When I started this job 10 years ago, the majority of the correspondence was via hardcopy, what came to be known as snail mail. At the top of each month I’d have a massive stack of letters—submissions, queries, People and Places photographs, etc.—on one side of my desk, and a very small pile on the other of items I had dealt with. I had a visual representation of my work. I would make a folder at the end of each month, saving all the correspondence for a year. At the end of each month I could hold a magazine in my hand that represented the byproduct of that folder.
Ten years later the stacks on my desk are replaced with folders in my computer. I no longer have a visual marker for my work. It’s still the same work, still the same amount of work, but I can’t visualize it in the same way. Plus, with email the expectation of response is faster. If you had sent me a letter in 2004, you wouldn’t have expected a response for a couple of weeks at the earliest. Now, you expect—as I expect of you—an email response within a day, if not sooner.
I get about 100 emails a day; many go straight to junk, some are from various subscriptions and marketing firms which have subscribed me. And about a dozen are from you—members of the church, past writers, future writers—inquiring about stories we might do, we should do, we should have done. That is a lot more mail than I would have received a decade back.
Still, in some ways my job is easier today—I work a lot from home; I go into the office once a week, if that. I might take a morning off to meet some mates for breakfast and work a couple of hours in the evening instead. The pressures and expectations of ‘work’ have shifted. It still takes the same amount of time and effort to put a magazine out each month, but it is no longer done within the structure of 9 – 5 at a designated desk.
The way I do work today has changed. I’ve written this column, or corresponded with you, or edited articles, from pubs, buses, hotel rooms, at four a.m. What’s important is that I get the job done, not where and when I do it. I like this freedom.
My job is somewhat unique, I realize; still it represents a shift in the marketplace. I might take a day off during the week to volunteer at my daughter’s school, to run chores that are more efficient to do on a Wednesday morning than a Saturday afternoon. It all evens out in the end.
Last month Rev. Dr. Douglas John Hall asked, “What time is it?” This column in many ways has been dedicated to that question for a decade. The way I work, the way I spend my time, the way I think of quality of life, filtered through my day job, changes my attitude towards… everything. The structure of a week doesn’t have the same meaning for me as it did a decade ago. And, I’m guessing that’s true for many of you as well. While we are deconstructing the structures of our own days, we are still living within coarsely drawn and unquestioned structures all around us. The ancient curse is true for us: We do live in interesting times.
