I do wonder whether my having become a lighter sleeper has something to do with me working in our basement and thus having less exposure to natural light.
My ideal workstation is in something like a climate-controlled, outdoor telephone booth:
Geez, Steve
We’re gonna need you to leave
We’re just trying get some work done
Please, Steve
Don’t act so bereaved
Can’t you see we’re working under the gun? ✏️ 🎤 🎵
percentage of adult household members holding a full-time job ∝ (frequency of dinner guests hosted by that household)-1
Uncommitted time I anticipate with pleasure, but planned time I often anticipate with a low level of discontent, even if it’s time I planned for pleasure. Why is that?
[edit, 8/13/24]: I think it’s planned social time that evokes the mild discontent—and I think it’s because I still hold an idolatrous candle for solo productive time. After all these years, GTD is still my god. Sigh.
Note to self: When you find yourself reflecting unhappily about your job being helping make truck bed covers when you wish automobiles had never been invented, remember that these words of Paul were addressed to slaves: “Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord” (Colossians 3:23). Whatever you do. And besides, DiamondBack is easily the best manufacturing company (and one of the best companies period) to work for in central Pennsylvania. Everything about working there pretty much couldn’t better.
In order for me to maximally productive at work, I have to be cutthroat with all non-work items. I have to forcefully box out distraction, daydreaming, and other (non-work) people and their agendas.
But that’s no way to live your home life!
Love in one’s home life means primarily the enjoyment of relationship with those around you and acting for others’ good by relating and enjoying and resting with them. Work is necessary in home life—and indeed, even for love’s sake it is necessary—but it isn’t primary. It serves the primary purpose of enjoyment. And besides, home life flows like water, it’s stochastic, it’s unpredictable, it’s got a bunch of other people and animals and neighbors and friends that can’t be controlled like one’s own attention can be controlled.
So I need to have two mindsets:
At home, I will not abandon my getting-things-done agendas, which are after all mostly built on love, but I will let the direct relational and enjoyment modes of love take precedence. I will go with the flow comprised of everybody else’s wishes and needs (and my own, for that matter—let’s not forget that rest and occasionally following one’s whim is important).
At work, since love in one’s job life is indeed primarily about productivity for the sake of the “family farm”—although not entirely (think of the joys of turning my attention 100% to others when they interrupt me!)—I will continue to hone that blade.
I should take my commitment to eschew multitasking further: Instead of filling all the short periods of waiting that come frequently at work with some other task, take advantage of them to return to awareness of and communication with God.
While walking with God through a nearby neighborhood in the wake of a few spats this morning with wife about housekeeping, it finally clicked: The housekeeping and homemaking is her work. It may even be helpful to compare the house to my computer and desktop workspace. Before I do any of the following again, it would be best to consider how it would make me feel if anyone came to my computer or desktop workspace and did the same:
- Leave items in places they shouldn’t be
- Move items that are not mine
- Change settings without asking
- Argue forcefully about the proper place or protocol for something
- Complainingly refuse to help when asked
Daddy, no you don’t go to work! Éa and I go to work! [pause] Oh. Well, I guess if Éa and I were the one who went to work, we’d be poor.
— Sullivan, in a gradually self-aware attempt to keep Scott from going to work that day