The Value of Time

The New York Times ran two articles this weekend, both written by professional researchers, about the relationship between productivity and how we perceive our time. One made the case for boredom as a tool for creative fulfillment, the other critiqued the contemporary obsession with quantifying every facet of life--including and especially how we spend our time. Both argue that it's counterproductive to meta-analyze how we spend our time, or should spend our time. In light of my recent attempts to maximize my writing productivity and make headway on my dissertation, I found elements of these arguments compelling.

In "The Other Side of Boredom," freelance researcher Mary Mann related how the boredom of her job as an under-employed kayaking guide inspired her to pursue a new career in research. For her, boredom helped her realize that she most enjoyed spending her time pursuing the "delayed gratification" of discovery. Her stints of boredom in the kayak-guiding job showed that she was not averse to tedium--which admittedly describes most of the research process--if it ultimately yielded "idea-shaping information." Mann offered the following advice for others hoping to usefully harness their boredom:

“So what turns doing nothing into creative fuel? While there are no conclusive studies on this, therapists and psychoanalysts I’ve interviewed tend to agree that the best way to really use boredom is to allow our bored minds to wander freely and to pay close attention to where they go, like watching a Ouija board supply answers under our own fingertips.”

I'm charmed by this notion of boredom as a tool for revelation, which in turn makes me doubly wary that this is an ultra-powerful justification for procrastination--a "get out of jail free" card for days spent knitting on the couch instead of working on the dissertation. Mann never really addresses whether, past a certain point, periods of boredom begin to yield diminishing returns. 

Over in the business section, Natasha Singer profiled Professor Natasha Dow Schull for the Technophoria column. Prof. Schull is a cultural anthropologist who will soon release a book about consumer electronics that monitor and quantify the behaviors of its users. In the interview, Schull critiques technologies that attempt to change a user's behavior with a prompt or cue instead of by providing users with their data so they gain insight into their behavior patterns. She accuses these technologies of turning the "quantified self" into the "infantilized self," and warns that while users feel like they're investing in their wellness they're often just redirecting anxiety from one neurosis to another. 

I am guilty of this charge. While I have avoided wristbands the prompt me to exercise, I have tried multiple apps that quantify the time that I work and prompt me to adhere to a work schedule. Recently I wrote about how I'm using the Pomodoro technique. When I start my Pomodoro  app, it tells me when to start working, when to take my breaks, and when I've met my goal. Although the app does not monitoring my compliance, its reminders are changing my behavior. The regular interval of beeps and chimes are training me to work consistently for shorter periods of time, and  the amount of time I work each day increases by incorporating five minute rejuvenating breaks between sessions. That's all well and good, but Prof. Schull's argument does raise two questions. Can I maintain these work/rest patterns and the enhanced level of productivity without the use of the app? And is my obsessive monitoring of my time merely distracting me from my real anxiety, the writing of deep historical thoughts?

Both Prof. Schull and Ms. Mann ask if we over-value productive time and create anxiety where there should be creativity. I was reminded of some advice that my mother passed along to me from her friend: "we are not machines." Perhaps, by programming my time, I'm making my task harder than it has to be. And as useful as my mom's second-hand advice was, it's compelling to hear this case made by fellow researchers. I know their time is spent doing much of the same work that I do, and I give more credence to their advice than to most of the people who admonish me to "just chill." 

Tax Day

My father in law, who does my taxes every year, always says that tax day is the adult iteration of opposite day. Whatever was good for you all year suddenly becomes a liability, while your drama and trauma and failure become valuable. At no time in my life has that been more true than during graduate school.

For 364 days each year, I wish that I did not have to think twice about whether or not to buy a $5 sandwich. On April 15, I embrace my low tax bracket and wait for the government to send me a check. From a tax standpoint, graduate school certainly beats working an entry level job!

Conversely, one of the few good things that happens to graduate students--grant funding--is very bad at tax time. A windfall of a few thousand dollars can add several hundred dollars of tax liability, and without careful financial planning you can end up with a very nasty shock in April. It's imperative to save part of your grant checks to cover taxes. 

I'm not delusional. I understand that my tax return effectively subsidizes my labor and empowers my employer to continue paying low wages to graduate students. For one day, though, I conveniently forget this fact. Tax day is a good day!

Solar Fuel

I have no scientific evidence on which to base this claim, but I had a superbly productive day and I attribute it to the sunshine and spring breeze. Pittsburgh has had some exceptionally beautiful weather this week--and I mean exceptional in the truest sense, this does not happen often--and I've been working outside on the stoop of my apartment building. For an hour this morning and for two this afternoon, I sat and reviewed the secondary literature I'm using to write the first section of my first chapter. It was warm enough to have my arms bare, and so even when my back and bottom began to ache from being pressed against the hard concrete steps I refused to get up and go inside. I just kept reading, leaning gingerly against the wrought iron banister that's come partially unmoored from the porch. 

The magnolia tree across the street is blooming. The playground down the block is filled with kids from the Catholic school. Everyone else is at work and so it's just me, reading, uninterrupted. 

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Hametz

It seems that when the Jews were finally freed from slavery and left Egypt, they had neither the time to let their bread rise nor to write blog posts. It's been a week without blogging or hametz and frankly I've quite missed both. I had the pleasure of spending Passover with my family in Florida, but it was a busy trip and I prioritized my dissertation in the sporadic hours I found myself free of familial responsibilities. 

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Landing in North Central Florida

As I have steadily worked on my first chapter, I continue to pilot my writing checklist. I've had the most success with step one, eliminating distractions, and surprisingly also with step four, documenting my progress. It's been helpful to summarize and synthesize the day's work, because the next day I have a great reminder of where to begin. 

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Step two has been the most difficult. I've struggled to articulate "reasonable and meaningful" goals each day. In fact, I've mostly skipped this step and thus had to forgo step five, reward. I experimented with time goals (ex: write for 3 hours) and with completion goals (ex: finish a particular section). The former was often too ambitious and not commensurate with the daily variations in my stamina; the latter was tricky to adhere to because I tend to restructure sections as I write. Although I was inconsistent about setting a timer, which was step three on the checklist, I found that with the timer I was more likely to continue writing past the point when I felt like quitting.

I've thus created a second draft of the checklist that matches writing tasks to my attention span. Instead of selecting a completion goal or setting an arbitrary number of hours I want to work, I will instead divide my available work time into a number of Pomodoro cycles ("pomodori") and assign a general task to each one. For example, I could choose to do three pomodori of 25 minutes each separated by 5 minute breaks. In the first I could commit to re-reading and editing the previous days' writing, in the second I could outline the next paragraph, and in the third I could read the secondary literature on that topic. 

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I will report back next week on whether these revisions inspire more productive writing sessions or, conversely, have the unintended consequence of promoting productive procrastination.

Synthesis

I finally began writing in earnest this week. It's the first section of my first chapter, and it describes the history of the Jewish Center movement before World War II and the Janowsky Survey of 1946-7. Each day, I've alternated between staccato, panicked typing and consulting books so I can fill the holes I left gaping in my argument. On the first day, I tried to relay from memory the argument made by David Kaufman in his amazing book, Shul with a Pool: The "Synagogue-Center" in American Jewish History. I managed to articulate Kaufman's claim that the postwar JCC evolved from the failed synthesis of the synagogue-center, which itself evolved in the 1920s from the synthesis of five earlier (or co-existant) institutions: the Reform Temple, the YMHA, the Settlement, the Talmud Torah, and the Orthodox synagogue. All of these iterations were attempts, Kaufman argues, to balance the religious and social functions of the synagogue. 

After I stutteringly wrote that all down--it felt like what I imagine a cat feels when coughing up a hairball--it became clear to me that I needed to go back to the roots of the American synagogue. I needed to explain why rabbis and Jewish lay leaders in the 1920s were searching for a new solution to a problem they'd been facing for 100 years, namely how to attract "secular" or "apathetic" or "Americanized" Jews into Jewish communal institutions without being accused of being "secular" or "Americanized" themselves. I was already thinking about the split of the synagogue-center, and so it seemed logical to begin telling this story at the point of another significant split: the end of the Sephardic "synagogue-communities" in 1820.

Still in writing mode, I wrote the basic outline of that story. The earliest arrivals to colonial America were Sephardic Jews, and following their tradition from Europe they established synagogues in America that governed both the social and religious life of the entire Jewish community. The benefit of this model was its unity, and the disadvantage was the discipline that the parnas--the community leaders--could enforce over congregants who had no alternatives. If you wanted to observe Judaism in a way that differed from the conventions of the synagogue, you could be alienated and denied access to kosher meat, a minyan to pray with, and other resources necessary for living a Jewish life in a majority-Protestant land. So, around the 1820s, younger Jews began breaking away and establishing competing synagogues. I was left wondering how to connect the end of the synagogue-community to the end of the synagogue-center. 

To explain the historical events that led from one event to the other, I pulled my well-worn copy of Jonathan Sarna's American Judaism down from the shelf. It's an essential reference; Sarna devotes 400 pages to tell 350 years of American Jewish history. It's comprehensive but not dense or dry.  Sarna argues that that American Jews’ response to fears about assimilation and extinction has generated “many creative responses” over the past 300 years. This theme of renewal acts as an organizing structure for the messy story of fracturing religious movements. Like Kaufman, Sarna emphasizes that American Jews and Judaism have constantly evolved, creating new syntheses to suit the times and the culture. 

This "synthesis" argument is a popular one in American Jewish historiography because it demonstrates how Jews have prevailed as, in Sarna's words, America’s “most visible non-Christian faith.”  Despite their foreignness and despite anti-Semitism, Jews swiftly entered the American middle class. It certainly helped that they were white, but white Irish and Italian Catholics did not experience the same speedy upward mobility. Synthesis--Jews' history of adapting their institutions and practices and culture--is one way to explain this exceptionalism. 

The pitfall of the synthesis argument, however, is that it can be triumphalist and focus only on successes. What about the struggles and the failures? American Judaism does not ignore controversy, but because its intent is to provide a broad outline of 350 years of history it does necessarily focus more on achievements and victors. Shul with a Pool also makes a synthesis argument, but concludes that the synagogue-center hybrid was unsuccessful (if influential).

All this to say that I've realized I am left wondering how I will describe the postwar history of JCCs. I certainly know that it's a story of constant struggle and disagreement. The question is, did Jewish Centers continue to evolve? Did they continue trying to strike a balance between viewpoints? Did they keep incorporating functions of other institutions in the same way that the synagogue-center did?

While preparing for my doctoral exams, I remember saying to my advisor that although I understood all the pros and cons of this historiographical debate, I didn't really know where I would fit myself. She reassured me that I wasn't supposed to know yet, that my perspective would emerge as I worked on the dissertation. And now here I am, wondering where I will eventually stand.