Last week turned into an empirical
study in my own personal goal for the year (being kind to myself). I had written most of last week’s
post at the beginning of the month. I only needed to dump it from the temporary
file into blogger, but I couldn’t find the five minutes. Sure, there were five
minutes somewhere. But, mentally, I just couldn’t. And, I could have beaten
myself up. I could have thought of the scores of loyal readers, most of whom
predate my authorship. I could have worried that people might be waiting for my
post. Or I could do what I said in January. I could let it go. I could give
myself a break.
So, instead of stressing, I’m going to
combine the last post for January and the first one of February. The topic for
February will be about work and positivity. How do we harness positivity to
make our own work better?
For me, one huge step is to be
confident in my own abilities, and honest in my weaknesses. Last week reminded
me of a weakness. I can ignore work as easily as I can do it. In ignoring work,
or procrastinating, I add new labor to my docket. I add the labor of worrying
about the work I haven’t done. The worry becomes a shadow looming over me as I
do whatever other actions I’m doing with my time. Now, last week, I forced
myself not to worry. And, I did a pretty good job. But, it took real effort to
stop worrying about undone work. There are times when doing the small task,
like just finishing up this post, would be far preferable to the ghost labors
of procrastination.
Positivity in work is about making
choices. Which tasks do I have to do to be less stressed? Which issues can I
ignore because they don’t need my attention? Which elements of work are out of
my control? What elements of this task can I control? When can I enjoy the
fruits of my failures, compost for successes?
Making good choices requires knowing
yourself. For January, I was originally going to write about a practical goal
I’ve set myself for this year. I’ve been trying to improve my work processes.
You’re often the best person to improve yourself. As part of that task, I’m
trying what I accomplish each week, and marking down how much of my time is
spent doing each type of task (meetings, email, etc).
I also tried to think critically about
how long it takes me to accomplish something. I decided to do an experiment
recently. In my early career, time was vast and free, or at least it felt like
it. My energy was equally easily replenishable. I’d finish things right. No
shortcuts were taken! Extra effort gains extra merit. But as it turns out,
there isn’t really extra credit in the workplace.
For example, two curators can be asked
to write the same number of labels. One gets finished in ten hours and the
other in twenty. Neither gets more credit than the other (if they’ve co-curated
the show). Furthermore, lavishing ten extra hours on labels doesn’t ensure
having labels that are twice as good.
Why? Museum work includes many
intellectual labors that draw on deep reserves of knowledge and years of
experience. The person putting in ten hours from the example above might
actually be putting in 10 hours plus 30 years of reading in the field. The
person putting in 20 hours might have only 10 years of reading in the field.
So, with 3 times of background, the first writer becomes twice as efficient.
That said, experience doesn’t necessarily help. Some people are so mired in
their process, and with years of using the same system, frozen in their ways,
they can’t get faster at a task. Time, therefore, is not an indicator of
quality. There are those people who say but I spent 20 hours on those
labels—they can’t be half as good. There is no simple metric to understand how
to consider efficiency and effectiveness in intellectual work. A good label is
insanely hard to quantify. Just as porn was famously hard to define, good
writing is easy to enjoy and hard to measure.
Good writers are hard to manufacture.
I’ve long asked applicants to write a short label based on a catalog entry. (In
case you’re wondering, I shred the output after the job is hired. Their
intellectual output should not be used for my org’s gain.) I did this because
credentials often inveigle hiring managers. Your old prejudices and hang-ups,
your own beliefs about credentials, are hanging out in your mind, no matter how
you try to avoid it. Then, when you look through resumes, your unconscious
brain might move you to a certain candidate. It’s hard then to say you’ve
looked at apples and apples. You’re looking at a Harvard apple vs a Community
College apple, say. Over the years, I found good writers didn’t come from a
single background or training. They weren’t similar in temperament or attitude.
Some people can just write. Some can’t.
So, what does this aside about writing
have to do with my experiment? Understanding work, time, and efficiency in
museums aren’t easy or universal. Everyone’s process is different, and if you
want to understand work in your organization, you should start with you.
Over the holidays, as it was my first
at my new job, I didn’t take a vacation. My boss was away, and I needed to be
around. In this quiet period, I did three wildly different types of tasks. I
performed an analysis of my organization’s attendance at programs for the last
five years, I created the decorations for our new music series, and I worked on
labels for an exhibition in our interpretation laboratory.
Data analysis isn’t strictly my job,
but I’ve been asking everyone to start using data to help inform
decision-making. (Notice I didn’t say drive). I work with a couple of
data-obsessed folks, so my analysis was somewhat easy. Everything was at my
fingertips, and I’m a bit obsessed with using excel as it was meant to be
employed. 45 minutes later, I had some solid graphs and a couple of zip code
maps to pour over. I made some quick conclusions and walked away. Later, as I
was sending my findings to a colleague, I told them the exercise took me 1
hour. The active time was one hour, but there was that percolating time. It was
as critical as my active time. In the workplace, we often don’t allot for these
interstitial moments. Putting in the time to ruminate can be challenging, but
in the end, essential. Smart workers often chunk rote tasks and/ or various
types of tasks in order to allow space for deep thought. Also, it’s important
to remember in organizations, work is often accrued time. I wouldn’t have been
able to have that time, or data if a couple people hadn’t put in the initial
labor to compile my source numbers. So, my 1 hour of work was also someone
else’s 20 hours of work. Was all this time worth it? More on that later.
After the data crunching, and before
my analysis, I spent time preparing decorations for an event. It has been a
long time since I made things. In an old job, I used to make all sorts of
things. I’ve probably made more coasters than I’ll ever need. Most of the
jewelry I wear are old samples. And I feel like if everything I’ve
screenprinted in my life were lined up, it’d stretch coast to coast. In other
words, I’ve got pretty good muscle memory and a great facility with scissors.
It took me 20 hours to decorate 20 giant lanterns, make 20 T-shirts, print 4
large rolls of paper, print 80 tote bags, and make 12 banners. Now, I’m
excluding the time in bed when I dreamed up the image, the hour to make the
image for the screens (done by a colleague), the two hours to burn the screens
(done by a dear friend), the half-hour of driving to get the screens and back.
Experience not only helped me be efficient but in some ways, it helped me be
effective. I chose an evergreen image we can use for years. I focused on big
decorations so my efforts were maximized.
But experience also led me down some
less smart paths. Work is often about patterns. Imagine you date a crummy
person. Rationally, in the end, you say, no more bad people. Two decades later,
you might find yourself recalling dozens of crummy people in your past. Museums
have a lot of tasks that are terrible dates. For events, for example, you might
decide you must have this particular set up. Sure it will mean you lose a
weekend, and your porch will stink of indigo dye, but it’s worth it. The
mission is worth it, you think. Well, friend, like that bad date, the mission
doesn’t care about you. And your choice (I’m looking at you, Seema) was a bad
one. I’d gotten into the bad habit of excusing the overage of hours for events
and fell back into that pattern. (Though at a particular moment in December, a
wiser me stepped in. We ended up with some indigo blue bags but more white
ones.) I chose to spend time with my kids over wasting time getting the right
blue.
That’s the thing about work. Every
single element is a choice. You might say I need to spend a good deal of time
reading and searching before I write that label. You might feel you do your
best writing twenty minutes before the deadline. You might think you have to
write something out longhand first. Those are all choices. None of those
choices are inherently wrong.
As to the last task, the labels, I’ve
spent countless hours and none. At first assessment, I’m like the person who
took 10 hours to write my labels. (I certainly feel twice as old as many). I’m
a fast and slow writer. When I finally get to writing, I’m fast with the keys.
But there are hours, weeks even, of time falling into every rabbit hole of
research I find. I probably could change this method, but I’m old and I’ve
never been good with tricks. Instead, I’ve chosen to set up systems to
accommodate my process. I do things that are fast for me, like data crunching
and silkscreening, by rote. I choose to sandwich rote tasks with deep tasks to
give me time for both. I choose to allot a specific, very short, amount of time
for tasks that don’t give me a high yield.
In the end, I think the prepping data
was a good use of my time particularly given that did the deep thinking part
while silkscreening. My decorations were a mixed bag. The production was a good
effort, but the batch dying wasn’t. While the products are a lovely blue, the
products will not appreciably improve the event and as such it’s a poor
allocation of my time.
Finally, the hours I spend thinking
about writing are an imperative use of my time. Ideas can be self-propagating
but slippery. Their trajectory is hard to track; their path tortuous but
exhilarating. In a knowledge field, ideas are our ore. We need them to fuel
every part of our organizations and to propel our visitor-engagement. Does my
scanning Blaire’s Moskovitz’s regular
feature on museum collection connections to award attire look like goofing off?
Sure. But then, hours later as I wait for a meeting when her thread sends me
down a rabbit hole of colors, design and the science of looking, and then I
find myself reenergized to write labels, I know that I wasn’t a detour. It was
the scenic route—the richer, more enjoyable path.
For me, time has an eggs/ basket
quality. With these three tasks as my baskets, I decided the labels would take
the most time, and that’s where I spent my time.
Work processes aren’t a given or
immutable. Reflecting on the time a task takes and if that is the right amount
of time can appreciably improve the way you work and therefore how you feel
about work. In the end, you might need to work longer. You might need to do
things a certain way you perceive as right. And that is your choice. I made the
choices that made me feel the most positive about my work and my output.
What are some choices you make at work
to help you feel good about your labors? Tag me so I can add your thoughts to this month’s summary post @artlust on twitter, @_art_lust_ on IG, & @brilliantideastudiollc on FB.