Temporalities of My Work
I met with a small group of graduate students a few days ago to talk about planning, goal-setting, and priorities. Hopefully, it was a useful conversation for them, but it's also been an opportunity to return to some of my own questions & obstacles. Chief among them: Where and how do I derive satisfaction from the work that I do? I recognize the enormous amount of privilege that comes with being able to ask that question in the first place - precisely the point about the alienated labor of many people, where the value they derive from their work isn't accrued by them.
My own anxieties & questions turn on the temporality of this work: Everyday, I sit down to write a little - some days it's 15 mins, other days I might drag myself to 3 hours.
I've resumed teaching, so for two hours a week I stand in front of a lecture hall and try to deliver a set of observations and insights about human geography. Those two hours also require time invested elsewhere - fiddling with slide design, finding images that might translate key points, and trying to condense large very complicated stories into some sort of coherent narrative.
But in both instances - the research and the teaching - the response, the return on time and energy invested plays out not on an hourly or daily basis but often on a semester-long, year-long, or even decade-long basis. The temporality of this work - the tension between a daily practice (which is absolutely crucial) and the long-term return (which is both personally and professionally important) is something that I'm still trying to get my head around.
To writing.
My own anxieties & questions turn on the temporality of this work: Everyday, I sit down to write a little - some days it's 15 mins, other days I might drag myself to 3 hours.
 |
| Tracking writing time using Toggl |
I've resumed teaching, so for two hours a week I stand in front of a lecture hall and try to deliver a set of observations and insights about human geography. Those two hours also require time invested elsewhere - fiddling with slide design, finding images that might translate key points, and trying to condense large very complicated stories into some sort of coherent narrative.
But in both instances - the research and the teaching - the response, the return on time and energy invested plays out not on an hourly or daily basis but often on a semester-long, year-long, or even decade-long basis. The temporality of this work - the tension between a daily practice (which is absolutely crucial) and the long-term return (which is both personally and professionally important) is something that I'm still trying to get my head around.
To writing.
Comments