Time on Tuessday

Last week, I had a series of engaging conversations about the nature of time. My relative new Garmin smartwatch prompted some of them. My watch records exercise minutes in two ways. It records the number of minutes that I exercise “moderately” (like walking the dog), but gives me double minutes for vigorous exercise (like going for a jog). 

This got me thinking about how I spend my time during the semester. It seems like I have three modes: moderate effort, vigorous effort, and recovery. Each has its own temporal dimension.

Over the last two decades of being a full time, professional historian, I’ve become relatively adept at handling large quantities of moderate level work. In other words, doing emails, grading papers, low intensity reading (say, for general interest rather than specific research), meetings with colleagues, typesetting, and that kind of thing, 

Vigorous intensity activity, for me at least, involves writing, editing, or revising, reading for review or thoughtful critique, and teaching in the classroom. Some data oriented work is vigorous, some GIS work is vigorous, and some other professional activities — giving a conference paper or doing a teaching evaluation for a colleague — are often vigorous for me. 

Recovery work ranges from time set aside to read without a clear goal, walking dogs, traveling to and from campus, meals, sports, and sleep. Ironically, riding my bike or going for a run also is a kind of recovery time when I let my brain reset a bit. Writing this blog is also a kind of recovery time in that it allows me think through things “out loud” in a low stakes way. 

Each of these temporal categories have different consequences. A day full of vigorous work — say writing or reading intensively — can leave me drained for hours (or even days) afterword, whereas moderate work is not nearly as exhausting. In fact, days spent with moderate work can be quite pleasant and leave me with the low level satisfaction that is similar to a successful shopping trip or filling my car with gas. On the worst days, moderate work seems endless and frustrating like a team that seems content to hit singles, but not score enough runs to win. 

The challenge then is to balance moderate work, vigorous work, and recovery. One of the nasty problems that I encounter is when I feel pressure it usually comes from vigorous work and vigorous work tends to push out moderate work and recovery. In other words, the number of “work minutes” in my week doesn’t change much, but the balance between them does. My exhaustion levels then is not a simple function of how MUCH I work, but also what I do.

While this might seem really obvious to most people, in practice, we still talk more about the amount of work that we have to do than the kind of work that we have to do. Of course, there is a limit to number of hours in a day and some kinds of work simply takes time to complete. One my goals this semester, however, is to be more attentive to the KINDS of work I do and to balance between moderate and vigorous work and recovery time.