What work looks like

An excellent article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education about what intellectual or creative work looks like from the outside (not much) and how productivity can be measured (not easily). Although it's focused on academics, obviously, a lot of what the author says applies to other fields as well, where you spend a lot of time doing things that might look like time-wasting, or boring drudgery, or nothing at all. And yet all those things are directly connected to the success of the work. She does use a sports metaphor late in the piece:

When I first started running competitively, each time I told my brother that I had run a race, he would ask me the same question, "Did you win?" It diminished any achievement I may have felt -- a personal best, feeling good the whole time, having a great day. Perhaps the fact that he thought I was fast enough to win the Boston Marathon meant that he really loves and believes in me. But it also meant that the months of hard work I did training for the race were made invisible by the way he had framed the question.

Academics write and publish. So do non-academic writers. But a lot of our time gets spent answering e-mails, walking around aimlessly as ideas coalesce, formatting citations, poking around libraries and blogs and our old diaries with no idea what we're looking for, really, only that we'll know it when we find it. It's hard to explain to other people. If you weren't raised in that kind of family--if you were raised in a family where "work" meant eight hours on the shop floor, or thirty pairs of hands manicured, or seven patients analyzed, even--work, whether blue-collar or professional, where you have to be somewhere specific and/or complete particular tasks--it can be hard to explain to yourself. I've been freelancing for almost three years now and I still find it hard to say when I've done a "good day's work" and when I haven't. This is why the questions about procrastination and productivity have been so compelling to me of late, I suppose.

I wonder, also, if stay-at-home mothers and fathers have a similar difficulty grasping what they do on a day-to-day basis and how it relates to the overall project. "Raising a child"--what is that, exactly? When are you doing it and when are you not? Obviously when you're having serious heart-to-hearts, or coaching the Little League, or planting a garden together you can feel you're engaged in the work of parenting. That's the equivalent of a writer sitting at their desk pounding out the words. But what about chatting with friends about the best places to get inexpensive new-school clothes, reading a book while the kid digs holes in the yard, calling the babysitter so you and your spouse can have a night on the town?

That's important to the work of parenting, too, I think. Kids and books need a little bit of benign neglect, a little time to grow into themselves, so that when you pay full attention to them again you can be surprised and delighted by what they're really saying. Parents and writers need to have some parts of their mind and identity that aren't completely wrapped up their child, their book. At least I'm guessing it's similar--don't have a kid, but I did have a pretty good mother, and that's how she approached it.

Will leave comments open on this, for anyone who wants to talk about their own work, be it paid or unpaid, intellectual or physical, measurable or unquantifiable, rewarding or frustrating.

Have a wonderful long weekend, y'all, and don't work too hard.