Soul Shelter

Seventeen days without touching a computer, cell phone, or television did me a world of good. And when I got back, those days taught me what’s wrong with my desk.

I was vacationing on Orcas Island, part of the San Juan Island group between Canada and Washington State. There I pursued manly activities such as fishing, chopping wood, boating, hiking, swimming, and lighting woodstove fires. The copy of Wired magazine I brought lay unread in my shoulder bag, which remained unopened (what was I thinking?). Amid the Orcas Island landscapes and the Puget Sound seascapes—Dall porpoises, harbor seals, soaring trees, boats, dogs, fish, dogfish, banana slugs, iron fireplaces, axes, and deer skeletons—Wired magazine seemed an effete, puerile invader, deserving of banishment from my analog island.

Instead, I went to the Orcas Island public library and got a copy of Wuthering Heights. Good, timeless human angst and agony, still powerful after 200 years. In the final two days I finished off Jay Mcinerney’s Ransom, a solid read with particular appeal to Japan buffs like me. And as the August days waned, I came closer than I care to admit to buying a boat and spending the next six months cruising the San Juans with fishing tackle and a sleeping bag.

Back in Portland, I reluctantly switched on the PC, took one look at my desk, and immediately saw two acute problems. Here’s a picture: Can you see what’s wrong?

The problems with my desk are subtle but serious, and I’m going to fix them ASAP. Here they are:

1. Role confusion
This is a honkin’ big desk, measuring 80 inches long by 36 inches deep. For a computer station, it’s far bigger than it needs to be. That’s because it’s designed for analog work—for spreading out papers and books, for thinking and writing by hand. Yet it’s dominated by computer crap that makes such “spreading out” impractical. It needs to return to its true mission in life as an analog work desk.

2. Telephone presence
What’s that about? The presence of a telephone assumes constant sitting at this computer station/desk throughout the day. This a dreadful violation of several of Clark’s Rules (though great if you want to be a constantly swamped office worker).

Apprehending these problems, I immediately got on the phone with Harris Work Systems to arrange the purchase of a new, separate computer workstation, substantially smaller than my main desk (BTW, this will be a motorized workstation—when it arrives I’ll show a picture and explain the ergonomic advantages). My honkin’ big desk, sans computer, will return to its proper purpose, in a new and honored location in my office.

So thanks, Orcas Island, for the analog injection—and for the hint on better coping with an all-too wired world.

You may also enjoy:

“How to Be Late for Dinner”

“Fixing a Broken Work Model”

“Happiness is Turning Off the Computer“

Staying swamped at work is essential for upwardly mobile office professionals. Remember, if you want to be a success, constant activity is a must!

So for the tiny handful of you who haven’t yet thrown off the antiquated shackles of analog worklife, here are some guidelines for keeping busy, busy, busy in the wired workforce of the twenty-first century.

1. Sit in Front of Your Computer All Day
Your computer is the ultimate source of productivity, so don’t leave it unattended. Ignore nonsense about so-called “offline” work. Forget “ergonomic” claptrap about repetitive stress injuries, eyestrain, etc. And remember: Rest breaks are for wimps.

2. Make E-Mail the Center of Your Worklife
The modern office worker’s ultimate goal is to work entirely by passing e-mail messages back and forth. Work diligently toward this ideal (see Rules 3 through 7).

3. Check E-Mail First Thing in the Morning and Constantly Throughout the Day
Start each workday by checking e-mail. Leave your e-mail program open, and set it to automatically check for incoming messages every two minutes. This way you can respond immediately to the exciting and important information each new communication brings (pay special attention to software upgrade announcements, Facebook invitations, and jokes from relatives). This is called “multitasking.”

4. Multitask
Avoid focusing on a single task until it’s done—that’s for Luddites unable to embrace new technology and the modern workstyle. Wired workers multitask constantly. They jump effortlessly from task to task—and create entirely new tasks with every arriving e-mail message.

5. React, Don’t Think
Reflection, pondering, deliberation, and contemplation are for squares stuck in the 1900s. Wired workers don’t think, they react. Respond immediately to each and every e-mail message, regardless of its so-called “importance.”

6. Check the Web Constantly
Clicking through to URLs referenced in e-mail messages is the second most important task of the modern worker. “Bookmark” important sites and check them continuously for updates. To understand how crucial this is, just imagine what would happen if you didn’t check your bookmarks constantly.

7. Carry a Mobile E-Mail Device
For those rare occasions when you must leave your PC, carry a mobile device so you can respond to crucial e-mail messages and do important Web research. Use your mobile device during meetings, at lunch, and especially when you’re with your family.

8. Type, Don’t Talk
Modern office workers know typing is more effective than talking. Why arrange lunch in an eight-second phone call when you can stretch the discussion over hours and multiple e-mail messages? Typing not only keeps you busier, it helps you avoid live encounters involving such passé elements of communication as tone of voice, facial expression, body language, physical proximity, eye contact, and so forth. C’mon, people, this isn’t the 1800s!

9. Avoid Pencil and Paper, Draft in Digital
Never go offline or off-site with pencil and paper to “think” about what you want to say (hey, they don’t call it “Office” for nothing). Start typing and pasting in cool images. It’ll all make sense once it’s formatted.

10. Do Fun Tasks First
Work on fun tasks first (assuming you’re caught up with e-mail, which shouldn’t happen often). Ignore the CRAP™ rule. Leave difficult work for later. This’ll ensure that you’re constantly swamped and enable you to check your mobile device late into the evening hours.

Follow these simple steps and you, too, can stay swamped on the path to success!

“Happiness is Turning Off the Computer”

“The Perils of the Internet”

“Want to Achieve Your Goal? Avoid E-Mail!“

In observation of Labor Day 2008, we share the following essay by New York writer Vicki Wilson. It’s an honest and incisive glimpse at the the unspoken pressures of being on the clock, and it touches gracefully on the soul’s need for balance in work and life. Enjoy.

• Overtime by Vicki Wilson •

It’s 6:00 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon. I’m straightening pens on my desk, placing stray paperclips in the magnetic paperclip holder, and piling folders on top of each other. It’s now 6:03. I check my e-mail one more time, pick up my phone and put it back down. I count the tiles on the ceiling from my desk to the door. I look out the window at the company parking lot. It’s 6:05 The lot is still full of cars.

The thing is, I’m completely done with the work I have to do today. And it’s too late to get started on some other big project — if I do that, I’ll be here for hours. But if I leave before now — now being approximately 6:07 p.m. — I will be labeled The Woman Who Goes Home Almost on Time. There’s nothing worse you can be in an office. It’s something akin to being The Girl Who Picks Her Nose in the second grade. If you are a serious worker, dedicated to your career and loyal to your company, you will work late every day. It’s the unwritten rule, or so it seems.

Ever since my first office job, I’ve heard people whispering reverently to each other in lunch rooms and around the coffee pot, “Do you know Janet (or Sally or Sue)? Yeah, well she works all the time. She’s even here on Sundays.” Never mind that Janet and Sally and Sue have husbands, houses, children, dogs and/or hobbies — they were the real workers, the employees who were big deals, because they gave up their lives to put in the hours. I once worked with a woman who came in two hours early and left much later than I did every single day. The bosses loved her, despite the facts that she made more mistakes than anyone in the office and had a bad attitude. She wasn’t perfect, maybe, but she sure as heck was there a lot. That meant something.

What exactly it meant, though, I haven’t been able to figure out. Sure, there are times when I need to work late or on weekends to get the job done. Everyone has to sometimes. But on other days, say on a normal Tuesday like today, I am caught up on my work and I just want to go home. But I have to worry: how does this reflect on me? If I leave on time and actually get a chance to eat my dinner at the table with my husband before dark, what kind of message am I sending to my co-workers and my supervisor? Will they think I’m a slacker? When it comes time for a raise will my evaluation read “Good worker, but she leaves on time a lot,” denying me my yearly three percent increase? Shouldn’t it be enough that I do a good job? Or is it really quantity and not quality that matters?

I don’t know the answers to my own questions. What I do know, however, is that it’s now 6:15 p.m. I’ve heard the secretary down the hall, AKA The Woman Who Always Leaves First, shut the door behind her as she exits the office through the side door. I shut down my computer and turn off my lights. If I walk really slowly, it will be almost 6:20 when I officially leave — more than a whole extra hour of overtime for me, The Woman Who’s Late Again for Dinner.

You might also enjoy:

“Let Us Begin”

“Born Ready”

“You’ve Got to Jump“

Jim, one of my entrepreneurship students this summer, has led an extraordinary life.

Born in France, Jim sailed the world with his vagabond parents for fourteen years aboard a fifteen-meter aluminum schooner, all the while studying via correspondence course.

Jim’s sunny, open personality reflects a true worldview absorbed from growing up on the open sea-and in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, Senegal, and the United States. Along the way, he gained fluency in English, French, and Spanish. And his Japanese is pretty sharp, too.

Today he works as—what else?—a sailboat designer. I imagine Jim slicing through the waters of his career the way his family’s sleek silver schooner once cut through blue-green ocean waves en route to yet another unexplored destination. What a life!

Jim’s happy. Yet like many of us, he looks forward to the day when his career will allow him to “go off the grid” at will. You might call Jim and others like him seekers of career ‘unpluggability’ (is that a real word?).

But how to start?

The way to unplug, says Jim, is to unplug.

Just as the key to getting things done is doing things, the key to unplugging is to unplug. A good place to start is with e-mail, the “killer app” that too often kills our ability to achieve. Go ahead: Not checking e-mail for a day won’t destroy your career. Neither will abandoning it for a week. In fact, people will probably be impressed that you’re involved in something more important than passing messages back and forth.

Maybe you have one of those jobs where everybody communicates by e-mail, despite sitting within shouting distance of each other. If so, consider reducing your mail-checking frequency. You could try a new policy with a signature like this:

In the interest of greater productivity, I’m checking and responding to e-mail messages just twice daily, at around 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. For urgent matters, please call me at ____________ (or poke your head outside the cubicle and shout).

The point is to train others (and maybe yourself) to honor the boundaries of a productive offline life.

If you want to go completely off the grid, consider applying techniques described in The 4-Hour Workweek. I’ve tried a few, including hiring India-based computer specialists through elance.com at $3 an hour (a decent wage in India but one that will make others think twice about basing careers on computer expertise).

For those committed to spending months or even years away, the issues around unplugging grow more challenging.

“The hard part is not unplugging but ‘replugging’ after a long time away from work,” says Jim. “To fully unplug and not worry about job issues when living away from it all, I need a skillset and a network of connections that will get me a satisfying job when I decide to re-plug myself, either by choice or by necessity.”

What you really need, I told Jim, is to start your own business.

But today’s topic is unplugging, and it’s time to practice what I preach. So I’m off to the island hideaway with the family for two solid weeks. No computers, no e-mail, no blogs, television, or cell phone. We’ll swim, hike, fish, agate-hunt, and play with the dog outdoors. We’ll plan nothing and savor everything. We’ll let the hours slip by as they will, let chance encounters stretch into an afternoon—or an entire day.

I hear the sun is shining off the grid, and the waters are clear.

You may also enjoy:

“The Perils of the Internet”

“How to Stay Stressed”

“Happiness is Turning Off the Computer“

While cleaning out old paper files the other day, I ran across a printout of an intriguing e-mail message received nine and a half years ago from my friend and fellow entrepreneur Maxwell Thomas.

“I seldom send out mass e-mails,” Maxwell wrote, “but this one particularly struck me.”

Well, it struck me, too—hard. Reading “How to Stay Stressed” again made me recognize my own tendency, unchanged after more than nine years, to create self-importance-inflating “stress.”

I tried calling and e-mailing John Pinto, the apparent author, for permission to reprint his work, but was unable to contact him. Since the piece already appears online in several places, here it is for your enjoyment.

How to Stay Stressed

Although the De Anza Health Office long been an advocate of stress management, stress, tension, and burnout are still common complaints of students, faculty, and staff alike. On account of this, we have come to the following conclusion: YOU ALL WANT TO STAY STRESSED! The following provides you with a few reasons why.

Stress Helps You Seem Important
Anyone as stressed as you must be working very hard and, therefore, is probably doing something very crucial.

It Helps You to Maintain Personal Distance and Avoid Intimacy
Anyone as busy as you are certainly can’t be expected to form emotional attachments to anyone. And let’s face it, you’re not much fun to be around anyway.

It Helps You Avoid Responsibilities
Obviously you are too stressed to be given any more work. This gets you off the hook for all the mundane chores; let someone else take care of them.

It Gives You a Chemical Rush
Stress might be considered a cheap thrill, and you can give yourself a “hit” anytime you choose. But be careful, you might get addicted to your own adrenaline.

It Helps You Avoid Success
Why risk being “successful” when by simply staying stressed you can avoid all of that? Stress can keep your performance level low enough that success will never be a threat.

Stress Also Lets You Keep Your Authoritarian Management Style
The authoritarian style of “Just do what I say!” is generally permissible under crisis conditions. If you maintain a permanently stressed crisis atmosphere, you can justify an authoritarian style all the time.

Are you worried now about how to stay stressed? You’ll have no trouble if you practice the following clinically proven methods:

Never Exercise
Exercise wastes a lot of time that could be spent worrying.

Eat Anything You Want
Hey, if cigarette smoke can’t cleanse your system, a balanced diet isn’t likely to.

Gain Weight
Work hard at staying at least 25 pounds over your recommended weight.

Take Plenty of Stimulants
The old standards of caffeine, nicotine, and sugar will continue to do the job just fine.

Avoid “Woo-Woo” Practices
Ignore the evidence suggesting that meditation, yoga, deep breathing, and/or mental imaging help to reduce stress. The Protestant work ethic is good for everyone, Protestant or not.

Get Rid of Your Social Support System
Let the few friends who are willing to tolerate you know that you concern yourself with friendships only if you have time, and you never have time. If a few people persist in trying to be your friend, avoid them.

Personalize All Criticism
Anyone who criticizes any aspect of your work, family, dog, house, or car is mounting a personal attack. Don’t take time to listen, be offended, then return the attack!

Throw Out Your Sense of Humor
Staying stressed is no laughing matter, and it shouldn’t be treated as one.

Males and Females Alike: Be Macho
Never ask for help, and if you want it done right, do it yourself!

Become a Workaholic
Put work before everything else, and be sure to take work home evenings and weekends. Keep reminding yourself that vacations are for sissies.

Discard Good Time Management Skills
Schedule in more activities every day than you can possibly get done and then worry about all whenever you get a chance.

Procrastinate
Putting things off to the last second always produces a marvelous amount of stress.

Worry About Things You Can’t Control
Worry about the stock market, earthquakes, the approaching Ice Age, you know, all the big issues.

Become Not Only a Perfectionist but Set Impossibly High Standards
… and either beat yourself up, or feel guilty, depressed, discouraged, and/or inadequate when you don’t meet them.

You may also enjoy:

“Fixing a Broken Work Model”

“Life Without Principle (or Interest)”

“Opting Out of the Deferred Life Plan“

“After several generations of ‘technological improvement’… we have become a people who cannot think about anything important.”
—Wendell Berry

The Internet is widely celebrated as a democratic, informational, and connective blessing. But what if it also exacerbates the “American malady” that the poet Stephen Spender bemoaned back in 1949?—“The commercialization of spiritual goods on an enormous scale, in the same way as material goods are commercialized.”

What if the Internet poses a threat to the cultivation of a rich, reflective inner life? What if Internet-mentality endangers Art—its creation, its place in our culture, and our ability to appreciate it?—or the cultivation of real knowledge?

Ridiculous! you might say. The Internet as a cultural negative?! You’ve gotta be crazy!

Well, I do see the self-destructive irony of using the Internet to blog about the potential damage the Internet is wreaking on our spiritual lives. But here goes anyway.

I’ve recently sunk my teeth into three books that deeply and compellingly question the real nature of online culture, and the price we may be paying in our eagerness to embrace the Internet as a godsend. (Don’t get me wrong: I want you to keep reading the words on this screen).

1. Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob by cultural critic Lee Siegel. Published earlier this year, Siegel’s volume makes the most curmudgeonly arguments of the books I’m discussing today—but Against the Machine also advances a number of salient points. The most arresting, and hard to dispute, is Siegel’s assertion that culture on the Internet—that is, the ‘cultural offerings’ most readily available to browsers through Google rankings, etc—is often qualitatively of the lowest common denominator.

Though the Internet promises freer access to information or culture than older mass-culture media, Siegel contends that it does so by using the same mass-culture formula used by network TV: Popularity = Value. And a trawl through mainstream primetime offerings will immediately show the cultural folly of such a formulation.

Siegel is not alone in complaining that the Internet as we know it actually lowers the cultural bar, rather than raising it to accommodate a refined cultural hunger in the American public. It’s a concern being echoed in numerous places these days.

The effect on American youths of prolonged Internet use is a point of special worry. Recently the Los Angeles Times featured a prominent review of writer Mark Bauerlein’s new book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. Bauerlein argues that the intellectual atmosphere of the Internet is one of information detrimentally streamlined. Consequently, instead of nurturing real curiosity and undertaking real inquiry, students reared in the Internet age adopt a kind of intellectual tunnel vision fixated on results and indifferent to substance. They “seek out what they already hope to find, and they want it fast and free, with a minimum of effort. … Going online habituates them to juvenile mental habits.”

Similarly, the cover of the current July/August issue of the Atlantic Monthly bears the bold words, Is Google Making us Stoopid? Affixed to the article is the telling subtitle, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Writer Nicholas Carr begins the piece with a confession:

I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. … The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online. … And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

Carr’s article is interesting and well worth taking in, but his insights have their antecedents in an eloquent book which receives nary a mention in the Atlantic article—the second in my three-book profile today…

2. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by Sven Birkerts. Published in 1998, well before Internet addiction became a societal norm, Birkerts’ book was astonishingly prophetic—and hence destined for the honorable obscurity allotted to things well ahead of their time. A decade ago Birkerts foresaw the ominous consequences of our rush to move our existences online—the many dangers the Internet posed to the spirit, and correspondingly to the rich stuff of the spirit, such as art:

Our lives are busy, distracted, multitracked, stressed. We may have altered our cognitive apparatus—speeding up, learning to deal with complex assaults of stimuli—in such a way that we can no longer take in the [printed] word [of literature] as it is meant to be taken in. …

While circuit and screen are ideal conduits for certain kinds of data—they are entirely inhospitable to the more subjective materials that have always been the stuff of art. That is to say, they are antithetical to inwardness. …

Being online and having the subjective experience of depth, of existential coherence, are mutually exclusive situations. …

What I fear is a continued withering-away of [artistic and creative] influence. … My nightmare scenario is not one of neotroglodytes grunting and wielding clubs, but of efficient and prosperous information managers living in the shallows of what it means to be human and not knowing the difference. I fear a world become sanitized and superficial.

Digital/Internet culture is collective or ‘horizontal,’ says Birkerts. It is a world of disembodiment, fragmentation, and abstraction, predicated entirely upon instantaneousness. And though it was not yet so at the time Birkerts wrote The Gutenberg Elegies, the Internet has since become a realm of rampant commercialization too. It therefore stands opposed to the real culture, creations, and relationships which give meaning to our lives.

In contrast to our online mentality of today, says Birkerts, our pre-Internet mentality allowed for a greater number of deep, personal (‘vertical’), and cohesive experiences. For example, the old fashioned acts of reading or experiencing art entailed the “slow, painful, delicious excavation of the self.” Today, however, we are reducing—if not abandoning—these rich, subjective experiences in favor of constant connectivity and the light-speed acquisition of data. In other words, we’re trading inward cultivation for the collection of lifeless information.

“We will bring our terminals, our modems, and menus further and further into our former privacies; we will implicate ourselves by degree in the unitary life, and there may come a day when we no longer remember that there was any other life. …

To me the wager is intuitively clear: we gain access and efficiency at the expense of subjective self-awareness. …

We have created invisible elsewheres that are as immediate as our actual surroundings. We have fractured the flow of time, layered it into competing simultaneities. We learn to do five things at once or pay the price. …

We are experiencing the gradual but steady erosion of human presence.

The Gutenberg Elegies and Against the Machine share an important central message, which, for all our connectedness in the Internet Age, has been much too rarely transmitted till now. It is this:

As our personal time becomes more and more ‘virtual,’ as we become increasingly enmeshed in 24-hour connectivity, our individuality—our very identity—comes under threat, for the psycho-physical experience of staring at a terminal is the same for everyone. Individuality, personality, and independent thought are deeply conditioned by varied experience—there is no changing that. Of course, information and ideas have a role in shaping us as individuals—and these are accessible through a computer terminal—but they alone cannot sustain individuality. Contrary to popular belief, the democratization of information cannot itself liberate people. And what power it possesses to do so may well be countered, even dispelled altogether, by the dangerous flattening of psycho-physical experience produced in all of us by prolonged ‘screen-time.’

This brings me to the third book in today’s discussion.

3. The Twilight of American Culture by Morris Berman. Published in 2001, Berman’s volume takes aim and fires at a relatively new American culture in which “community life has been reduced to shopping malls,” and “endless promotional/commercial bullshit…masks a deep systemic emptiness.” He presents engrossing parallels between the onset of the European Dark Ages and the consumer decadence subsuming our national culture.

His societal critique is broader than the subject of the Internet, but it inherently takes up the soul-damaging aspects of the Internet Age, and sounds notes similar to those of Siegel and Birkerts.

Mass culture [is] not culture, but entertainment, and…to believe a society could become cultured via this process [is] a fatal mistake. … [Nevertheless] the drift in the United States today is toward the submergence of the self into the Mass Mind, a trend that is powerfully encouraged by corporate culture and the new technology. Along with this—as in the early Middle Ages—we see the dissolution of interiority, and the loss or denigration of individual judgment and achievement. All this is a major factor of the disintegration of American culture, which, popular opinion to the contrary, is a herd culture, not an individualistic one.

Berman’s argument builds to an inspiring discussion of what he calls a “New Monastic Individual,” a kind of person who quietly ‘checks out’ of the “total commercial environment” and espouses habits or causes that will help to sustain our culture through its coming ‘twilight’ in the same way that a coterie of monks preserved the Western world’s cultural treasures during the Dark Ages.

[New Monastic Individuals] belong to no class, have no membership in a hierarchy. They form a kind of ‘unmonied aristocracy,’ free of bosses, supervision, and what is typically called ‘work.’ They work very hard, in fact, but as they love their work and do it for its intrinsic interest, this work is not much different from play. In the context of contemporary American culture, such people are an anomaly, for they have no interest in the world of business success and mass consumerism. … [But] the new monastic individual is the purest embodiment of the human spirit.

Against the Machine, The Gutenberg Elegies, and The Twilight of American Culture form a beautiful triumvirate on the themes of Technology versus the Soul, Commodity versus the Spirit, Creativity versus Commerce. The reader will find valuable counsel embedded in each book.

I hope you’ll explore these three volumes in themselves, but to close I’ll offer some major takeaways:

Against the Machine: Popularity does not equal value; Log off; Go outside; Have a face-to-face conversation.

The Gutenberg Elegies: Information is not everything, neither is connectivity; Plumb the present moment; Be cautious toward electronic devices; Protect and nourish your subjectivity; Spend more time with the printed page.

The Twilight of American Culture: The cash value of things is not their only value; Avoid mistaking the “tools of the good life” for the good life itself; Defy the “commodity culture”; Be “monastic.”

You might also enjoy:

“Happiness is Turning Off the Computer”

“Fixing a Broken Work Model”

“Want to Achieve Your Goal? Avoid E-Mail!“

We received well over three hundred entries to our essay contest, and today announce the winners. All the prize checks (totaling $2,000) have been sent, and the winning essays lined up in our post bank for you to enjoy over coming weeks (several essays already appear on the site).

Culling the best essays was a tough job, and ranking the final eight tougher still. But reading the top entries over and over again was pure pleasure. Here are the winners:

Grand Prize
Theresa Collins of New Jersey, for The Truth About Quitting, which appears below. While puncturing the conceit of traditional Western thought that life should be free of contradictions, Theresa’s essay story reminds us that quitting doesn’t mean failing, and that sometimes, happiness comes not from achieving goals, but rather “from revising them, from lovingly sorting through them and discarding the ones that don’t work.”

Second Place
Yuvi Zalkow of Portland, Oregon for Dogs and Dolphins, a wonderfully funny piece that turns the “I quit my awful job to do something I love” form upside-down—sort of. Dogs and Dolphins will appear on this page Monday, July 28.

Third Place
Vance H. White of Niceville, Florida took third prize with The Bard of Gooseneck Bay, another piece about teaching—but with a twist. We’ll feature The Bard later this summer.

Runnerups
Ken Korczak’s delightful Twenty-Seven Years of Zen Destroyed My Life appeared on Soul Shelter earlier this month, and we featured Melissa Hanser’s powerful Lighting the Way for Others in May. Terri Davis Smith’s moving essay, originally entitled No More Sweater Sets, appeared in May.

We loved the gritty detail of Simon A. Smith’s These Things Happen, posted June 22. And finally, keep your eyes out for Knuckle Down, Knuckle Up, by the deeply talented Ainsley Drew. Now, enjoy The Truth About Quitting.

The Truth About Quitting by Theresa Collins

What if I had listened to Mr. Howard? I was nineteen years old, tote bag hitched under my arm, sensible shoes on my feet, the cushiony kind you can stand in all day, and I was walking down the endless hallway after my first day subbing seventh grade. It was June, two weeks left of school, and there was no air conditioning.

And I was almost in tears, the kind where you’re not quite crying, but your eyes are swollen pink from tears about to slosh over.

Mr. Howard stood at his door, flashed a kind smile, and asked how my day went. When he saw the look on my face, he waved me in. I sat on the edge of a wobbly student chair and Mr. Howard handed me a tissue. “It’s okay,” he said.

And I felt a little better. Mr. Howard was a thirtysomethingish teacher, new that year to the school, my old high school. And he was friendly, brown eyed, charismatic. Everyone’s new favorite teacher.

I prepared myself for inspiration, for a speech about how subbing isn’t like real teaching, how the first year is always tough, but how you learn, you get better, you change the lives of children and it’s all worth it. I wanted a real-life version of a teacher movie, a guide to becoming Michelle Pfeiffer.

But what he said was this: “You should quit now.”

I didn’t think I heard him correctly. “What?”

Perhaps he didn’t understand my situation. I told him what happened, how the students threw wads of paper at each other (and me), how they kept switching the fan and radio on and off when I looked away, how they didn’t want to learn. “But it’s subbing, and it’s the end of June, and I’m brand-new. I’m sure that’s why.”

He shook his head sadly. “After this year I think teaching is like triage. Everyone is hurting and you can’t help them all. It’s true that most of the kids don’t want to learn, and they prevent you from really helping the ones who do.”

He went on to give the most un-inspirational advice I’ve ever heard, affirming all my worst fears about entering the profession.

And I felt angry, defensive, challenged him when he raked my beloved theorists Piaget and Kohlberg over coals and described the disconnect between learning about teaching from people with PhDs and actually teaching. I leaned back in my chair, stared him down. “So what are you going to do about it? Are you quitting?”

“I’m handing in my resignation letter today actually.”

I have to tell you, I didn’t believe him. But he did it. He really did hand in his letter that day, and he wasn’t back the next year. I returned though. I subbed at my high school for three springs before I graduated and landed a full-time gig teaching middle school.

Before I left the room that day, Mr. Howard gave me his number, and I thumbed it into my cell phone. Call me, he said, if you have any questions about teaching.

I never called him.

I was an optimist, and one bitter, vocal teacher and a bad day couldn’t stop me. I’d invested four years of sweat and tears earning my B.A. in English Education, so how could I throw it away and give up?

Quitting was not an option. So I spent the next year at college taking education classes and yammering off the ears of my roommates with constant soul-searching. I wondered whether I should teach Elementary or Secondary Education, whether I should get a Master’s in Administration or Counseling, or maybe even a PhD, so I could instruct future teachers. I had my whole future hypothetically planned out.

The thing is, I never seriously entertained the gaping hole of dread floating between my heart and my stomach, the feeling that the future I meticulously planned was all wrong for me.

Student teaching came and went, and my doubts grew. My boyfriend comforted me each night and one night, sprawled on the floor of my dorm amid stacks of student papers, I asked him if he thought I could ever enjoy teaching.

And he said, “You should quit now. It’s killing you.”

I almost broke up with him on the spot. I clutched the student papers. “You clearly don’t know me! I can’t throw away a semester’s worth of tuition! I have to finish.”

So I finished student teaching, earned an A minus, and taught middle school for two years before I reached my breaking point. I snapped at my loved ones, cried in my classroom after school with the door shut, cried at home, felt anger and bitterness stiffening my spirit like ice.

I finally quit in June, the end of my second year, to the surprise of everyone, especially my supervisor. She told me I’d been a great teacher.

Maybe, I thought to myself, but maybe not. I think that was one of the hardest parts. I left teaching feeling like I had a red, teacher’s-pen ‘F’ scrawled across my forehead. I desperately wished I had a heartwarming story to tell, a moment of lucidity with a child in need, a feeling that all the hard work paid off. For years, ever since I did a career report in eighth grade, I’d labeled myself “future teacher” and later, “teacher.” To me, “teacher” meant a kind person, a person who patiently loved children, a lifetime devoted to kindness. And the dreaded alternative, “business,” meant pure, money-grubbing evil.

It’s hard to leave behind a label, an expectation you’ve had your whole adult life, the dream you worked towards in college. When I stopped calling myself a teacher and awkwardly described my new, quasi-human resources position at barbeques and holidays, I started feeling that I’d quit being a kind person too.

It’s been a year now, and I haven’t found my dream job, but I finally feel like I’m on my way. I’m working in human resources at an office, and I started noticing things. I’m happier. And I don’t cry at night, and I haven’t morphed into an evil, greedy ogre.

When I handed in my resignation letter and walked out of my supervisor’s office last year, I was surprised by the relief I felt. I wasn’t wracked with doubt, the way I’d lived for years. I was free, and I felt alive, vibrant. My inner world sparkled.

For me, happiness hasn’t come from achieving my goals, it’s come from revising them, from lovingly sorting through them and discarding the ones that don’t work, the labels that don’t describe me anymore. To do that, I’ve had to entertain doubts, to accept the idea that maybe, just maybe, certain professions aren’t right for me, and that it’s okay to make a mistake, and then fix it.

I’ve discovered that quitting doesn’t mean failure.

I think Mr. Howard knew the truth about quitting, but, like so much advice, we can’t follow it until we discover it ourselves. Ultimately, I’m not sorry that I taught for two years. I’m just grateful that after two years I finally listened to myself and made the decision to quit before I taught for two more years. Mr. Howard described teaching as triage, picking the most wounded person and concentrating your efforts there. And sometimes, when that wounded person is you, it’s best to quit, to leap into the chilly unknown and dare to believe that it can become better than what you left behind.

You may also enjoy:

“Creativity Vs. Commerce: Stalking the Spotlight”

“The Soul of an Entrepreneur, the DNA of a Business“

Once upon a time, a young Apple Computer attorney named Randy Komisar negotiated a deal that might have turned the personal computing industry upside down—and changed the world.

Komisar struck an agreement with Apollo Computer to license the Macintosh operating system. The move was the very embodiment of “Computing for the Rest of Us,” Apple’s Big Idea, the grand and good mission that inspired Apple employees and fans alike. Later Komisar would write:

Along with many others inside Apple, I was a strong proponent of licensing the Macintosh operating system in order to preempt Microsoft in setting the standard for user-friendly computing. After all, it was Apple’s birthright, its overriding mission. It would mean cannibalizing our own model, sacrificing margins for volume and market share, but it seemed better than circling the wagons and defending an ever-declining piece of the PC business.

But at the last minute, John Sculley, the brilliant Pepsi-Cola executive who at Steve Job’s behest famously gave up “selling sugar water” to lead Apple, scuttled the deal. Sculley undercut the company’s greater mission in order to preserve Apple’s high-margin end-to-end hardware/software business model.

Apple’s share of the worldwide personal computer market subsequently plummeted, and today it stands at just under three percent (3%). Would Sculley have made the same decision if he could have known that, years later, the reality of Apple’s vision would be Computing for Three Percent of Us?

No one knows, of course, what might have happened had Apple stuck to its ideals and licensed its operating system. But in The Monk and the Riddle, the best-seller detailing the episode, Komisar illuminates the point by distinguishing between passion and drive. Passion and drive are not the same at all, he writes:

Passion pulls you toward something you cannot resist. Drive pushes you toward something you feel compelled or obligated to do.

Passion pulled Apple Computer toward its mission of making computing available to everyman, but drive forced management to choose predictable profitability and lower risk. Here’s my takeaway: Drive arises from will, passion from the soul.

The distinction is useful. Komisar goes on to make the key point of his book, a rejection of what he calls the “Deferred Life Plan.”

The Deferred Life Plan consists of two steps:

1. Do what you have to do
2. Do what you want to do

To achieve the “promise of full coverage under the plan,” writes Komisar, you should divide life into two distinct parts. In Part One you do whatever it takes to become financially secure. In Part Two, you retire and do exactly what you want (it may hardly be necessary to note that the Deferred Life Plan is fueled by drive rather than passion).

The problem, of course, is that those who achieve financial security through drive rather than passion often discover the hollowness of victory. To use a self-help cliché, the success ladder they struggled so hard to climb was leaning against the wrong building.

I experienced this for myself when I sold my company in 2000. I’d started my firm in 1994 based on a passion: exploiting the Internet’s ability to convert high variable communications costs into low fixed costs on behalf of Japanese consumers, who’d long suffered from expensive metered-rate telecommunications services. The Internet also promised a curiously powerful mix of intimacy and anonymity, something perfectly matching the Japanese communication style.

That passion sustained me through the tough early years. Later, as our services were sought by higher and higher profile customers, the exigencies of business—and my drive to succeed—steadily overtook passion. Soon my business became one of helping online retailers sell more, more, more into Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. By the time we sold out, I, too, had “sold out” my Big Idea—my original vision—while fatigue and world-weary “success” blurred my recognition of that very truth. Maybe that’s why Komisar’s story struck me with such force.

Received Western wisdom continues to enthusiastically endorse the Deferred Life Plan, as it has for more than 200 years (earlier this month Mark wrote about Charles Lamb’s surprisingly mixed feelings upon his “deliverance” from a life of office drudgery in the early nineteenth century).

Opting out of the Deferred Life Plan is no easy task. It’s a struggle demanding discipline, not just of the will, but of the soul.

You may also enjoy:

“Time for Everything”

“You’ve Got to Jump”

“Recognizing the Opportunity Within“

Try as I might, I still spend too much time in front of the computer. I’m an Internet junkie. Even though most of what filters in each day is unimportant, it’s hard to resist “handling” it. E-mail is like fishing: you just might get a bite—or even catch a whopper.

Though 95% of what confronts us online is unnecessary, unimportant, irrelevant, or at most, entertaining, it somehow feels like work. So we “do” it.

Here’s the problem: Most of it’s not real work. It’s busywork, or make-work, or distracted play. It’s dependence on false urgency. How many professions really require one to sit in front of a computer all day long? Could any work posture be less creative, less inspiring, or more isolating?

Realizing something was fundamentally wrong, last month I decided to travel for eight days straight without once checking e-mail or doing any other computing. The experience convinced me that my premise of sitting down in front of a computer every morning with the intention of doing productive work is irretrievably broken. And if it’s broken for me, there’s a good chance it’s broken for millions of other so-called white collar workers.

The moment of clarity came on an Easter Sunday morning as I descended to the lobby of the Marriott Fairfield in Ann Arbor, Michigan. From a huge wall-mounted flat screen television, a commercial touting vitamins blared. This was followed by a continuous stream of embarrassing CNN sludge; uninspired attempts to create news “stories” by pitting personalities one against another.

No one else was in the lobby, and I wanted to read, so I looked for the television remote control, and finding none, asked the receptionist to mute this soul-damaging noise (I left out the “soul-damaging” part of the request).

Blessed silence. I read peacefully for a solid hour and a half, looking up occasionally at the soundless television screen to realize I was missing absolutely nothing of importance. Without sound the sludge was harmless.

At that moment in my computer-free week I suddenly understood the solution: Turn it off. Sitting in front of a PC to work now seemed as foolish as watching CNN in order to learn something important about the world.

I departed the lobby, and returning six hours later found the television sound still muted (it was, I choose to think, a demonstration that the absence of television audio improves the ambience of any room). Ads for the erectile dysfunction nostrum Cialys were alternating, somehow appropriately, with more CNN “news.”

What is a computer? For me, and for most regular schleps, it is primarily a recording device. We enter text, conduct research, revise text, manipulate spreadsheets, create presentations, update Web sites and blogs, write programs, execute designs, do accounting, and so forth.

But we’re basically creating files of things we’ve presumably thought about before sparking up our CPUs. After all, musicians do not wake up and hit the “record” button on their multitrack machines for six hours straight. They practice, compose, collaborate, and rehearse before arranging recordings. Should the less musical among us differ in how we approach our crafts?

Consider how one should arrange a work area. A woodworker’s shop has a bandsaw, drill press, and other specialized tools, carefully placed to maximize productivity and comfort. Similarly, computers should contain neatly arranged word processing, spreadsheet, and other programs.

But what craftsman would mix tools and games in his workspace? Who would place a television and magazine rack in the middle of his shop, install a foosball game between the drill press and lathe, move a pool table next to the bandsaw?

Yet the computer—the most important worktool of the twenty-first century—has become precisely that: a bottomless repository of time-wasting, thought-numbing activities and games, each eager to engage the easily-distracted mind in some trivial task, CNN screaming at us uninvited.

Check e-mail? Sure—it’ll only take a minute. Allow that Adobe update? Why not? While we’re at it, might as well peek in on the blog, read a little news, accept that Facebook invitation, forward that joke, monitor the ol’ portfolio …

The computer is a tool for fixing thoughts in digitized format (and for viewing others’ thoughts in digitized formats). As such, it hardly requires five or seven hours per day of our attention.

Isn’t it more reasonable—and more soul-affirming—to spend our hours in analog mode, thinking and talking and drawing and writing? Then, when we have a draft worth recording, to do so in the briefest possible time?

You may say “but I think better when I type.” I doubt it. You’re probably just more used to thinking while typing. You’ll probably accomplish more by exiting your cubicle or leaving the house.

Eight joyous days of setting not a single finger to keyboard taught me three lessons. Here they are, with resolutions derived therefrom (incidentally, I fully appreciate the irony of publishing this in a blog, and can only say it went through three paper drafts with manual redlining first, minimizing the number of pixels …er, viewed—in its production):

• The least creative, least productive, most isolating work posture is also the most familiar: facing a monitor astride a comfy office chair.

No more reflexively turning on the computer first thing every morning. That routine stopped April 1, 2008. I plan to spend less and less time at my computer.

• Thinking, planning, and drafting are the priority work tasks

Now, each day starts with a blank sheet of paper, a pen, and careful balancing of what’s important against what’s merely urgent. Thoughtfully, mindfully, I will carefully hand-draw, hand-letter paper drafts of each Next Step, my WIRU master list at hand. A cup of tea or coffee helps.

• Paper and pen—not PC—are the tools for the job

See that non-pixellized clipboard? Add paper and pen, in an offline environment that encourages fresh thinking—the library, a coffee shop—at the very least the dining room table. Somewhere without distractions (a wise man once advised that we should not read too much, lest we forget how to think for ourselves).

A mind at rest, a body at ease on the sofa. Creativity on, CPU off. Thoughts self-generated, not borrowed from others. Then, after confirming the Important and sketching drafts on paper—then and only then—will I reach around the wooden desk surface, reluctantly hit the CPU’s “on” button, activate that electronic wonderbox, and strive to record the useful.

See also:

“Happiness is Turning Off the Computer”

“Want to Achieve Your Goal? Avoid E-Mail!”

“The Four-Letter Question for 2008: WIRU“

I work entirely from home, and unless I make a concerted effort, I can go weeks without seeing other human beings face-to-face, save my wife (and soon my child). But because this weird lifestyle helps me remain prolific, I thought I’d share a few small habits that keep me keeping on.

I believe each of the following points may be applicable to the lifestyle and/or profession of anybody seeking to increase and maintain productivity, whether in the workplace or in some as-yet uncultivated personal or creative aspect of life. So even if you don’t stay at home alone everyday dreaming up characters and writing novels and short stories, take a look.

1. Wake Up Early (Engage the Process)

I get up every weekday at 6:45am. I make my wife’s lunch and see her off to work, then settle into my daily rhythm at the desk, amidst my books and papers. Now, most people have to rise and shine and be at the workplace by 7:30, 8:00, 9:00am, so this may not seem like news. But I include it because for me, waking up early is about more than the literal act of rising from bed in order to arrive at my desk “on time.” It’s about consciously putting my day before me, giving myself the time to envision its many possibilities, then easing into all that possibility with a sense of purpose and an awareness of each day as an incremental accomplishment on the way to a larger goal. The process is more important than the result; without the former there can be no latter.

2. Get Dressed & Put On Your Shoes (Establish a Ritual Act)

I never sit down at the desk without first changing out of my pajamas and slippers. For me, this outer preparation facilitates an inner one. I guess you could call it a ritual act. It helps me feel more focused or centered. Somehow it also validates or elevates my sense of the work I’m going to do. I arrive at the desk feeling put-together, more equal to the challenge, the seriousness, of what’s before me. “Look the part,” they say in the business world, meaning if you seek a high-powered executive job, you’d better arrive at the interview dressed like a high-powered executive. That’s one element of my meaning here, sure. But more importantly, I’m talking about establishing some active personal ritual, however simple, by which you prepare yourself, body and mind, for immersion into your work.

3. Use an “Isolation Booth” (Nurture Concentration)

There is no greater danger to productivity than distraction. I suspect this is true in many professions. And silence (sometimes soft music) is to the writer what a steady hand is to the surgeon. Concentration and productivity are symbiotic. I believe that the buzzword “multitasking” is merely a benign-sounding synonym for distraction. I’m a big proponent of mono-tasking, and for that very purpose I’ve set up a detached writing studio in my backyard. This studio is unprofaned by the telephone or Internet. It’s my sacrosanct creative space. All one really needs is a designated area, preferably shut off from everything about, where one may focus exclusively on a particular task.

4. Write Longhand (Go Analog)

The advantages of an analog working method are nearly countless. I usually write my first drafts on paper (I filled nine notebooks while working on my last novel). Word processing programs are invaluable later in the writing process, but early on, the backspace key imperils productivity. I produce far more by opening a notebook than by switching on my laptop. Surrendering to the imperfection of the first draft, I escape writerly paralysis. On paper, there’s no “highlight and delete” function, hence no compulsive scrapping of text. Sentences, paragraphs, pages are allowed to accumulate in all their lovely inadequacy. A book takes shape this way, flawed at first, and later sculpted and refined. And I suspect that for all those insufficiencies of the early draft, I am a better writer on paper, because my thoughts move more slowly and each of my imaginings is allowed to deepen in that process. Nuances come to light that I might have missed altogether in the hurried tapping of a keyboard. As a bonus, paper productivity allows me to retain a visible record of all my deletions, in case I should later rethink my first impulses; i.e. ‘This sentence didn’t work in this particular place, but it will go nicely over there!’ Check out Tim’s preachments of the value of avoiding e-mail and turning off your computer.

5. Think Progress, Not Completion (Stay in the Rhythm)

Avoid overwhelming yourself with the magnitude of the task before you. Trust your process. Novelist E.L. Doctorow said:

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

All one can do is orient oneself to the daily act. By putting one’s focus into each moment at hand rather than far out ahead at some hazy eventual destination, one does better and more meaningful work–or, to amend Doctorow’s analogy, one avoids crashing the car.

The Lonely Novelist’s Five Point Productivity Plan is simple, but it works for me. Allow me to cap it off with a favorite quote (which you may have seen in a previous post):

Be intent on action, not on the fruits of action. Avoid attraction to the fruits and attachment to inaction.

Here at Soul Shelter this Thursday, Tim will present a method for dealing with daunting tasks.

See also:

“The Four-Letter Question for 2008: WIRU”

“Understanding the World Through the Thomas Theorem”

“Redefining Rejection“