Productivity Unhacked // 12.30.21

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Transcript:

Laura: This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about embracing the journey in a world forever changed. Coming to you from Oakland California, I’m Laura 

Joyce Davis.

I used to think that New Year’s Eve was the most romantic holiday of the year, a time to reflect on the past and dream of the future.

It’s the time of resolutions, of promises to do better than we did last year. In the movies it’s the scene where the friends who are secretly in love finally kiss to the backdrop of clinking glasses and fireworks. It’s a time to gather with friends and family . . . that perfect transitional point between the past and the future, when for a brief moment, we allow ourselves to feel hopeful about what’s ahead.

Even though it’s been several years since I went to a New Year’s Eve party, I still love New Year’s Eve. I’m at my best when I’m dreaming, when I’m reflecting on the things I’m grateful for, and imagining what life could become.

But for some reason this year, I’m finding it harder than usual to conjure up the festive spirit. The year is almost over and I haven’t yet nailed down a single resolution. 

This time last year we released an episode called Dear 2020, our tongue-in-cheek breakup letter to what had been a very hard year of getting our bearings and grieving what was lost.

2021 has been challenging in a new way, one I didn’t see coming. The world has seemingly gone back to something like normal,  and many of us have made changes—some of them big ones—but they haven’t added up to their promised outcome. 

It’s been a year of trying to fit together the pieces of this new life. In the beginning, it felt like putting together a really big, challenging jigsaw puzzle. I knew it was going to be tough, but I wasn’t deterred. I started with the corners and edges, the obvious parts that fit together. I kept trying the pieces, sure that eventually they’d all snap into place.

But a year later there’s still a big gaping hole in the sky, and even after searching under the couch cushions and sifting through the vacuum cleaner bag, there are so many missing pieces that I’m starting to wonder if the effortis futile. Maybe this puzzle came with pieces missing. Or worse—maybe what I thought was a puzzle isn’t actually a puzzle at all! Maybe it’s only the beginning materials of a different kind of project, one that requires glue, wire, rubber bands, clay, and a whole lot of other tools I’ve added to my cupboard in this new and changed life.

It’s not that I’m not up for the challenge. I will eventually get around to making those resolutions for the new year. It’s just that after a year that has often felt like all we’ve done is change—constantly—a year when we repeated the cycle of goal-setting and planning and pivoting and executing over and over and over again—how else to say it?—I’m tired. 

All I need is three or four days of staring at the wall and doing absolutely nothing, with no one needing me or asking me for anything. Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself, followed by the immediate thought, “well that’s not going to happen!” 

Hannah: It's a unique moment where a lot of us have felt very stuck within the boundaries of our homes and our lives. We're all in this moment in the pandemic where we've realized it's not going back to normal and we can’t actually solve our problems by living life more efficiently.

Laura: This is Hannah Fowler, one of our recent Kasama Collective graduates. Hannah lives in New York City and she works in corporate communications. 

Each of our Kasama Collective trainees enter the program with an idea that we help them build into an episode. Hannah’s idea was this one: that maybe our productivity-obsessed culture was making promises it couldn’t deliver on. 

Deep down we’d both had a hunch that this was true, but still, we couldn’t resist trying to snap the picture into place, especially since it seemed to be working so well for others.

Hannah: I feel surrounded by a culture where everyone inherently knows what they need to do and are evolving into their best selves at a younger and younger age. 

Laura: Right before the pandemic I was making my way through David Allen’s book Getting Things Done. I was juggling the ever-changing demands of parenting three young kids, patching together freelance work, and attempting to submit my writing to magazines while chipping away at my novel-in-progress. 

I remember meeting with my writing group and telling them, “I just need a way to systematize my life, to really get organized so nothing falls through the cracks.”

My friend Teresa Miller had read Getting Things Done. She’d also seen me through fifteen years of highs and lows in writing and life. Teresa is one of the most productive writers I know. She’s been publishing poems like clockwork for decades. She recently won the National Poetry series and had a book published with Penguin. She was a Shelter in Place guest in one of my all-time favorite episodes, Embrace the Process.

She listened patiently as I touted the latest hacks I was learning, and then said something along the lines of, “everybody wants a life hack, but there are only so many hours in a day. Eventually you’ve got to just pick one thing and focus or you’ll just be frustrated.”

At the time, I didn’t like her advice. A part of me still believed that productivity could save me. But months later I’m still thinking about it, wondering if she’s right.

I think what I was resisting then—what I’m resisting still—is uncertainty and self-doubt. If my life is perfectly ordered, there’s less room for error, a smaller likelihood that I’ll mess up or disappoint someone.

But to truly understand my obsession with productivity—and Hannah’s—we have to go back further to the seed of that self-doubt.

For me, it began when I was thirteen years old. I can still remember the tremor of excitement in my brother’s voice as he told me how Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People had changed his life. He was seventeen at the time, and had that older brother cool I was constantly trying to emulate. I was bowing down to the productivity alter before he’d even gotten through the list.

Be proactive. Begin with the end in mind. Put first things first. Think win-win. Seek first to understand, then to be understood. Synergize. Sharpen the saw.

Reading that book as a teenager, I felt like I’d discovered a secret portal that would transform me from the girl who would get too lost in imaginary worlds to successfully clean her room into a productive member of society who accomplished every goal before me.

And it worked—sort of. I still lived in my imagination, but I also learned to become driven and focused, to make checklists and five-year plans. I shared a bit of that journey way back in season 1, in an episode titled “My Foolproof Plan for Fame and Fortune.” I’ll include a link to that episode in the show notes.

For Hannah, the draw of productivity was similar. In a world where everyone seemed to know exactly where they were going, she craved that sense of direction. 

Hannah: For most of my life, I've had this uneasy sense that everyone around me knew exactly where they were headed while I was still trying to find my path. I've struggled to understand the type of person I want to be, the kind of life I want to live. 

From early on, I was seduced by productivity culture, addicted to the never-ending stream of how to books, the long hour videos on habit stacking, the best hacks and cures for the indecisive. For years, I've been following productivity gurus on YouTube, trying to master productivity hacks in a faint attempt to gain control of my life.

I want a quick fix to my inability to find my path. I want to find my job or my passion and never look back.

Laura: For Hannah, and for me, the lure of productivity hacks was that they promised a way to order the parts of ourselves that felt messy. 

For me, that began when I was a little girl struggling to clean my messy room. For Hannah, it began by watching her parents.

Hannah: My parents modeled steadiness, responsibility, and gratitude. Their singular work ethic carried them through the intensity of life and work, and their sense of purpose never came at the exclusion of their love for our family. My mom worked in publishing before entering the TV industry. As a woman in a high pressure cooker environment, surrounded by men and every meeting, she took snide remarks left and right, but never looked at.  no matter what was happening in her life. She woke up each day, dressed herself in a chic outfit and went to work ready to take on the world.

My dad was New York city cop who worked his way up to a Sergeant living through 911, the deaths of close friends and unimaginable experiences that I'm still not fully allowed to know the details of today. 

Often they'd come home from an exhausting day of work still in their workloads, and step in to be a girl scout leader or run to Modell’s to replace our old sneakers.

I remember watching my dad under the fluorescent lights at a Modell's one night, the creases on his forehead, the way his eyes watered after a long day at work. But as soon as my sister and I tried on our sneakers, his face transformed and he flashed the biggest smile as we flew around the store in our new shoes, our arms outstretched, laughing. 

Laura: Hannah’s favorite book is Tiny, Beautiful Things. Hannah says that the way Cheryl Strayed describes her single mother in that book is how Hannah feels about her parents. “She was imperfect. She made mistakes, but she was her best self more often than it's reasonable for any human to be. And that is the gift of my life.” 

I'm almost 20 years older than Hannah, closer to her parents' age than hers, but I still remember exactly how it felt to be where she is now, to watch and admire as my parents and later my siblings modeled a sense of purpose and focus that I hoped I was capable of, but that always eluded me.

I didn’t know until we did this episode how much Hannah and I had in common. We were both kids who had plenty of interests, but struggled to find a path that would lead us to a certain future. 

Hannah: Even as a teenager, my closest friends always seem so sure of themselves. They understood their strengths at an early age and then played to those strengths until they landed in a career that was the natural end point for their passion.

Meanwhile, I was jumping from one thing to the next, in an attempt to find a passion. I took guitar lessons only to quit a few months later. I wrote for my high school newspaper, but felt exhausted by the time I chased out my stories. I joined the stage crew for school plays. I dabbled with the clarinet, but even as I was learning those things, I always felt slightly lost.

The only thing in my life I'd ever stuck with was gymnastics. From the time I was old enough to run, I was tumbling through round off backhand springs and leaping across the balance beam.  I was in the best shape of my life  But by the time I was in eighth grade, I was so burned out from all of the intense training and long hours that when I finally decided to quit, all I felt was relief.

I tried and even had fleeting success at so many things, I ran cross country for a few seasons and even tried out for the lacrosse team. But my efforts to muster the energy for new activities repeatedly fell flat.  

In college I was told that once I found the classes I liked, decided my major, and got my first job, everything would click and I'd naturally find my way to narrow down what I was supposed to do. So I threw myself into every possible interest and passion I'd ever entertained. It's only fitting that my first job out of college was in a rotational program where I switched my job every three months. I took writing classes at night and did extra programs after work. I squeezed in as much as I could out of life, but I never seem to be able to stick the landing.   

Laura: Like Hannah, I was a serious gymnast until eighth grade. Like Hannah, I taught myself the guitar . . . and 20 years later, the songs that I learned then are still the only ones that I can play. Like Hannah, I tried dozens of activities in search of one that would stick: I flirted with the saxophone, tennis, ballet, theater, art. I found out by accident that I was good at running mostly because I wasn't good at the ball sports I tried.   Like Hannah, I wrote for my high school newspaper and was briefly a journalism major before switching to pre-med and then English lit, and finally with just three semesters to go creative writing, which I loved but offered no tangible path to employment.

Meanwhile, that same brother who had recommended Steven Covey’s 7 Habits was in med school, pursuing the dream of being a doctor he’d had since childhood. For decades I’ve watched him pursue that path without wavering. I was never interested in medicine like he was, but I did want what he had: a path that would lead to a certain career packed with purpose, job security, that was valued by society.

So much of how we view our own journey depends on who we’re traveling with. For Hannah, there’s one person who has been with her from the very beginning.

Hannah: Most people grow up, looking in the mirror. But I grew up looking at my twin sister, Sonia. We're fraternal twins, so we don't look identical, but we came into the world understanding each other, experiencing each step of life together. She's my best friend, the one person in the world I've always known I can count on. 

Does she still scream at me when I accidentally borrow her shirt and forget to carefully fold it back in its place. Obviously. We've had our moments, but she is and has always been my anchor, and I know how lucky I am to have her in my life.  

But the thing about having a partner to walk with you from your very first day of life is that you're constantly aware of how things could be. While I was wandering through experiences in search of a direction from an early age, Sonja was steady, clearly the offspring of my parents with her purposeful work ethic and strong sense of place in life.

She was a star softball player, was effortlessly hilarious, and such a joy to be around that I watched as an entire friend group formed around us in middle school that we're still close to today. 

It felt like a sneaky, unfair advantage that all I had to do was tread alongside her unflappable sense of self. And her friends became my friends.  I admired her, loved her sometimes wanting to be her.  I knew that  in this one core way, we weren't the same,  but I couldn't stop myself from trying.

Laura: We need family members and role models and thinkers and leaders who can give us the vision to shift our paradigms, who can help us to articulate not just our New Year’s resolutions, but our life goals. I don’t begrudge Stephen Covey or my brother or any of the other productivity gurus I’ve followed over the years. They’ve taught me a lot, and some of those lessons I still use today.

There’s nothing wrong with productivity—that is unless it becomes the thing that defines us.

“What do you do?” has become synonymous with “who are you and what have you done?” As if it’s a given that we are workers first, not human beings who work. 

Hannah: The information scientist Gilly Leshed and computer scientist and cultural theorist Phoebe Sengers, both at Cornell University, found when they talked to people about their to-do lists, “They abide by the norm of ‘We need to be productive citizens of this world,’” Leshed tells me. “Doing more is doing good.” 

Laura: I had to sit with that quote for a while before I could even question its legitimacy. Isn’t doing more doing good? Aren’t we all here to be productive citizens of the world? 

And yet there’s a fundamental flaw in that worldview, one that allows us to be always in action, but never in process. 

Maybe a kinder way to live is to give each other permission to not have it all figured out—to make mistakes, even—and to see that messy evolution as a necessary part of our growth both as individuals and a society. Maybe we need permission to sometimes be a little unhappy, a little unhinged.

Hannah: Maybe the answer isn't a more productive society, but instead a world where we allow each other to be in process. Perhaps that's actually the most kind and gracious thing we can do for each other no matter what situation we're in. We need to allow each other to be a little unhappy and unhinged, not that we don't have standards or try to do better, but I wonder if we could see the process as the story, not just part of the story, but the narrative arc, we're all in process all the time.

Laura: Hannah has spent most of the pandemic interviewing for jobs and applying for a wide range of opportunities—even though she has a job that paid the bills that she liked well enough. But there was a part of her that felt like she wasn’t living up to her potential, that she should be on some more ambitious path. She’s spent the last year searching for meaning in productivity the same way I was in those months leading up to the pandemic. 

Hannah: I used to rationalize my addiction to Productivity YouTube as an escape from the incessant foreboding news headlines. That would make me stop in my tracks. But I began to realize the productivity world can be just as toxic and all consuming as everything else.

I've experienced dozens of interviews where I've made it to the last round and it was never quite the right success story.

At twenty-five, I can honestly say I feel as lost as I did at ten years old, when I’d pack up my guitar with tears in my eyes, watching as another attempted passion slipped away from me. 

Laura: It turns out that this need to define ourselves by what we’ve accomplished, of trying to eliminate all uncertainty and continually order our lives better, began long before Hannah and I were kids, or even before our parents. In his 2021 story in Wired Magazine, science and techology writer Clive Thompson describes the history of what he calls “American to-do behavior.” 

Hannah: He writes, “Benjamin Franklin was among the first to pioneer to-do lists, creating a checklist of “virtues”

Laura: Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, Chastity and Humility.

Hannah:—temperance! frugality! moderation!—that he intended to practice every day. 

Thompson goes on to describe to-do lists as, “...in the American imagination , a curiously moral type of software. Nobody opens Google Docs or PowerPoint thinking “This will make me a better person.” But with to-do apps, that ambition is front and center.” 

Laura: Whether it was through seven habits or getting things done, I wasn’t just interested in getting organized. I wanted to become the mom who never missed my kids’ parent-teacher conference sign-ups, who volunteered at the school, who managed to find time to do my creative work while also nurturing my friendships.

Hannah: “Everyone thinks that, with this system, I’m going to be like the best parent, the best child, the best worker, the most organized, punctual friend,” says Monique Mongeon, a product manager at the book-sales-tracking firm BookNet and a self-admitted serial organizational-app devotee.

When you start using something to organize your life, it's because you're hoping to improve it in some way. You're trying to solve something. 

I cringed reading that section of the article this past summer. I had made a to-do list with the above article on it. Thinking one more productivity hack or article would finally be the quick fix I needed. I started to realize that our “to-do” lists and culture of quick fixes and hacks condition us to think that there’s a right and wrong way to be ourselves. You’re only fifty bullet journals away, six cups of water away, or some tangible, seemingly harmless anecdote that will shed this outer layer of stress and exhaustion and reveal our true, hidden selves underneath.

Laura: The problem with productivity is that whether we’re talking about work or health or even rest, there’s always a bigger—or perhaps smaller and more efficient—dream we should be chasing. 

Now we’re supposed to be working four hours instead of forty so we can walk those 10,000 steps, master that 15-minute meal, make our homes into Zen sanctuaries, curate capsule wardrobes that spark joy . . . all in the name of thriving, of being satisfied and joyful and fulfilled and purposeful and rested—and it’s exhausting.  

Even our self-care has standards; scroll through any Instagram Influencer’s feed and you’ll see vision boards and bullet journals and infographics to measure your me-time and remind you that taking care of yourself isn’t just a good idea, it’s an art project. 

I’ll never forget the moment years ago when I was in a season of deep depression, and I told my therapist that I knew I should be doing things differently, but I just couldn’t summon the willpower. She interrupted me and said, “how about instead of saying ‘should,’ you say you “intend?” 

I remember pausing to take this in. It wasn’t terrible advice, but that correction made me feel ashamed of myself in the very moment when I thought I was allowed to be a mess.

Hannah: We don't live in a society that celebrates feeling lost, wandering, and sitting with our pain. We don't create space for those things. Maybe part of this productivity unhacked is creating space to realize that life is sad and hard. 

This gap for growth in our lives is often mistaken for a void and I've fallen down the rabbit hole one too many times of looking to others and finding quick fixes during these growth gaps that I was always led to believe were dark holes in my life.

We're constantly trying to figure out how to get unstuck. 

It's a valid reaction to the past two years where we've had to continually tweak our lives when we're not traveling or seeing loved ones, our lives have very different than they did in the past. 

Laura: My own obsession with productivity got un-hacked by accident—or more accurately, by circumstance. 

When I started Shelter in Place on March 17, 2020 as a daily podcast, I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. I just needed a way to keep myself sane in a time when I was barely keeping it together.

The irony of my story is that I became the most productive I’ve ever been at the point when I stopped worrying about productivity. I have done more writing in the last 21 months than I did in the last 21 years—and yet my motivations for doing that work have been less about productivity and more about survival. 

Because I had to work fast, I did learn productivity hacks. I blocked off my time and used timers and figure out which parts of the work I could do quickly and which parts I needed to slow down. It was that process of learning how to work under a deadline week after week that gave me the tools to pass along to people like Hannah.

But if there is one thing the last year has hit home for me, it’s that productivity has its limits—and also its liabilities. 

I think the tension I’ve felt all my life—that Hannah has felt too—is that productivity stands in direct opposition to uncertainty. It promises us that we can do away with that uncertainty if we just get organized enough. But this pandemic has revealed what was true all along: that uncertainty in life is inevitable, and it’s not fun for anyone. No one goes looking for it.

Hannah: We love to prune and neatly trim the parts of ourselves that we reveal to others. 

We don't like to unveil the darker, more complicated parts of ourselves that require the most work. 

This isn't a new concept, but COVID, and the pandemic and being in isolation has brought it to the surface in a way that we've never had to deal with before we're living in this moment, unlike any in our lifetimes, when we're forced to grapple with our pain and our loneliness in a way that can't be numbed by seeing people all the time.

Laura: Hannah and I have both spent a lot of our lives believing that if we could just get more organized, or achieve the next opportunity, we’d finally feel settled on our path. That all of those nagging uncertainties would finally fall away and we’d know who we are and what we have to offer this world.

The interesting thing about the things we believe about ourselves is that there’s always a kernel of truth—even if the beliefs themselves ultimately aren’t true. 

Last month Alana Herlands, another one of our Kasama Collective graduates, came to speak with our group about what she’s learned from the job interview process after applying to over 100 jobs, and making it to the final round in many of them.

Alana posed to our team three questions:

What are my commonly held beliefs about myself?
Where did these beliefs come from?
And finally, are those beliefs serving me?

The questions weren’t new for me—in many years of therapy and leadership training and reading dozens of books on creativity and productivity, I’ve encountered different versions of them often. 

But asking them at this point in my life, when I’m approaching a new year, and coming up on the 2-year anniversary of the life I’m in now, I realized that some of my answers had changed. And also, some of them hadn’t. 

I realized that podcasting had given me a pace of publish and release that kept me focused more on the work, and less on comparing myself to others. After creating over 180 podcast episodes and training 17 women and non-binary audio storytellers, I no longer doubt myself. This was startling, that the imposter syndrome that had plagued me all my life could fall away simply by letting myself learn something new and then doing it over and over again, until even the adjusting and flexing and pivoting to the demands and surprises of each new episode felt natural.

But there was another belief there, too. I know that I’ve changed a lot since those days when I would get lost inside my imagination and my messy room, and yet there was a part of me that still believed that I wasn’t doing life right because I wasn’t following a prescribed, perfectly mapped out path. This is not to say that there is no order to my life, but doing daily episodes six days a week in season one taught me that there is a certain part of the creative process that won’t be pinned down no matter how far ahead you work or or how well you plan.

Recently a friend who’s been working in audio much longer than I have asked me about our production process. I told her how we approached scriptwriting and audio editing and sound design and which project management tools we used for a fully remote team, and what check-lists and spreadsheets and guides I’d developed both for myself and for our trainees, and how I’d basically redone our project management system in an attempt to make them more accessible for the very different needs of our fall cohort—and then I admitted that no matter how hard I try or how many hours I spend getting more organized, I can’t seem to pin the process down. That life often got in the way: people got sick, work projects came up, people moved or got new jobs or just didn’t have the bandwidth they thought they would.

My friend paused, and then said, “I am so comforted to hear this, and it’s exactly the same for me. You’re the most organized person I know. If the process keeps shifting and changing for you, it must be this way for everybody.”

I’ve thought about her comment a lot over the weeks, because as soon as she said it, it was like I was looking at myself in the mirror, but in my reflection there were two versions of myself at once. One was the person I actually am, and the other was the little girl with the messy room, whose problem could be boiled down to a lack of organization, or direction, or efficiency.

But the real problem, it turns out, is that I am messy, because to be human is to be in process, all the time, adjusting and flexing and trying your best even as you acknowledge that there will always be somebody doing it better.

—Few things in life train us for transition—and yet learning to be flexible and adapt may just be one of the most essential skills we can cultivate. 

When we began the Kasama Collective almost exactly a year ago, we built it on that belief.

From the beginning, we’ve designed the program to look a lot like Hannah and I have experienced life: our trainees do something different every single week. They never settle anywhere long enough to become masters. For the more structured personalities, this can be crazy-making.

But over time, something remarkable happens: people learn to adapt, to adjust, to understand which parts of the process they love and which parts they’d rather leave to someone else. They see that process from all angles, and so over time, their understanding becomes not just wide, but deep.

They know how an idea that starts so small and simple can take on a life of its own, how it can draw you out of yourself and push you to places you’re not sure you want to go. They understand how every story has characters and conflict and truth and pain—no matter what genre. They see that sound can be a story the same as words, that there is an art even to managing projects. 

But most of all, they understand that creativity, like life, is messy. It’s a process, one that productivity can’t fix, that can abide by deadlines, but won’t be rushed. 

It’s less like a to-do list or even like a puzzle and more like a sculpture with found objects. You can systematize your puzzle pieces, putting all of the edges in one pile and organizing by color. Often, these are worthy efforts. But if it turns out that the thing you're building isn’t a puzzle, but a collage, you have to learn new rules for building.

You can fight the process and give up, and let yourself get immersed in the shapes and colors until finally the 3D picture finally takes shape. It’s not neat and tidy, and no two are the same. There might be some visible flaws, things you wish were different. But the difference makes it interesting.

Hannah: Growing up, my dad always used to repeat this quote from Albert Einstein along the lines of, “It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, it’s not the fastest, it’s not the smartest, but the Most Adaptable”. 

For so long I viewed my inability to stick to a certain path or career as a weakness. That each time I quit the guitar or quit lacrosse I was a failure. I would be killed within seconds if I were a tiny mouse darting from the grass to the water to the weeds. But perhaps I’ve been adaptable all along. Building my life in various evolutions. Trying out different prototypes of myself. This fragile, complicated, painful part of my life, feeling like I haven’t hit any major life milestones in my career or my passion, is quite possibly another tiny evolution shaping me not into my best self, but into my most adaptable self yet. 

I’m afraid of change. We all are. It’s exhausting. And it feels more convenient to sit in the pain. 

I’ve poured myself into productivity tools as a means to escape the pain of failure. To just do away with all of the messiness and ruin in between. I sometimes don’t have the energy to fail and then adapt and fail again. 

This past COVID year felt like it ruined me in a lot of ways. I lost parts of myself that I’m still trying to build. And there are times I would rather settle in the feeling of being broken. Yet, we rarely allow ourselves to lean into this failure as often as we’d like. Perhaps all the time I’ve spent jumping around from sports to jobs to people has prepared me for this very moment in my life to adapt and continue to put one foot in front of the other. 

Laura: Years ago, when I was complaining about never having enough time and feeling like I was never getting anywhere with my goals, my friend Angela let me borrow her copy of Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett, Stanford professors who urge us to approach life the way a designer would, which means undoing a lot of our productivity-obsessed thinking. Failures aren’t failures, they’re the attempts you need to try before you find your way to the idea that’s going to work. You don’t have to find one right idea; you need a lot of ideas so you can explore any number of possibilities.
 

Today, Designing Your Life is one of the books we recommend to our Kasama Collective trainees, that we reference often in our training program, which is how Hannah found it. 

Hannah: For the first time in a while with my computer and phone off to the side with my notifications and incessant scrolling paused, I felt like I grabbed onto something sturdy that was keeping my head above my pit of quicksand. 

Burnett and Evans build a case around the amount of hours people spend trying to figure out their lives as opposed to actually living their lives. They write that this type of worry and analysis keeps us “spinning in circles spending weeks, months or years sitting on that couch (or at a desk or in a relationship) trying to figure out what to do next.” While there are ways in which productivity tools and resources can be helpful, I struggled to understand why it all wasn’t helping me and being the quick fix it seemed to be for everyone else. Yet, Evans and Burnett called me out in a way I didn’t expect by then writing, “It’s as if life were this great big DIY project, but only a select few actually got the instruction manual. This is not designing your life. This is obsessing about your life.” 

It occurred to me that watching YouTube hacks on organization and meticulously planning my life was perhaps my way of trying to unlock this so-called “instruction manual” everyone else around me seemed to have been given.

We may show up and be really admirable versions of ourselves, or we may not. And that's okay.

I’ve gotten to live a bit of life with Hannah these past few months. I’ve watched her go through job interviews, seen her make the final round only to watch the job go to someone else. But I’ve also seen her come alive in our Kasama Collective meetings, and heard in the excitement in her voice when she gave herself permission to chase her curiosity, to let it be okay that she didn’t have all the answers. 

Just a couple of weeks ago, as Hannah was finishing up her final Kasama Collective projects, she got a job offer at the New York Times. It’s the kind of opportunity she’s been dreaming out, and it was an incredible way to end this chapter of her life and begin another. And also, she knows that whatever happens next, this transition, and every other one that follows, is all part of the story. It is the story. Because as nice as the things we do are, it’s really the people we become in that process that makes us who we are.

As always, if you listen to the very end of the episode, you’ll hear Shelter in Place outtakes, our little easter egg to thank you for sticking around. 

But first, I want to let you know about we’re closing 2021 by opening a project that is close to our hearts. Our Kasama Labs offers writers and podcasters the chance to explore both the science and art of audio storytelling. It’s self-paced and flexible, built for busy, tired people, who might need a walk in the woods more than they need more time in front of their screens. You can find details about the program and a link to register at shelterinplacepodcast.org. We still have a few spots left, and you can get in on the early bird price if you register before 2021 is over. 

End Credits:

The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects for this episode come from Storyblocks. Nate Davis is our creative director, Sarah Edgell is our design director. Hannah Fowler was our lead writer on this episode, Nikki Schaffer was our assistant audio editor, and Meridian Watters was our assistant producer.

Until next time, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

And now if you’re still listening, here’s a little outtake.