Lucas Cherkewski

An hour writing this newsletter

Hit and Miss #358

Good morning!

We spent a lovely day with friends yesterday, showing them around Rockcliffe and enjoying a BBQ lunch. T and I realized we haven’t spent as much time in Rockcliffe in the summer (having previously gone there mostly in the fall and winter, for the changing leaves and the quiet), and are making plans to head back on our bikes to check out the various gardens in full bloom.

In the course of our meandering conversation, my old habit of time tracking came up. I’ve written about it here before, but the short of it is: it started when I billed clients by the hour (very glad to have stopped that); expanded to include housework and my personal life; covered nearly my entire time at CDS (which was immensely helpful for two-week retros and year-end reviews); and then, toward the end of my time at CDS, stopped entirely.

In the last six, maybe twelve months of my time at CDS, I’d become pretty unmotivated. Part of it was from how long I’d been there (as with anywhere), from running low on novel things to dive into and grow through. But it also came from how many iterations of the organization I’d lived, and from being on a team where our job involved knowing not only the changes that had happened, but the many various changes we’d dreamed up, proposed, attempted, and so on. Carrying the memory of not only what an institution was, but also all its could have beens—that takes a toll after a while.

A casualty of that lack of motivation was my productivity. I still loved the people, and I found some of those last projects incredibly interesting, but even still, I didn’t feel capable of pulling off near what I’d done in the past. My time tracking confronted me with this reality: I’d stare at a day or week’s work and feel how much I’d struggled to fill those hours, how little I felt I’d contributed after all that time.

And so, to stem that hurt a bit, I slowly stopped tracking my time, a sort of pain avoidance. Around the same time, I stopped tracking my personal time, too. I can’t recall quite why, but was in a bit of a general malaise, and think it all went hand in hand.

Recently, though, I’ve been feeling the lack of time tracking. I’ve toyed on and off with ways to better remember my days, as a first step to better reflecting on them. T’s mom was recently sharing excerpts from journals she kept in the first few years of her life, and pointed out that, while she remembered some of the entries completely, other—sometimes quite significant!—stories had slipped her mind. I found time tracking a helpful prompt for memory: the details were rarely enough to fill in the whole picture, but they at least offered a helpful sketch of what I’d been up to. As I try to be more reflective, I’m pondering picking up time tracking again, to help that practice.

Anyhow—I must now go record somewhere that I’ve spent an hour staring at the sky, listening to the birds, and eking out these words. Hopefully they weren’t too ponderous for you. All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas