’t know you wanted to meet and thoughtful takes on cultural topics as wide ranging as work, gender, and the Baylor influencer twins.

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How algorithms break things

We’re finally into February, and I hope this month trots by at good clip, instead of the slogging along like January. There’s over a foot of snow in Chicago, and I’m drinking Irish coffees and making galettes for dinner -- seriously it’s an easy, flexible dish that will leave you feeling fancy and sated. Pair with a glass of wine and a green salad and indulge in a fantasy that you’re in a Parisian bistro, or any bistro. 

In between my food and drink indulgences, I’ve been thinking more and more about the not sexy but interesting and vital work of process, that is what systems are in place that allow, for example, teams to function well, that allows products to be designed and built, or in the case below, that fairly allocate vaccines.

I’ve touched on this before, about the behind-the-scenes, often invisible, thinking that goes into the products and services we use. But here’s a case that shows how that thinking can be riddled with blind spots.

This article details how Stanford Medicine botched their vaccine rollout. An algorithm gave priority to doctors who were not the ones on the front lines seeing Covid patients over those who were. Any person in charge would surely place those who would face the most risk at the top of the list, not the bottom. 

Besides flaws in the construction of the algorithm itself, there was a very human issue: at no point did the medical workers get any visibility into why they were placed where they were in the line to get the vaccine. It sounds like it had the feel of being assigned a random number, vs one programmed with a set of decision criteria. 

A core problem was one of process. Throughout the whole process of deciding who will get the shot first, from building and running the program, to communicating its “decision,” the people in charge didn’t include time to communicate with or provide transparency to the staff about how and why those decisions were made.

The algorithm also failed to take in feedback from the frontlines, which would have immediately alerted officials to significant problems with the algorithm.

Algorithms can be created because of a real desire for fairness, which is a great thing, especially in a case like this with a life-saving vaccine in short supply. They can also be deployed for cost-saving reasons, whether it is money and/or labor. Either way, what often ends up happening is those in charge punt the problem to an algorithm and walk away, as if the machine alone can fix it.

This Stanford Medicine example illustrates why this is a faulty way of thinking and the frustration and confusion and risk involved when we just toss out algorithmic decisions with a shoulder shrug. These programs clearly don’t fit neatly into our lives, into whatever processes we, our hospitals, our workplaces, have already established. They break them. 

I keep thinking, what if a couple of doctors or nurses or anyone on the medical staff were brought into the process early on, before the vaccine allocations were announced. What if the medical staff were asked, simply, “What do you think of this? What’s missing or confusing?” No doubt Stanford would have heard and seen their concerns. They would have been able to course-correct before rolling out their program to everyone. Before creating a disaster.

What this shows is, we need to rethink our relationship to AI, to the kinds of algorithms used by Stanford Medicine. We think we can simply delegate tasks, but maybe thinking about it as a partnership is better. We humans have to figure out how to work with these tools and how to reimagine our work, our processes to account for the breakage wrought by algorithms. New systems must be designed with the input from those affected. People need to be part of this reimagining. 

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Thinking about objects we love and why we love them

For me and my fellow planner junkies, the beginning of a new year means a new planner. I’ve been dying to use the most beautiful planner I’ve ever held in my hands, the Hobonichi Cousin, since I ordered it in August. Truly, the quality of the design is top-notch. I’m sure my life will just be better because I’m using this planner. Do you know what I mean? That certain objects or tools can make us feel this mix of joy, satisfaction, and certainty that no matter the chaos in other aspects of our lives, in this one way there’ll be calm? Peace. 

So I bought the Hobonichi Cousin because it is the rare planner that contains monthly, weekly, and daily spreads all in one book. It started out as pure function. But I fell in love once I held it in my hands. The weight and shape of it make me feel like I’m holding an actual book, not a notebook, which is better somehow. The feel of it makes me want to use it. The pages are thin and smooth like silk and yet make a satisfying crisp crinkle with every page turn. The layout is elegant AF. Even the week layout, which includes a 24-hour time table for every day of the week takes up a mere two pages. It’s extraordinary how some tidy lines and columns make this otherwise empty collection of papers something I want to fill in. When I cram my nose to the spine, there is even a subtle aroma, like rainwater on damp paper (I do not have a sponsorship deal with Hobonichi but I 1000% would). 

I’m marveling at the amount of thinking that went into the design of this planner, that goes into any really well-designed item. It’s usually imperceptible that a team of minds is in the background, thinking hard about how something should look and feel and function. They went through numerous iterations before getting to the finished product. But the finished thing, like this planner, can seem so right that it appears to have come into being fully formed rather than through trial and error, like Athena exploding out of Zeus’s head. 

I’m sure (I hope!) you can think of objects in your own life that are just so good or so perfect at being what they are. Like an article of clothing that fits your body just right can make you feel cool, sophisticated, confident, sexy, stylish, the right object can make performing some task easier, more efficient, more pleasurable. Maybe it’s the keyboard that makes a satisfying clack when you type, the office chair that gives your back proper support, a good non-stick pan makes for easier clean-up, and a wide cutting board with a just-sharpened knife makes tasks like chopping vegetables faster and more satisfying. 

Having the right items, I think, can make small, subtle, but important improvements in our lives. But sometimes we hold onto items past the point of their usefulness, past the point where they’ve started to annoy us. And yet we keep them around, like those old sweaters and jeans that don’t really fit anymore, that make us feel schlumpy, frumpy, messy. Why do we do this, why do we hold onto things that we should let go of? 

Time gets me all the time. It takes time to find the right item, whether it’s trying out a bunch of paper planners or testing out calendar apps. That time could be better spent doing any number of things, like watching a movie or sleeping or working. Sometimes it’s stubbornness, or laziness. Inertia is pretty powerful. Maybe we think we don’t really deserve nice things. Maybe spending the money seems like a waste. Sometimes the budget just doesn’t allow it. Dropping a significant sum on one single purchase that might not be worth it is nerve-wracking. 

I stubbornly held onto an IKEA desk that I’m pretty sure was made for kids, for years. I bought it at a time when I had limited space and a limited funds for a desk, but I kept it well past the point where it’s smallness became a distraction. It’s fine, it’s fine, I thought as I put off the purchase of an adult-sized desk for months and months before finally clicking the buy button. Now I see what an idiot I was for not doing it sooner, for not investing in my own sanity or my own ability to work and focus. If I could only have quantified the mental effort I spent convincing myself a bad desk was working, maybe it would have been easier to spend the cash on something new sooner.

I suppose that’s one reason why all these reviews sites like Wirecutter, The Strategist, and CNET have popped up, why we’ve come to rely on star ratings on everything from restaurant reviews to shoes, to give us the piece of mind that spending time and/or beaucoup bucks on something won’t be a waste, that we won’t regret it.

I wonder what it would look like if we went around our homes and gave all our things star ratings. And then we’d have to get rid of all the 1-star things and some (maybe all?) of the 2-star things too. Like Marie Kondo meets Amazon. What are the 4- and 5 star items left, those that actually work really really well in some way?

My point is not about how we should only buy the best products or how January is such a great time to do some kind of things-purge. Rather, I’m thinking about what tools (physical objects or digital products) we use in our own lives that really fit us, those 5-star items. There are thousands and thousands of products on the market and literally millions of apps we can download that purport to make our lives easier or more fun. Which ones actually do? Why?

It can be deeply personal. For me, I prefer a paper planner over digital because I enjoy the act of writing and holding the planner in my hands. And I need a planner because I need to know what tasks to tackle and what to look forward to, which has become ever more important during this pandemic. Otherwise I sit on the couch watching endless episodes of Bob’s Burgers on Hulu (with the commercials because I haven’t yet upped to the ad-free tier :/) and feel crappy about it, the feeling of wasting time adding to my increased anxiety levels.

Of course there are scads of planners available and I’ve tried many. The Hobonichi Cousin is working for me right now. I hope you have something in your own life that is working really well for you. What is it? What do you use it for? Why does it matter? I bet we all have radically different answers to this question. Or is everyone thinking about a planner?!

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Trying to imagine a future beyond 2020

I’ve been thinking a lot more lately about the future. It started with money. The pandemic has thrown many things into sharp relief and long term financial stability is one of them. But imagining what that magical time of retirement will be like completely overwhelms me. This year crashed into me, into all of us, like a freight train. How do you plan for the decades ahead when it feels like anything can actually happen?

By future I mean beyond the next few years. I mean the next decade, I mean the next 20, 50, 100 years. What will the world of your golden years look like? What sort of world will your great grandchildren see, hear, smell, experience? I’m sure I’m not the only one who struggles with long-term thinking. New technologies and ways of communicating with each other keep pushing us to the bounds of what we understand, and are comfortable with. 

In the 1950s computers were huge machines that could weigh over 2,000 pounds. Nowadays we carry tiny computers (that can also make phone calls!) in our pockets. It took 182 years to build Notre Dame. There’s this particular kind of awe that washes over you when you stand at the foot of some huge and solid structure, knowing it’s been around for centuries, knowing it will out last you. Notre Dame, though charred, still stands. I know my pocket-sized computer will not outlast me, or maybe even next year. It, along with Facebook and Twitter, were invented after I graduated from college. Kids these days apparently don’t know how to use a rotary phone. So who can easily think in terms of 100, 200 years when tremendous shifts in something as basic as how humans communicate happened in less than 20 years?

So I marvel at the people who could continue showing up to work on one piece of Notre Dame, knowing they wouldn’t live to see the finished result. Maybe their great grandchildren would see it finished. But would they have pictured the world that those great grandchildren lived in as very different from theirs?

Trying to predict the future

We always want to know what the future will bring. We’ve used fortune tellers, crystal balls, oracles, our own imagination. Now we’ve added technology and sophisticated math, algorithms and polling and modeling, to the mix.

The worlds we try to predict are informed by our knowledge of and experience of what’s occurring now, if not what happened in the past. In some instances, software created with AI that we use to help make decisions, such as who should get a bank loan, who should or should not get parole because they’re more likely to commit a crime, are designed with reams of historical data that predict what might happen. Because the data is historical and because the programs are created by humans (often white, male humans) the results are algorithms that can be loaded with racial bias, gender bias, bias of any kind. Real harm can come to people because of these baked-in biases. You might not get that loan, or be denied parole not because of you but because of the algorithm. (I oversimplify, but see Weapons of Math Destruction for an eye-popping exploration of these topics).

On the other hand, programs using AI that are created and integrated into systems with thought and care, can literally saves lives. My point here isn’t to get into good or bad AI (I will do that in another letter). My point is, it’s hard to envision the next decade, the next generation, even at times the next few hours, but we’re harnessing as much computing power as possible to help see through that fog. If only we knew what would happen we could be better prepared. If only we knew who would actually commit a crime. If only I knew how long I needed to save money for, if only if only, I could make smarter decisions.

It’s scary not to know. We can only really make good guesses and bad guesses. Even the most informed are still guesses. 2020 has shown this to all of us. The future is murky, and I sometimes feel overwhelmed by it, and how my tiny little world will be affected.

However, far more imaginative people than me have clearer visions of the decades ahead, and are stretching their imaginations way beyond the next month, the next year. 

Imagining the future

Trying to figure out things like bank loans and saving money are like small potatoes compared to climate change. Even as we see, if not experience ourselves, the effects of climate change (more hurricanes, more fires etc), it’s still difficult to connect that experience to a greater whole, like to the polar ice caps melting. And then, what can you do about it, since individualist action alone will not save us? The sheer scale of this problem can be shattering whereas a few hundred years ago, the scale of our world was the size of Notre Dame. However, Greta Thunberg, climate change activists, scientists, the incoming Biden administration, are thinking decades ahead, to what the state of our whole planet could be, and they’re pushing the rest of us to do the same.

In another example, the protests over the summer brought national attention to the movement to defund the police (meaning reallocating money in police budgets to social, health, and community services). It seems to me the activists who’ve been pushing for these measures have a vision of what the future could look like, depending if we maintain the status quo or if we try something new. They have been posing tough questions: what might our cities and our communities look like if there was more funding for community health programs? If instead of calling the police for wellness checks, we called social workers, mental health professionals, crisis intervention teams? They’re asking of us, can you imagine a world where anyone who needed mental health support actually received it?

There are plenty of other writers, artists, thinkers who have been thinking long and hard about what the future could be. You probably know some.

The pandemic has given us an opportunity to think more deeply about the future, about the future we want to have, not the one we’re stuck in. Maybe it’s a little too early to broach this conversation with COVID-19 cases in the U.S. and many other parts of the world rising as they are. But I’m jumping in anyway. The pandemic has shaken up our routines, changed our behavior, and thoroughly upended the idea of “normal.” Scientists have been able to listen to the Earth in new ways, there’s been a sudden drop in CO2. Maybe there’s something in all the chaos and stress and anxiety we can learn from. Michele Norris on The Michelle Obama Podcast said something like, “Let’s not reach for normal, let’s reach for better.”

So what is better? Climate activists, the movement to defund the police, have visions for what is better. There are surely others looking ahead and imagining the possibilities. That is something I want to take with me into 2021: possibility instead of the lonely havoc of 2020. My world right now feels really small, like I can only see the end of my own nose. Perhaps that’s part of the problem, thinking so narrowly in terms of what I want and I need.  The people who built Notre Dame, I doubt they thought so narrowly. To work on such a grand project for so long I would think they imagined beyond their own bubble. Activists certainly aren’t thinking in bubbles.

So here’s a not-bad thing about the pandemic, I hope: more imaginative thinking. We aren’t able to use a crystal ball or algorithms to predict the exact future we’ll end up with. But we have the smarts and tools and resources to progress toward a future we do want.

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