9-to-5
productivity, professionalism, optimization, and how my rainbow-banded Swatch started it all
It was a good watch, a little watch, but a strong watch. A Swatch, to be exact, and my true pride-and-joy. Well, as much pride as a girl can carry considering her 7 years of age. It was enough to be proud about because it was my belonging on my bedside table solely under my ownership and control.
I would put this watch on my left wrist every morning as soon as I scurried under my stars-and-moons sheets, before I brushed my teeth standing on the plastic stool under the sink. As I swiped my other wrist left-to-right-to-left, my curls dangling over my ears, I'd drop my eyes to my watch. What time was it? (It doesn't matter in this memory because this was before I internalized the religious sanction of the 8 hour shift.)
Long gone the Swatch, my trusted rainbow-banded and wall-scuffed birthday present, the pale ribbon of skin is memorialized on my wrist. I steal a glance at my current watch, a black-leather Timex watch with only 2 features: the date dial & the Indiglo button. What time is it? (It matters in this memory because I'm headed to work and my shift is about to begin.)
Now that I'm back at school, I'm once again freed from the division of the earth's axial rotation into 3 parcels of 8 hours each.1 Prior to my current situation, I was a newly minted recruit into the 8 hour shift. I met my sanction with resolve: I would work until I had saved enough to go back to school, trading the 9-to-5 salaried life for the "laissez-faire" approach business school impounded in our heads. Thus, I had a plan and a mission, my tactical objectives only waiting to be typed out into an Excel sheet and assigned a monetary and temporal value.
As I budgeted my life in monthly increments, I began to trade impulses for plans, thoughts for tasks, and feelings for signs. Here I was finally initiated into the lifestyle of productivity, professionalism, and optimization: my life became a mechanized system of improvements and efficiencies organized by strengths, weaknesses, value, and time. In total, it was a two-year stint that accumulated in intensity when we moved to Manhattan. So while I no longer am a full-time employee and am once again a student pursuing her dream of the past 7 years, I maintain the same attitude towards my life that treats all days as a problem of optimization to be divided into 3 parcels of 8 hours each— and I collapse if I can't fit myself into either of these parcels at last notice.
This summer, I made the executive decision to take it easy. I hadn't had a spare summer for myself since my first year at university, and even then I scrambled to get any little job for my schedule's sake.2 In my many black Moleskines over the years, I have outlined my plan to make such-and-such amount with so-and-so position for this-and-that experience. I have detailed it for the years leading to my Master's and the year post, but have failed to dream up the years in between and, specifically, the long and empty summers. So, according to my life's plan, I'm living unaccounted for this season and have found it difficult figuring out what to do with myself.
We're halfway through this summer and, at time of writing this, there is plenty that I can look back on from this season alone. In the past 6 weeks, we flew 1 lap around the earth3, went to the beach, tufted a small rug, met two more cats, took two driving lessons, read four books, subletted in Montreal, booked a trip to New York, got a yoga membership, bought a smoothie maker, bought a vacuum cleaner, and napped many afternoons. And yet, at time of living these experiences, I can't say that any truly felt as real to me as the morning I woke up to make my way to my little summer gig of four 8 hour shifts at the school's coworking space. Walking down Providence's College Hill, I carried the weight of each hour thinking of how familiar this felt, and sighing some mixture of relief and deep alarm.
The alarm is this: I am comfortable when I recognize that my existence is being used in a "productive" manner. According to my principle of the division of parcels, my criteria for personal curiosity, initiative, or intrigue does not qualify as "productive." Only what can be blocked in a calendar or sent in an email or received in an invoice qualifies as an optimized use of my existence, and the rest is just mere play. In essence, I am closer to sacrificing my evening for unexpected work rather than drop a shift for time with myself.
I can investigate this questionable habit through multiple lineages. I can blame it on society, or on my business degree, or my dissatisfaction of my business degree, or the intimidation of my dreams, or the impatient expectations of myself, or the great hope I have for my future, or the Mail app on my phone. But if I had to commit to one origin story, I'd pick the symbol of my silly rainbow-banded Swatch watch.
There are a few memories from my childhood that I remember vividly and with certainty that they were not just a dream. For one, I remember our uncle instructing us on how to eat our salads with a fork and knife: left fork on lettuce, right knife on crease, release left to raise, bend, pull over, and drop left fork again on lettuce, slide right knife out. In the attempt to make us "ladylike," I was introduced to the idea of being observed as a "lady," and thus needed to demonstrate control over my actions in public. I held that lesson with such high regard that I continue to practice this technique (and philosophy) to this day.
I also remember my first journal: a little red notebook identical to my best friend, Faith's, book. Under her instruction, I began to jot down "memorable" events of each minute past. Entries read along the lines of "3:47pm: Baba picks us up at school. / 3:48pm: Baba drives. / 3:49pm: Baba keeps driving. / 3:50pm: Tamara says she's hungry." Daily during recess, Faith and I would meet and share our recorded findings from the previous day. While this joint documentation only lasted a week at most, I would continue to carry a journal (of perhaps more "memorable" events) by my side up to this present day.
What these two memories have in common is my introduction to the opinions, expectations, and cues that make up a successful, productive, and optimized life in adulthood. When I received the gift of the Swatch watch, I beamed with joy thinking about how soon I'd be fluent in the cryptic system of short and long hands, the radial Arabic and Roman numerals, and the urge to ask "What time is it?" and have an immediate opinionated response to whatever time it was that was uttered. The Swatch was my ticket into adulthood, and I treasured its soft ticks for years by my bedside as my slow salvation towards productivity, professionalism, and optimization.
Well, here I am now more than 15 years later, checking my Mail app after snoozing the alarm, the Timex on my wrist often before I can decide on what to wear for the day. We make our coffee at home or head over to a café if we’re out of beans or if it’s not a weekday, and spend the morning hours talking about how we slept, how we feel, and what our plans are for the day.
Our lives are full of errands because I make them that way with enough tasks and enough lists to take us to 5pm, the end of the most important parcel. That is when I undo my watch, wash my face, and close the curtains. The show is over, the actress has played her final lines, it is now time for her to rest and critique her strengths and faults of the day’s act. She will sit at the table, palm to her chin, thinking of when this came to be, and begin to type what she thinks was the start of it, her eyes fixed on the pale ribbon of skin youthful on her wrist.
If anything, being at (landscape) architecture school, I divide my time by 0 and my answer remains inconclusive (in other words: I am always working).
The list of jobs include being an UberEats delivery person on my bicycle where I rode for 3 days, took a break on the 4th, and have rested ever since; and gardening with naïveté over how to prune hydrangeas while listening to audiobook versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray and Shoe Dog.
As a friend just recently noted, we are now displaced by 40,075km until the next time we decide to fly to Japan westwardly.
i fr need to try the providence smoothie
I retired from my job in Silicon Valley a decade ago but still am self-compelled to be “productive” 8-6 M-F. Sigh.