JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

My friends in corporate jobs who are working from home all agree: It’s exhausting. It’s not just having to work in the same physical and headspace where you live, rest, and sleep, or being around spouse and spawn every single second. It’s being connected to your office all the time, on Google Hangouts, Slack, Zoom, and a host of apps. You may be physically apart from your coworkers, but they’re in your ear all the time so you cannot have a moment to think. You’re under constant surveillance. Of course your employer wants to make sure that you’re actually working and not playing games. That’s based on the assumption that people are most productive when they’re chained to their desks under the boss’s watchful eye. I’m a freelancer so technically WFH, and I can tell you that all the work gets done in intense three-hour bursts, and the rest of the time I’m getting ready for that burst by doing stuff that seems totally unrelated to work (feeding the cats, etc).
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When you examine the lives of history’s most creative figures, you are immediately confronted with a paradox: They organize their lives around their work, but not their days.

Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work. The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking. Their creativity and productivity, in other words, were not the result of endless hours of toil. Their towering creative achievements result from modest “working” hours.

How did they manage to be so accomplished? Can a generation raised to believe that 80-hour workweeks are necessary for success learn something from the lives of the people who laid the foundations of chaos theory and topology or wrote Great Expectations?

Read Darwin Was A Slacker And You Should Be, Too.

I like this strategy! I’m not slacking, I’m deliberately slacking.

These cats agree.

I have to finish writing a novel in three months so I’ve been in lockdown for two and a half weeks. I only allow myself out of the house twice a week for appointments and chores. So far it’s been working: I’ve written down half of it, and expect to complete the first draft well before my August 31 deadline. Also, I’ve made a detailed outline so I know where it’s going. More importantly I can stand it, so it’s safe from the shredder.

Technically this is my second novel. The first one, I never published. I didn’t like it. However, it wasn’t total garbage so I took the parts that worked and published them as short stories. They’re in The Stories So Far, the ones where the protagonist is named Jude.

So I’m living inside my head these days, and the only witnesses are the cats. They are not the most cooperative creatures. They want attention. Saffy challenges me to staring contests.

Drogon invades my workspace in stages.

What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing?

Would you like to rub my tummy? It’s very soft.

I’m sure you won’t mind if I park my butt on top of your notebook.

Fur! Soft!

I’m sleepy. This is a good place for a nap.

This goes out to my sister, who is in the office twelve hours a day, is raising three kids and taking her MBA on weekends. Just reading her schedule makes me tired.

One possibility is that we have all got stuck on a treadmill. Technology and globalisation mean that an increasing number of good jobs are winner-take-most competitions. Banks and law firms amass extraordinary financial returns, directors and partners within those firms make colossal salaries, and the route to those coveted positions lies through years of round-the-clock work. The number of firms with global reach, and of tech start-ups that dominate a market niche, is limited. Securing a place near the top of the income spectrum in such a firm, and remaining in it, is a matter of constant struggle and competition. Meanwhile the technological forces that enable a few elite firms to become dominant also allow work, in the form of those constantly pinging emails, to follow us everywhere.

This relentless competition increases the need to earn high salaries, for as well-paid people cluster together they bid up the price of the resources for which they compete. In the brainpower-heavy cities where most of them live, getting on the property ladder requires the sort of sum that can be built up only through long hours in an important job. Then there is conspicuous consumption: the need to have a great-looking car and a home out of Interiors magazine, the competition to place children in good (that is, private) schools, the need to maintain a coterie of domestic workers – you mean you don’t have a personal shopper? And so on, and on.

Read it in The Economist.

She’s a harsh critic.

Saffy had dental surgery two weeks ago. We noticed that she’d been swatting her face and snarling, and figured she had a toothache. The excellent vets at Makati Dog and Cat Hospital extracted five rotten teeth (Saffy is 15 and has never brushed her teeth in her life, being a cat). Saffy has recovered completely and is slightly nicer than she was when she was in pain, though she could still be the reincarnation of Josef Stalin. She’s even started eating hard kibble again, after having demanded paté-type cat food for the last year or so.

If we had a “normal” work schedule and went to the office everyday, we might not have noticed that our feline overlord needed medical attention. The great advantage of being freelance, i.e. living by our wits, is that we can decide how we’re going to spend our time. In the 21st century, time is a luxury that even the rich and powerful can barely afford. They’re over-scheduled and have to hoard their holidays. As long as we finish our assignments, we can go to the movies in the middle of the afternoon.

In our observation, people who live by their wits are less stressed than people with high-paying jobs or successful businesses. We don’t have real financial security, and we’re always aware that periods of liquidity can suddenly give way to penury. We’re accustomed to uncertainty and chaos, so we’ve learned to ride out the lean periods. This does not mean we’re lazy. Freelancers who are lazy cannot pay the rent or buy cat food. We toil, but we get to decide when to toil, usually in intense bursts.

Living by your wits isn’t for everybody, but if you know how to improvise and you don’t have ten children to buy braces for, we recommend it.