Not-Work
Essentially everything I do for a living is a solo project.
I have clients for my speaking gigs and collaborators on some of my side-hustles, but fundamentally I operate as an independent entity, which is fortunate in some ways and far less so in others.
For someone who likes to have creative control and the ability to pivot on a dime, this approach to making things (and sometimes getting paid for it) works great. It suites my mentality and the way I prefer to operate on a day to day basis.
There are times, though, when I have reason to imagine how wonderful it would be to have partners, coworkers, other folks who are responsible for some chunk of what needs to get done in order for all these balls to stay in the air, all the trains to run on time, etc.
Because of this lifestyle/working arrangement, I don't really have meetings or Slacks or group calls on a regular basis. I'm interviewed sometimes, and I have catch-up calls with friends, some of which also have businessy components—but that's it. I can go weeks without speaking to anyone about work if I choose to do so.
This is a double-edged sword, as casual conversation and cross-pollination with folks who are adjacent to something you're working on can be great fun and valuable to the eventual output of whatever it is you're making, but it also means you have more time to do the work itself, rather than spending countless hours and untold energy on various sorts of not-work.
A recent study conducted by Microsoft shows, among other things, that folks working in numerous industries (mostly the types of industries that require you spend a lot of time in front of a computer—white collar jobs) spend an average of 57% of their time in meetings or conversing with job-related people (coworkers, bosses, clients) via email and chat services.
A whopping 68% of people surveyed said they don't have enough uninterrupted time to ever really focus, and 64% said they don't feel like they have sufficient time and energy to do their jobs.
About 60% of leaders surveyed said they could detect the effects of this lack of focus and time in their employees, and all of these issues (from the top to the bottom of these surveyed organizations) noted increased burnout correlated with these issues (all of which are connected to a prioritization of not-work over work).
There's only so much you can do from within an organization or business of any size to turn the ship and change how things function, but this all sounds pretty grim to me.
I can't imagine trying to do what I do without long periods of time to just sit and think and read and otherwise mentally work-over what I'm parsing, before then sitting down for (also focused) periods of production: writing, recording, editing, etc.
There have been times, in fact, where I've tried to do what I normally do while embedded in more-distracted situations, and I simply haven't been able to do about 80% of the work I would normally do; those distractions, those tugs on my attention and disruptors of my focus are just too potent and pervasive.
There are things we can do in our non-work lives to make this sort of thing less likely, of course.
We can set expectations about when we'll respond to message (texts, emails, etc), we can turn off notifications when we're not on the clock, and we can turn off the TV, the music, anything else that we've got playing in the background, giving ourselves uninterrupted chunks of time throughout our day.
Most of us will have less power over how things work at our workplaces, but making even minor tweaks—and maybe even bringing it up with the Forces That Be, to see of some broader changes might be feasible (or if working remotely part of the time might be feasible)—seems prudent, as this is something that's becoming increasingly problematic in a measurable way, for folks at all levels of the making-things hierarchy.
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