Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Work
I read an article in The New York TImes a few weeks ago that has stayed on my mind. It was about work, and how Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, set us on the wrong course. By viewing leisure as the goal and aspiring to mechanize work we have actually taken away the part that makes work fulfilling.
This rings true for me. I wasn’t the best student, but my teachers praised me for my work ethic. Some of that was trying to compensate for my complete blockage on the pluperfect tense, but some of it was because I found work satisfying. Run the snack bar after school? I’m your gal. Sweep the stage after rehearsal? On it. Pick up 150 bagels at 6 a.m. on the day of the school fair? Done.
One of my favorite books is Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Csikzentmihalyi talks about how people who get into the flow develop little tricks to make the work more challenging or interesting. As a child, one of my jobs was to polish the silver before Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. I loved that job. I’d watched enough Upstairs Downstairs that it was easy for me to imagine myself as a young servant girl in a big, fancy mansion. My imagination went wild and the silver got polished.
It still works: for example, my twins turn 10 today, so a bit of quick math reveals that I have spent a minimum, probably more, of 960 hours doing laundry since they were born. I’m happy to say I’ve gotten better at it. My neatly folded stacks may not match up to the ladies at the Wash-Rite, but every Sunday they get neater. Meanwhile, I am constantly refining my technique: learning better ways to get stains out, making my system more efficient.
How boring, you might be thinking. But it isn’t. Folding is meditative. Watching a heap of clothes just pulled from the dryer transform into neatly squared piles provides a reliable sense of accomplishment. Getting up early on Sundays to beat the rush in my building’s laundry room gives me a head start on my day and time to read the New York Times before anyone else is up.
So don’t avoid your paper work: systematize it. Bring your inner Henry Ford to the mundane tasks you think you hate. Challenge yourself to cook in one pot or create a foolproof system for grocery shopping. Life is work, work is life. Don’t avoid, lean in. See if you can’t up your game—and have fun doing it.