I did not get much done today aside from making a few corrections on syllabi and clearing out a bunch of emails. In truth, today has been a pretty piss poor day even for non-work productivity. No additions to the book catalogue. No blog posts (until now). No podcast editing. No editing editing. Really, not a whole lot of anything got done.
I imagine we’ll see many of these over the next few weeks, especially now that Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz (who I voted for (thankfully)), has issued a shelter-in-place order. Part of this is actually my own doing: I made a pact with myself that “home” would be a separate zone from “work” solely so I can maintain a bit of critical distance; now those two have to come together, and that’s creating…issues. Part of this is only kinda my doing: working and working and working, even when you’re doing things you actually like, can be enormously draining, and I definitely hit my burnout point several years ago when I was still in grad school.
None of this is helped by being mostly trapped in an apartment. I take walks, but I’m also not really interacting with folks, whether in a work setting or out in the world. Text messages are, weirdly enough, not a sufficient replacement for someone who fancies themselves an introvert with extrovert qualities.
Normally, I’d beat myself up pretty bad over this. I hate not getting things done. I hate doing a whole lot of “not the stuff I’m meant to do” and that endless cycle of constantly putting things off and then not doing stuff you’d like to do because you feel guilty about not doing the things you should do.
But I’m going to try not to beat myself up over it here. The reality is that there’s a lot going on — at work, at home, in the world, among my friends, among my family. And it seems absurd to hold myself overly accountable in a situation as hectic as a pandemic. I wasn’t all that productive today. Oh well. There are going to be a lot of days like this to come. Let’s try to put the breaks on the self-destruction, shall we?
None of which comes easy, of course. American culture has an absolutely pathological obsession with productivity over all things. Politicians and pundits of a certain political persuasion are literally arguing that we should send folks back to work to protect the economy even if that means a whole lot of folks might die. It’s essentially the modern version of Swift’s A Modest Proposal, just without the literal cannibalism — capitalism is figurative cannibalism.
So, I’m taking it as my duty as a member of a semi-elite class (ahem, academia) to push against this, both in how I try to treat myself and in how I treat my students. We don’t need absolute productivity. We don’t need to get everything done right now except those things necessary for our physical and mental survival. If that means ripping through a TV show, writing blog posts that have nothing to do with your work, reading a book, going on a walk, playing a game, or doing almost anything other than the thing you’re “supposed to be doing,” then so be it.
Onward we go…
