Work and non-work: Decompartmentalizing

It was probably the most trivial item on my entire To Do list this week, and yet it made such a difference in my sense of personal organization.

“Fix email folders,” I had jotted down on my tasks list. I wasn’t sure what exactly I needed to do; I just sensed that there was probably a way to re-organize my email folders that would be more visually satisfying to me.

As it was, I had one main folder called “Work,” under which were numerous subfolders for emails related to upcoming articles and those already in progress; and another main folder called “Personal,” in which were folders for volunteer activities, community events, family correspondences and vacation plans.

I hadn’t chosen the designations “Work” and “Personal”; they were the default folders assigned by Gmail, but they seemed logical enough to me when I set up my mailbox. Everything presumably related to one or the other: work or personal life, so surely this was as good a way as any to start the process of dividing one’s correspondences.

But somehow it just didn’t work for me on a psychological level. The work items didn’t necessary feel like work, and the personal items sometimes did feel like work. It made sense to put emails related to an event I was covering for the Globe into a work folder, but when I received tickets to the same event by email, the tickets didn’t seem like they should be classified as work. And organizing the faculty/staff luncheon at my kids’ school is a volunteer activity, which made it by definition personal; yet it certainly felt more like work than leisure as I sent out countless emails asking people for food contributions and reiterating once again the school kitchen’s nut-free policy.

So I simply removed the “work” and “personal” designations. It was such a trivial act, but it did so much to clear my mind, because on a symbolic level, it seemed so much more genuinely reflective of my life. I do a variety of different things every day, and since I’m self-employed and write from home, “work” assignments don’t always feel so different from “personal” assignments. In the course of a typical week day, I might research an article, interview a subject, vacuum the carpets, make up the next month’s schedule for school library volunteers, select a recipe for dinner, draw up an agenda for the adult ed class I teach, and respond to an email about an issue related to church. What’s work? What’s leisure? What’s personal? What’s domestic?

This isn’t a complaint. Not at all. It’s life the way I believe it should be lived. Yes, I need to keep the revenue-producing tasks on my radar as a priority; given the choice between taking on another volunteer role at the kids’ school and accepting an assignment from a magazine I haven’t previously written for, I’m likely to gravitate to the latter, both for practical and ideological reasons. Writing is still one of my greatest interests as well as what I get paid to do. But I also really value the fact that as a self-employed person, I’m able to integrate so many other aspects of my life into the so-called “work” day.

When I was in my early 20’s and still new to the professional realm, working full-time in a corporate role, I was a little stunned to realize just how much of every day most people spent at their jobs. Even as an entry-level employee not expected to take work home or put in extra hours, I was there from 8:30 to 5 every weekday. “That’s the whole day,” I marveled silently during my first week of employment, a little bit horrified to discover this secret of adulthood that I’d previously chosen to overlook.

I realize how lucky I am now to be self-employed now. It gives me time to do both what I get paid for and what I like to do, whether those two categories are discrete or overlapping. Dissolving the “work” and “personal” designations in my email box was a token gesture, but for me they held a lot of symbolism. It was useful to me to override the Gmail defaults and acknowledge that in my life, “work” and “personal” are often indistinguishable, and that’s one of many things about my life for which I am truly grateful.

Lunch walks

Looking all the way back to the job I began one week after college graduation, in early June of 1989, I could trace my work history by job title. Or by salary. By immediate supervisor. By office address. By length of tenure.

But yesterday it occurred to me I could also trace my work history by midday walks. I’ve always appreciated the benefits of a lunch hour spent outside in the fresh air, taking a little exercise. And each workplace setting comes with its own options for lunchtime strolls.

When I worked in Boston, I’d walk over to the Public Garden and circle the Frog Pond and the Boston Common during the noontime hour. I’d watch tourists riding the Swan Boats. I’d see well-dressed Beacon Hill aristocrats stepping along carefully, carrying their little purses and walking their little dogs. I’d see Bullfinch architecture on the skyline and Freedom Trail landmarks along the way.

When I worked in Cambridge, I walked along the Charles River, from the Esplanade down to the Mass Ave Bridge or sometimes only as far as the Hatch Shell, where the Boston Pops play on the Fourth of July. At that time I worked for a big company and a lot of my co-workers liked to go walking as well, so we’d head out together and talk about anything but what was waiting for us on our desks when we got back.

When I worked in Waltham, walking was not a popular midday activity in my company. In fact, I’m not sure I ever saw anyone venture outdoors except to get to their cars in the parking lot. We were situated in an office park on a highway exit, so the surroundings were not exactly inviting, but some of the office parks around us had relatively appealing landscaping, with lawns and manmade ponds, and I even found a cut-through to a little suburban neighborhood that backed on to one of the parking lots. It was a neighborhood nondescript enough that it could have been featured in a study about what went wrong in the design of American suburbs, and I doubt even the people who lived there went for many walks around the block. But it was better than sitting in a windowless break room.

Using the standard of lunchtime walks as a framework, though, it’s obvious to me that I’ve figuratively won the lottery at this point. I’m self-employed and get to write all day; better still, I’m at home, where my so-called office – which is actually our kitchen alcove – looks into the woods. A trail from the yard leads into the state park, with over one thousand acres of trails.

So on days like yesterday, which was an absolutely perfect New England fall day, with cool dry air, an occasional gust of wind, and yellow leaves shimmering in the sunlight, my lunchtime walk consists of grabbing the leash, calling the dog, slipping a trail map into my jacket pocket and heading out.

And once I’m in the woods, deadlines and quotes and fact-checking don’t seem to matter so much. I can enjoy the scent of the forest, the rocks and pine needles and tree roots underfoot, the rush of water from the brooks that lace through the woods. The setting is far better than any of my previous office situations, but the joy of getting out in the middle of the day is the same.

Ultimately, that’s always been the purpose of lunchtime walks: to stop thinking for a little while about the work left behind. The woods, as Robert Frost observed, are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises – and deadlines -- to keep. Still, it’s inspiring to know that as long as I keep up with my work, I can slip out to the woods again at lunchtime tomorrow.

A priority on going biking

There were plenty of reasons for me not to go biking yesterday.

First and foremost, it was a work day for me. All summer, no matter how much fun I was having with the kids or with friends or other family members, the fact that I was putting in a substandard work day gnawed at me. At best, during July and August, I wrote for about three hours a day, compared with the six or more I can log once school is back in session.

So no matter how much fun I was having during summer break, it was always with a sense of comfort in knowing that a return to real life, and full work days, lay in the not-too-distant future.

And as is the case every year, when the school year started anew, nothing could have been more welcome than the opportunity to work from 9 to 3. That’s exactly how I felt a week ago, on the kids’ first day of classes. I turned on my computer five minutes after Holly clambered onto the bus, and I powered through three or four meaty assignments before Tim showed up with his first day of seventh grade behind him, asking about snack options.

But wanting to apply myself to my work was easy a week ago. It was a welcome novelty after the summer, and besides, that day was rainy. The whole first week of school was rainy, in fact. I was delighted to sit at my kitchen table writing for hours on end.

The Tuesday one week after the start of classes was a classic New England late-summer day, though, with a tinge of humidity underlying a warm, sunny morning. “This would be a good day for a bike ride,” I mused to myself as I drove across town after stopping by my parents’ house. “Too bad I can’t take one.”

Except wait. Why couldn’t I?

Well, because I had to file my weekly set of community news briefs. And write a blog entry. And slog along on a ghost-writing project I’m in the thick of.

But those were only the pragmatic reasons. Really, I reasoned with myself, I couldn’t take a bike ride because….well, because it was the middle of a work week in the midst of a busy month; vacation season had just ended; I hadn’t planned ahead to do something special and frivolous (normally if I’m going to divert from my regular workday routine, I plan it weeks if not months in advance); and besides, everyone else was at school or work – my children, my spouse, most of my friends, my sisters, my neighbors – why should I have the privilege of being out on a bike ride?

Because I can, came the answer, crashing over me like a breaking wave. Because I devoted the majority of my limited reading time this summer to Gretchen Rubin’s “The Happiness Project,” the gist of which is that each of us has a personal obligation to the universe to find what it is that makes us happiest and try to work that into our lives, regardless of our other necessary responsibilities. And spending time outdoors, preferably doing something physically challenging, on a warm late-summer day is definitely something that makes me happy.

But one thing I’ve learned about being self-employed is that playing hooky is very different now from how it was when I had a corporate employer. Back then, I took the occasional day off from work with a sense of triumph, even glee. “I earned this,” I would think to myself. “My company owes me this pleasure.”

When you’re self-employed, though, the boss always makes you feel guilty for a day off.

Make it a priority, I reminded myself. Do the things that matter most to you.

And so I did. I made myself a sandwich, filled up a water bottle and headed out.

You’re just lucky that you can do this, I told myself. You should still be feeling a little guilty, though, that other people can’t.

I wasn’t feeling guilty, though. I was feeling grateful. And happy. And yes, very fortunate. But also a little bit proud of my sense of focus. I’d made it a priority, and I’d done it.

As my friend Tracey wrote earlier in the day when I said I was contemplating putting work on hold, “Do it. You'll always remember the bike ride. You won't remember that extra hour you spent working.”

It turned out to be two hours of not-working, not one, but that was okay. I returned with inspiration for my blog and renewed energy for another couple of hours of work before the kids got home.

I felt a sense of accomplishment, too. Not the same sense of accomplishment I get when I finish drafting an article. The kind that comes from following my own priorities, no matter how frivolous they may be. Which in this case meant taking the opportunity to savor a magnificent and unique late-summer New England day, despite the awareness that maybe I should have been working.

The "oblivion principle" - perks of a privileged childhood

It’s such an obvious reality that I don’t know how it can still surprise me, but I'm sometimes amazed by how hard I can work and how much I can accomplish without my family having any inkling of what I’ve done.

And it’s easy to become resentful of that. I think often of the recurrent image from the “Rose Is Rose” comic strip by Pat Brady, in which every once in a while Rose descends into her Dungeon of Resentment. How is it that I spent all morning cleaning all four bathrooms and no one noticed? Do they have any idea of how much pollen would be piled on the windowsills right now if I hadn’t dusted this week? Where do they suppose the clean and folded laundry they regularly find in their bureau drawers comes from, anyway? Yesterday we were out of milk and today we have plenty of milk: did anyone notice that I spent two hours at the supermarket and then carried in five bags of groceries myself?

I know there are various ways to address this issue, and I know there are plenty of parents who think I should be more proactive as far as expecting contributions of help from my children. But they do tasks that I consider age-appropriate – they’re almost always responsible for unloading the dishwasher after it runs; they bring their clothes hampers to the laundry room when I ask them to; they clear the table after dinner; they would have helped carry in the grocery bags if they’d been home at the time – and it’s not really a matter of my wanting less work on my hands. It’s just the frustration of how invisible it all is to them, how they never seem to actually see me do any of this or notice what I’ve done.

But when I start to descend into the Dungeon of Resentment, I have to remind myself that this life I’m living in my own choice. I’ve chosen to raise a family, to live in a house, to do the kind of work that generates the kind of salary for which buying groceries is not a problem but having abundant paid household help would be.

What helps more than that, though, is to reiterate to myself my belief that being oblivious to the work your mother does is actually one of the privileges of a comfortable childhood: a privilege that will ideally be passed down from generation to generation. Like my children are with me, I was equally oblivious to how hard my mother worked to keep our household up and running. But every now and then I’ll look back on something from my childhood and be curious enough to ask her. Earlier this summer I found myself thinking about the evening cookouts we used to have once or twice a week at our family cabin in the mountains during our month-long Colorado vacations. The cabin was about thirty minutes away from where we stayed in town: we’d often drive there for dinner, sometimes just us five but more frequently with guests, spend a few hours, and return to our place in town for the night. I remembered happy evenings around the campfire with grilled hamburgers and toasted marshmallows and songs and jokes, but I didn’t remember anything about the sleepy return to town at bedtime. “How did you get all the dishes washed after we got back?” I asked my mother last month. “Didn’t it take hours to unload all the food and cookout gear?”

Of course it did, but I didn’t think about that at the time; it was one of the privileges of my happy childhood. My children may be oblivious to the hours I spent yesterday morning cleaning the house or the 45 minutes it took me to prepare yesterday’s picnic which we took to the pond for an early dinner and swim, and that’s a gift I’m giving them. If they someday choose – and are fortunate enough – to have an adulthood similar to mine, with families of their own and lots of opportunities to have fun, they’ll do this same thing themselves.

Yes, it’s good for them to help out around the house and do age-appropriate chores. But if they’re blind to just how much effort it sometimes takes to make vacations and holidays memorable, to keep the house clean and organized, to be generous hosts to friends and relatives, and to keep everyone safe and happy so much of the time? I may just have to consider that a privilege I’m happy to be able to give them.

Why Ira Flatow's fascination fascinates me

Sometimes I inadvertently download the podcast for NPR’s Science Friday and end up with the show on my playlist while I’m out running. This happened on Saturday. I’m really not interested in Science Friday in terms of the subject matter, but there’s still something I love about listening when I find myself stuck with it: the host, Ira Flatow, has to be one of the most genuinely enthusiastic professionals I have ever hard speak.

Ira Flatow simply adores science, and I have such tremendous respect for that even though the topics he chooses to discuss are hardly ever of interest to me. To hear Ira talk about this experiment or that discovery, you’d think you were talking to a whiz kid at a high school science fair or possibly a newly matriculated graduate student. But not someone who is a veteran radio journalist in his sixties, as Flatow in fact is.

What I especially like is how sincere he is about what surprises and fascinates him. In the segment I was listening to, another reporter was describing the way a group of fire ants can form themselves into a floating raft if they fall into a body of water. “I saw that report too, and I could not believe it!” Ira exclaimed to the reporter. “I just cannot understand how they do that!”

He’s an award-winning radio and TV personality, and yet when he says he can hardly believe something, you realize what it means to be truly fascinated by your work. Despite all that he has witnessed, uncovered and reported in six decades, the talents of fire ants still have the ability to catch him completely unaware.

I don’t hear this same sense of wonder, of awe, in many of his media colleagues. Some of NPR’s most experienced personalities will sometimes profess to be surprised by something, but often you know what they really mean is “My surprise about this comes from the fact that I’m such an unparalleled expert on this topic, and it’s really rare for me to stumble upon something I didn’t know.” So they don’t sound truly awed, just dubious about the idea that a fact slipped past them earlier. Even Terry Gross, whom I find to be very modest on air, puts so much research into her interviews that her surprise usually has an undertone of “How is it possible that I wasn’t aware of this one small detail?” Whereas Ira Flatow’s tone of surprise comes across as humility in its best form, as if he is saying, even after almost 40 years in the business, “Can you believe how fantastic and amazing the world of science is?”

Maybe this resonates with me so much because as a journalist, I love talking to people about their work or creative pursuits. “Any time you find someone pursuing a passion, you have a story,” one of my Globe editors told me years ago. He’s right: not only the story of what the person’s passion is, but how it came to have that role in their life.

I sometimes feel I’ve made a career out of this reality: people talking about what fascinates them tend to engage me. I want to know what they know that I don’t, but more importantly, what they care about that I don’t. It’s humility. It’s the opposite force to arrogance. And it’s a wonderful quality for a person to have: the ability to communicate that they are absolutely flabbergasted by the wondrous world that surrounds them.

Work I just can't pass up

It was late Friday afternoon and my editor at the Globe was calling to tell me that she’d decided the story idea she’d sent me earlier should be a full-length feature rather than just a short clip – and that she was therefore going to reassign it to another writer since I had two other articles on deadline for this weekend.

“No, let me keep it!” I exclaimed before I could give it much thought. “It’s exactly my type of story!”

And it is, too: a profile of a Boston-area writer who travels the country visiting major league ballparks so that he can then write mysteries for grade-school aged readers about the different parks and teams. Much as I lament the fact that I lack the hard-hitting drive of an investigative reporter or the tenacity of a political correspondent, I love the niche I’ve found for myself: features about not-so-famous people doing interesting things. Or, as I once put it after doing a story about the anomalously high number of twins in one grade in Carlisle and another one about kids with food allergies, “I do stories about twins, stories about food allergies, stories about twins with food allergies.” Or, as one friend has occasionally described my career, “Drawing water from a stone.” Of course, that was before I wrote a feature about him and his family that filled out three-quarters of a section cover on a recent Sunday.

But both of the other two stories I needed to work on this past weekend were exactly my type of story too, and my editor was just trying to lessen the burden on me.

Hearing myself protest to keep all three stories, I almost had to laugh. My editor didn’t know that we’d just moved two days earlier: my house was chock full of boxes to be unpacked, plus I had all the usual weekend responsibilities associated with kids and household; the truth is it was a terrible time for me to take on triple my usual workload.

But I just couldn’t say no, because I simply love writing feature stories and can never pass up the opportunity to do so. When I started freelancing for the Globe about six years ago, each assignment I received was a thrill beyond measure. Days I had an article published felt like my birthday, all day.

And that’s changed only slightly. It no longer feels like my birthday when I have a story in print, now that I’ve come to realize how few people actually read every story in the paper on a daily basis, and I no longer want to run around the house screaming with excitement every time an editor assigns me a story. But as witnessed this weekend, even now that I submit a weekly column and do two or three additional features every month, it still delights me beyond reason to have an assignment, two assignments, a whole pile-up of assignments.

I write features for a major city newspaper. What was long ago a dream and then later a novelty is now more like a regular job, or as regular a job as a freelancer can hope to have. But it still thrills me. And that, I have to believe, is just how a career should be.

All in a day's work

I admit that by the time September started, I was ready to send the kids off to school. We’d had a good summer and done a lot of interesting activities, but I was eager to turn my focus to my work. Afraid of the consequences of reducing my output over the summer, I hadn’t cut back on writing assignments at all; I had just tried to do the same amount of work in three-hour rather than six-hour workdays, per the deal I strike with the kids in the summer that I can work from 9 a.m. to noon and then we’ll have fun together all afternoon. So as summer ended, I had ongoing clients, new clients, and projects of my own that I wanted to pay more attention to. The resumption of school meant the resumption of long days of writing for me. At least in my mind.

And for the past two days I’ve been extremely productive, turning around assignments, generating new ones, and hitting deadlines. But what I tend to overlook when I line up my daily agenda in my mind’s eye is the sheer diversity that my workday encompasses. There are articles, essays and press releases to write, of course. That’s the work I get paid for. But there are household tasks, farm tasks, and family tasks that crop up throughout the day as well, which makes it really beneficial to be self-employed but also makes it challenging sometimes to account for my time.

Yesterday, for example, I did plenty of writing. I also scheduled a vet appointment for the dog, made a batch of puttanesca sauce, began organizing the volunteer schedule for the school library, sent a logo to the editor of the school newsletter so that she could help me publicize the upcoming Spaghetti Supper, let the sheep out to graze, posted two articles to my website and ran two miles. Throughout the late morning, I could hear a cow mooing incessantly, so shortly after noon I went out to investigate and found that her calf had once again wandered into the bull pasture. The mother cow wasn’t happy about this at all, but the baby was perfectly content, so I decided no action needed to be taken and went back to work.

When the kids arrived home from school, I helped them assemble ingredients for their weekly banana bread baking session; their goal this week is 25 loaves to sell at Farmers Market on Saturday. I washed dishes and folded laundry in the course of the day, and visited with my parents next door for a few minutes. I sent out save-the-dates for Tim’s birthday party.

And at 10 p.m., I was ironing. Not ironing clothes; ironing artwork. Holly had spent the afternoon making fuse-bead creations, which are like little mosaics made out of plastic beads that then stick together once you iron them, and I had promised her I’d iron them after she went to bed.

We live in a small and fairly homogeneous town, but days like today make me appreciate the inherent diversity in any 24-hour period. Writing is a wonderful way to make a living, but it’s only part of how I spend my day. And I consider this a blessing. A diversity of activities keeps us all busy and stimulated. And it’s made me better than I ever imagined I’d be at prioritizing. Sometimes an article deadline can wait but an impatiently braying cow cannot. It’s helpful for me to recognize the difference, even if I might never choose to share that distinction with my editors.

Kids & chores: Why they should and why I should

As I read this article by my Globe West colleague, Taryn Plumb, I noted with some relief that most of the children cited in the story about household chores are older than mine, or at least older than my younger child. The article reassured me that maybe there’s still time for my 7- and 11-year-old to get with the program.

I admit I’ve been negligent when it comes to expecting my children to do regular household chores. It’s much more my fault than theirs. For one thing, as odd as it may sound to admit, I don’t feel like I need a lot of help. This may be the whiplash effect of being a self-employed full-time-at-home mom after two years of 9-to-5 out-of-the-house corporate employment, but I really don’t find it difficult to get most of the household chores done myself. I’m just grateful to have the time at home to do them.

Furthermore, the kids’ schedules aren’t always particularly conducive to household chores. My first thought upon reading the opening about the kids helping with the laundry every day was to wonder how they possibly have time for this before school…and then I read that they go to a private school where catching a bus or even arriving in time for the first bell is not necessarily a requirement of their school day, as it is in our household.

And even though I know setting the table is an excellent match for the skills of a 7-year-old like my daughter, there are a lot of days when I find the half-hour before dinner to be one of the most peaceful parts of the day, as I spend it by myself in the kitchen cooking, setting up and listening to NPR. Sure, I could call the kids down to help, but they’re doing their homework or playing, and I’m relishing the early-evening solitude.

But I know that’s not entirely the point. As the article says, having children do chores isn’t just about getting help with the work; it’s also about contributing to the children’s character development. And intellectually, I agree with this; I just have trouble coming up with recurring jobs for the kids that I consider both ideologically and pragmatically appropriate for them.

For example, we have pets because the kids wanted pets and love having them around, so I think pet-related chores are a perfect match ideologically for the kids. But unfortunately, that’s where the pragmatic part comes in. Though it makes sense intellectually to have Holly clean her guinea pig’s cage, I don’t feel that she has the manual dexterity or the sanitation standards to do a good job. It takes coordination to ensure that all the dirty shavings from the cage slide into the trash bag rather than all over the floor, and I’m generally squeamish about a child who needs to be reminded to wash her hands before snacks and meals being up to her elbows, or even her knuckles, in guinea pig waste.

I also don’t like the level of dissent that chores tend to generate in our household. My two children seldom argue with each other, but when they do, it’s almost always because I’ve asked them to unload the dishwasher or clear the table. Both of them prefer to unload the upper rack of the dishwasher rather than the lower rack, but since it’s not a task that needs to be done daily, they can never remember whose turn it is to have first choice, so they argue about it. When my husband tells them to clear the dinner table, with each expected to take half the tabletop, they furtively try to slide items onto the other person’s half to “even it out.”

In the end, though, I think the winning reason to give my kids work is so that they don’t reach adulthood having never done any household tasks. When I ask my son to clear dishes or set the table, a part of me is aware that I’m paving the way for a future household in which he’s an adult. Since I’ve already picked out several girls in his fifth grade class whom I’d be happy to see him settle down with, it’s fairly easy to picture them cursing me, as his mom, for never have expected him to do any work around the house. It’s a sobering thought, and it almost always keeps me from caving in when he complains about being asked to pitch in.