#busywork

I, uh... might not have been fully paying attention to class today...

But seriously, I've had these two for years but I lost the base they came with almost as soon as I got them. Which unfortunately means every time my cat flops on my desk she knocks them over.

So I made the base/arch thing out of foam clay weeks ago and it holds them snuggly. But it was just the straight blue of the clay, so I knew I wanted to paint it at some point.

And that point ended up being today lol

I read recently (maybe in Wired) that the number one skill that will be in demand in the future is focus. The ability to avoid all the distractions of life. I can relate to that... I seem very distracted these days and find it hard to focus on what I’m supposed to be doing... although to be honest, I don’t have too much trouble focussing on the things that I’m not supposed to be doing. In the opinion of my boss that is; in my own opinion, I’m quite happy dithering around for the moment.

Achievement -- getting stuff done. That’s the name of the game for some people. But maybe there is another way to do all of this. Maybe focus isn’t what we need, and we should think about ways of creating environments that support emergent ideas. I mean honestly, we’ve all had that great idea in the shower when we weren’t focussed on anything in particular. Suddenly taking a shower went from chill to productive.

The answer here is obviously not to install a shower next to my desk, which is covered in Gantt charts and to-do lists. (Is that obvious? Maybe with work from home, this could be a thing...) The obvious thing here is balance, right? Don’t be too driven by work, and allow time away from the desk for creativity to bloom. Feed the to-do list into the brain, then turn it off and allow the brain to work subconsciously, and hope it will spit out the required answer (maybe in the shower). I’m sure you’ve heard something like that before too.

But I think we are bumping into another, maybe, hidden issue here. Work-life creeping into leisure time is not something new. Should my shower time be occupied by my boss? Or should we be able to chill a bit more at work, to create space for ideas to bloom?