Dear Diary...
Hello friends, and welcome back to Productivity, Without Privilege. I’m Alan Henry, and I am once again asking you to preorder my book, Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized.
If you already have, thank you so much! I’m marching ever closer to the book release and promotion is starting to ramp up, so your support means everything to me, and I can’t wait to have the book in your hands. I truly hope you enjoy it, and if you don’t enjoy it, I hope you at least find it useful.
And speaking of useful things, this week I want to talk about a tool that I elaborate a lot on in the book, but I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that should be behind a hardcover purchase: The Work Diary.
That’s right, you should be keeping a work diary if you’re not already. I know, it sounds like I’m asking you to journal your daily activities, but I’m really not. Let’s back up first though: I first stumbled on the idea of a work diary back in 2011, although the concept is definitely older than that, and certainly not mine.
At first, the idea of keeping track of what happened at work on a given day or week sounded like making more work for myself than I really needed—to spend time doing something silly when I really could be at home relaxing. But the more often I found myself stumbling at work because of random miscommunications, things I should have raised earlier than I did because I was so busy, or struggling because I couldn’t remember some recent wins or achievements when I was asked, I started to come around to the idea. And all of those things are really what a work diary is designed to help you with. (In fact, given how the past couple of weeks at work have gone for me personally, it’s about time to pay more attention to my work diary again!)
“But I’m already so busy!” I hear you say. And yeah, you probably are! We’re all busy, that’s the whole point. The busier you are, the more likely you are to forget things from day to day because you’re in a hurry to finish things up and move on to the next task in your life, like picking up the kids from school, going grocery shopping, working on your pet project or side hustle, or whatever else that might be. So it’s natural that if I stopped you on, let’s say, at 8 pm on a Tuesday night and asked you “So tell me how things are going at work,” you’d probably resort to telling me how that specific day went, or discuss any events at the office that loom large in your mind.
That’s fair, but wouldn’t it be nice if, when prompted to talk about work, you could answer with things you’re particularly thrilled about working on, or things you’re really proud of having accomplished? That’s the point of the work diary: it gives you a place to jot down both your small and big successes, challenges, places where you felt like you really scored big points or put your skills to use in a way that made you happy, as well as places where you feel like you were unfairly treated or overlooked. It’s a way to collect useful data and archive it so you don’t have to rely on memory.
And while you’re unlikely to run into me at 8 pm on a Tuesday night and even less likely for me to ask you a question like that (unless we already know each other and I know your job,) it IS likely that your next 1:1 meeting with your boss might include the question “so how are things going?” or you may be in the elevator with a colleague with some seniority but that you don’t work directly with, and they may ask the dreaded question: “so what are you working on?” Your work diary gives you a place that holds those answers—and if you keep it updated with regularity, you won’t even have to fumble to open it on the elevator to remember what you actually do every day.
This works in the other direction as well. When you’re stressed out about something that happened at work—a negative interaction with a coworker, a peer who treats you like a subordinate, a manager who gets angry you don’t know the answer to the questions you’re asking them—instead of sitting and stewing, you can write those things down in your work dairy, take those lumps, and move on armed with the knowledge that this thing may have happened today, but it doesn’t have to happen again. And if it does happen again, you jot it down as well, and if you start to see a pattern, well, you know where that’s going.
That’s part of the power of a work diary: it gives you a high-level perspective of your regular interactions at work, what your accomplishments are, what your challenges are, and how you feel overall about your job. It disabuses you of the very question that maybe this thing that’s gotten under your skin is a product of the past few days at the office versus a year or several years’ worth of poor treatment. It reminds you of what you’ve accomplished on those days when you feel like the only thing you do is screw up. It's a written record of everything a potential employer will ask you about your current job, including your achievements and challenges, and you don’t even have to sit there and make something up on the fly to sound convincing.
And, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention, the work diary is even more powerful for marginalized people at work. In the book, this is where I really dig in, but I’ll keep things brief here: if you’re one of what the legendary Shonda Rhimes calls an F.O.D., or “first, only, or different” person in your workplace, regardless of what that may look like for you, you have to struggle with everything from microaggressions that test your boundaries to the implicit biases of your colleagues. So keeping a running log of those emotionally spiky moments—whether they’re positive or negative—will help you establish whether there’s a pattern of behavior at play where you’re actively being marginalized at best, or discriminated against at worst.
When you explain to others what’s happening to you, and they ask if you’re really mistaking the intentions of the people you work with, or worse, try to gaslight you into thinking the things that happened to you didn’t actually happen the way you describe, you can point to a documented pattern. We can talk about why all of that data shouldn’t really be necessary to believe marginalized people in the workplace another time, but for now, consider the power that gives you to rebuke anyone who second-guesses your lived experience.
So what does a work diary look like? Simple: it looks like whatever you’ll actually use. If you’re the type who’ll lovingly jot your thoughts and accomplishments down in a beautiful blank book with a fancy pen, buy those things and treat yourself to that experience. If the thought of writing things down by hand makes your carpal tunnel act up, do what I do: use a Google Doc you can access anywhere at any time. If you don’t trust Google (and why should you, really?) Use a text file on your computer. Don’t like that? Fire up your favorite app for quick notes on your phone. What you use is far less important than the fact that it’s easy for you to use, update, and reference when you need to.
Besides, think about how much catharsis you’ll get by writing all of those things down. I mean, I wrote a whole book in the name of shared catharsis, right?
[Worth Reading]
Negotiating As a Woman of Color, by Deepa Purushothaman, Deborah M. Kolb, Hannah Riley Bowles, and Valerie Purdie-Greenaway: Women of color in the workplace have it the hardest. Seriously. Regardless of who they work for and where they work, there’s plenty of data to support that assertion, and this piece in Harvard Business Review shines a light on some of it. It’s bad enough that many women of color don’t feel like they can advocate for themselves at all, whether it’s in terms of their compensation, work assignments, work conditions, or career development. Even when they seek out the assistance of peers and colleagues, much of the conversation has more to do with encouraging women of color to try and keep their heads down and get along, while their privileged peers are often encouraged to be go-getters, to be more assertive, or to fearlessly negotiate. Read on to find out why that dichotomy exists. (h/t to Lydia Kan for flagging this incredible story.)
You Do Not Always Have to Say Yes, by Nicole Chung: Chung is an acquaintance of mine, and someone I deeply wish I knew better because everything she writes is incredible. This newsletter for The Atlantic (subscribers only, fair warning) is no exception. She takes something you might think is simple: remember to say no to save your bandwidth, mental health, and frankly, your productivity. She examines why it’s actually so difficult to do so, why it’s so difficult to manage your own boundaries, and what kinds of external pressure there is on people to actually cave and just acquiesce to anyone who wants something from them. And speaking as someone who gets incredibly depressed when I get the vibe that no one wants me around for anything other than what they can get from me, this hit home hard.
H.A.L.T: The acronym that will save you from spiraling: This one is a little personal, but hopefully it’ll help you too. HALT is short for “Hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired?” which are the four things you should ask yourself before you spiral into a place of anxiety, depression, sadness, or isolation. It’s important to remember they’re not methods to invalidate your feelings, but to add context to why you may be feeling the way you do right now. That’s important, because it’s easy to be anxious or upset and, when presented with the fact that you may be tired or hungry, feel like that’s somehow the same as dismissing your experiences or feelings, and it’s not. But it may be a tool you can use to step back from the ledge of making a bad decision or lashing out at someone (including yourself!) and address those basic needs before your return to address the issue that sparked the whole affair.
[See You, Space Cowboy]
This past weekend I was on a panel with some amazing writers and novelists, hosted by The Strand Bookstore, one of my favorite places to be in New York City, and one of the folks on our panel was Tiffanie Drayton, author of the upcoming book Black American Refugee: Escaping the Narcissism of the American Dream, available for pre-order now and releasing on February 15th, from Penguin Random House. (Also my publisher, full disclosure.)
It’s a memoir—but for me, it resonates a little differently. Sure, Drayton discusses exactly how the American Dream, as bright and inspirational as it may be, is so often dangled out of reach of so many people, and in her experience, seeing through the cracks of injustice and discrimination rooted in American society was enough to make her leave entirely, seeking a better—or at least different—experience elsewhere. The book is an exploration of the topics she discussed in this New York Times op-ed, and just listening to her story on the panel was powerful. Read the op-ed, then pre-order her book.
Meanwhile, I’ve pre-ordered, and I’m still, as I have been for the better part of the past decade or so, debating whether to move to Canada, where a large arm of my family lives and where I have dual citizenship. That may sound naive, but stories like Drayton’s make me wonder if it’s naivete or prudence that makes me even consider it in the first place.
Now then, speaking of books to pre-order, you know what to do. And of course, take care of yourselves and each other, and I’ll see you in two.