I haven’t been an engineer for more than a year. Instead, I’m doing stuff that I believe is important in theory (encouraging young synthetic biologists to reflect on responsible science) but that, hour-to-hour, involves a lot of sending emails and espousing opinions I feel underqualified to defend.
I volunteered for this nonprofit before starting my job, and I was a really good volunteer! I used to wonder why I seemed to show more agency and dedication in my volunteer gigs than at my engineering job… Was I just kind of a bad employee? A bad engineer? More passionate about responsibility than robots? Now that I’m doing this work full-time, I think it’s more that I wasn’t previously paying The Costs of Reliability:
If I feel like writing sometimes and not other times, then if writing is my hobby I’ll write when I feel like it, and my output per hour of writing will be fairly high. Even within “writing”, if my interests vary, and I write about whatever I feel like, I can take full advantage of every writing hour. By contrast, if I’ve committed to write a specific piece by a specific deadline, I have to do it whether or not I’m in the mood for it, and that means I’ll probably be less efficient, spend more time dithering, and I’ll demand more external compensation in exchange for my inconvenience.
I have sometimes (okay… often) compensated for my relatively lower efficiency by letting work bleed outside normal business hours. Apparently 2021 will have a total of 261 working days (plus 104 weekend days); my time tracking shows that I have worked at all on 301 days so far this year (oops), but have only worked 4 or more focused hours on 122 days (also oops). This averages out an unsatisfying but acceptable amount of work, but it’s probably not ideal to take so few uninterrupted holidays. I used to feel proud of not being All About My Job and it’s harder to feel that way when my evenings and weekends are so studded with working.
I remain a perpetual time optimist, and I have this fantasy of becoming really focused, and getting the same amount of work (well, actually, in my fantasy, more work) done in a smaller number of hours, and then returning to being the sort of person who has an assortment of cool non-work projects. If I am honest, this is not all that likely, but I want to try harder next year to take more real holidays, while still doing work that I’m proud of.
Just one day out of life― it would be so nice,
- Tessa