Blursday
The ever slippery dance between time, value, weekly routines, and the quality of our days
People often took at me strangely when I tell them the first year of the pandemic felt like a great relief to me.
While my ambivert nature makes me look like an extrovert in work settings, I deeply crave alone-time every day and every week to recover. When you work a 40 hour week in an area made up of cubicles without office doors, it’s nearly impossible to have what I call true recovery.
When I was released back into the “wild” about a week before the state of Minnesota issued stay-at-home orders in March 2020, at first I was shocked. Then I deeply leaned into not having to pick out work outfits every morning.
Yoga pants and comfortable sweaters became my new normal. I watched the ticker-tape of COVID-19 pandemic deaths with horror, and tried to stay connected with friends and family virtually.
But I drew in a sigh of relief when my husband (an essential worker) left each day. I was free to read, pursue my creative interests, and teach yoga part-time online for an acupuncture studio.
David M. Henkin, professor, historian and author of The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that Made Us (2021) talks about how “Blursday” started entering public discourse. It had become a common meme and them for people who felt “temporal disorientation” because of the spatial disorientation of our normal rhythms and weekly routines.
I am only on chapter 2 of this book. However, I’m fascinated by the fact that I reflexively chose the week as a unit of time for 30 is the new 40, rather than quantifying time in another way.
With the typical full time worker logging two thousand hours at work (40 hrs x ~50 weeks) or more, why didn’t I say 1,500 is the new 2k? There’s no "ring” to that one, is there?
In truth, my goal is nudge us to get away from our cultural equation that time equals money. Intuitively, we probably know working more doesn’t equal more output or even more income as a guarantee. The quality of time we spend is likely a more relevant measure of overall value.
Perusing some job ads at LinkedIn this past week I noticed (again) that full time work often lists a salary range. It’s one unit, for your full time effort. Part-time work (anything from 10 hours weekly to 25 hours in my small sample) lists an hourly rate instead.
This makes no sense to me. Do you understand it?
When I have worked in consulting roles, I had this temptation as well, to charge for “hours logged” rather than the value of what I was delivering. Attorney firms used to be famous (and perhaps some still are) for requiring their associates to rack up billable hours for work on their client’s cases.
Now I see spending unnecessary time to inflate our billing as a mark of ignorance, or maybe even malpractice, not of value.
I can’t wait to explore different approaches to quantifying and qualifying the value we deliver in future posts here. For now, I want to just bring myself (and perhaps you) back to the quality of the days of our week.
What is the quality of a Monday for you? What is the quality of a Friday? Are there days of the week you dread? Ones that make your heart sing?
Do you get the “Sunday scaries” or do you deeply love the quiet freedom of not having any morning commitments?
While it may be hard to remember 2020 (or hard to forget), did you feel a little relief at skipping the commute? Many of us had the ability before then to telecommute at least a couple of days of the week, especially if we traveled frequently for work. If you had that flexibility before, what felt qualitatively different about this experience?
I’d love to know.
I realize I’m raising questions in this post. Would you believe I have 10 essay starts in various states of draft in this account (so far)? After last month’s health challenge, I’m pacing myself. I’m reading, thinking and taking notes. Thanks for sticking around and being part of this community! I deeply appreciate your support. ❣️