I have a night class this semester, and I am finding once again that the time required for me to coast down after class does not quiiiite fit into the time available between my arrival at home and my preferred bedtime. So I am throwing up a quick blog post in hopes that it will de-froth my brain a little further.
Did you read that millennial burnout article? Did you react by saying to yourself "I sympathize with a lot of this" and also "Why can we not pull up our socks and get on with adult life these days"? Part of my trouble is the sheer number of input channels I am expected to respond to these days. Electronic messages make it quick and easy to communicate, but now we have all of this extra communication to deal with.
It might be most conspicuous at work, where email frees students up to ask me questions that I would never have asked a professor back in the days when the options were (a) go to office hours and ask in person or (b) make a phone call and hope to catch her in the office. Almost all of the time I am glad students have a frictionless means of asking me questions. I wonder sometimes what my working hours would have looked like if I had pursued a PhD and an academic career as a young woman. It would have been annoying to send off manuscripts and grant applications by US mail, for sure. But all of the stuff -- notifications and reminders and reply-all oversights -- must have been a much smaller part of the workday.
I used to be really guarded about giving out my cell number, but these days everybody and his pet gecko asks for it and sometimes I just say yes. It's easy to lose track of stuff in the text inbox, especially as more dumb notifications pile up. (Do I need three reminders for that appointment? No, I emphatically do not.) I deliberately set my Messenger notifications so that the app is not allowed to disturb me, which is mostly good but also means that stuff gets lost in there. Ditto for the Group Me app -- I don't let it buzz at me, but then I need to keep an occasional eye on what's going on in there.
When my kids first started getting involved in activities there was no expectation that every parent would have an email account. Communication was more of a pain in the days when you had to call everybody's landline to relay information, so there was less of it. If it was 40 degrees on the morning of a soccer game, the coach would assume you knew your kid needed to dress warmly. Our last soccer coach would send out messages tagged URGENT via both email and text. WARM LAYERS, he would say. I'm okay with the warm-layers-for-cold-days piece of adult life, thanks, but not so much with the inbox management.
I don't really think life was easier in the 80s, but there's something to be said for having a mailbox and a landline (and probably not even an answering machine) as your sole sources of Stuff That People Outside My House Need Me To Accomplish.
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