There is no invisible labor in my studio.
There have been many days when I stopped working and wondered what I actually accomplished. When all I have are lists of things I have yet to do it can be tempting to lose heart or start questioning if I’m going in the right direction after all. To-do lists get unreasonably long very quickly. Tasks that take hours get listed right alongside things that take five minutes. Consequently, each thing on the list looks just as important as everything else. It’s discouraging when the list isn’t completed by the end of the day and it isn’t immediately clear what happened to prevent it.
I didn’t realize how many other things got done instead. These are the important, time-sensitive tasks that have to be done daily or weekly and seem so embedded in the rhythm of life and work that they don’t ever make it onto a list. Within the wider context of the conversations happening around invisible labor, particularly that of women, I was surprised to see how I perpetuated that phenomenon for myself.
One of the brilliant things about running my own show over here is that I get to make the rules. So instead of to-do lists, I list my accomplishments everyday as I complete them. I call them my “Gold Stars.”
Having seen the potential for a child’s experiences to reverberate through decades of life, I decided to call upon early childhood reward systems. There are some experiences I didn’t choose to bring along into adulthood and it feels daring and defiant to intentionally give power to something shiny and joyful from my past when I can.
Sometimes I’m not feeling great about my abilities or my day and I pay more attention to writing down the details of a task, but some days I just note the broad strokes.
This has been a great way to keep my morale up as I worked toward the enormous goal of building up enough inventory to launch my own website. There were a lot of steps to get it up and running and there are still more to make sure people actually find it and see my work. Writing things down as I do them gives me motivation to keep going. I’ve been known to do a few extra tasks simply because I know I’ll get to put them on my gold stars list.
Thinking and strategizing get written down on my list. If it takes time and energy it counts. I make notes about my emotions so that I can see what gave me a boost, and what preceded a feeling of dejection. I also write down what I did in response to those feelings. I’ve committed to a reward system to motivate my actions in my work so when something happens that makes me feel like I’ve been knocked down a few rungs, I take a comforting action like making myself a cup of hot chocolate or walking down the block to look at Lake Superior.
I say I’ve committed to a reward system but that’s not entirely correct. Really, I’ve just accepted that I’m motivated more by rewards and positive reinforcement than a sense of grinding duty or fear of suffering and I’ve engineered my life accordingly. That’s not to say I don’t get a case of the “shoulds” sometimes or that I don’t experience fear. Those feelings just don’t get me up and moving reliably or effectively.
The Gold Stars aren’t just a list of what I’ve done so that I can feel good about my efforts. It’s a look at how I truly spend my time that I can look back on for patterns and to make decisions about how to move forward. It’s an inventory of my efforts. This record of the intersection of my mind, body, and labor helps me keep my eye on the prize while showing myself the same compassion I would show to a friend.
Love What You Just Read?
Comments