Tending in nuts and bolts
On what this model of productivity actually looks like
To tend means to “regularly or frequently behave in a particular way or have a certain characteristic.” It refers to habitual actions that make up our identities: they become characteristic of us because we do them so much. It also means to “care for or look after; give one’s attention to.” Both definitions are relevant here, where I am interested in using “tending” specifically to describe the kind of work we do when we do care work, like the daily tasks of parenting—tasks that require regular, habitual actions to look after someone.
My suggestion is that we might consider modeling other kinds of work off of the tending of care work, that is, viewing specifically knowledge work as a set of regular, habitual actions that may not directly care for a person but that require our care and attention as invested humans (i.e., we are not AI).
My hypothesis is that the thought experiment of structuring knowledge work like care work, wherein we emphasize the small and habitual, caring tasks of knowledge work, over rarer big goals and achievements is not only a way of dismantling social hierarchies (wherein care work is paid far less and valued far less than knowledge work) but is also a way of working better. By “working better,” I mean working more efficiently, more happily, and more productively (getting more done).
Care work is hard. It is tedious. Some people are motivated by thinking of their care work in terms of small achievements, rather than as tending per say. I do this to some extent in that I maintain a to-do list that primarily features the various loads of laundry that need to be done for my family on a regular basis (darks, lights, towels, sheets). But just as we can think of care work in terms of achievements in order to make it more satisfying, I wonder whether knowledge work might be better if we turn it into small regular tasks, into tending.
I’m not claiming to be original here in saying that seeing work projects as large, monolithic tasks makes them both anxiety-producing and difficult to work on. What I’d like to contribute to the discussion of breaking down tasks into manageable bites is the reflection that we already do this in our everyday lives, where we generally wash one load of laundry at a time, cook one meal at a time, clean the toilets on a regular (or if you’re me, not so regular) schedule, wash the baby’s bottles daily, take out the trash every few days, go grocery shopping weekly, etc.: all regular, small, manageable tasks that add up to a relatively clean house and thriving family. Rather than pushing aside our relative success at managing our everyday lives when it comes to figuring out our approach to work projects, what if we actually drew on that success and those habits? Productivity advice must take into account the totality of our lives.
In borrowing from care work, we shouldn’t ignore its tedium, as obviously the goal is not to make our knowledge work more tedious. Instead, the goal is to recognize that knowledge work requires effort—regular, small effort, not big effort that moves mountains, but regular effort that takes tiny steps. Thus when I was working on parental leave and didn’t know whether I’d get 30 minutes or 2 hours to work, depending on my baby’s nap (or maybe he wouldn’t even nap at all), I had to take steps forward on the book chapter I was writing without knowing whether I would manage to “accomplish” anything before I had to stop. This, I think, is a rather profound mode of working to at least ponder: working without an immediate end goal, an immediately defined task. Tending to a project, getting done the tiniest series of steps, but not focusing on the bigger tasks those steps add up to.
So what does this model of productivity I am advocating actually look like? It certainly looks like rethinking the valuing of labor to appreciate contributions at all levels of the economic hierarchy. But this model of productivity also includes valuing as progress, as a contribution to the greater purpose, even those tasks that seem like wheel-spinning because they are so small, so ill-defined, so seemingly purposeless. Just as, in some abstract sense, I can have confidence that brushing my child’s teeth this morning contributes to their well-being and lifelong health (no matter how easy it would be to just skip the brushing for a day), I must have confidence that whatever work I am doing is concretely contributing to my project.
We can also see making progress on a work project as a habitual action, one that can be done in small steps in only a few minutes, rather than in big steps in a few hours. (Because even those big steps are made of many smaller steps.) Each word we write contributes to the entire article or book, each thought, each idea moves us forward. Tending to knowledge work means not insisting on large uninterrupted chunks of time to work, but doing what you can, in the conditions you have, all while trusting that you’re moving forward. It also means not being intimidated when those magical large uninterrupted chunks of time do come along, and just… working, plugging away at it, going step by step. Tending to a project, both in the sense of taking regular action on it and in the sense of caring for it.