The Productivity Hour Project
some of the raised beds in the garden
where I practice my odd form of gardening
the snowball bush in bloom
I haven't posted anywhere else about this yet, just here. For the past few months I've been doing what I've told myself is 'The Productivity Project'... and it is slightly based off of something I did with the Puttytribe called 'Jumpstart January' back in 2020.
The first thing is to examine your goals, and pick something you think you can keep up for at least an hour almost every day for a few months - something productive, that you might not let yourself spend that much time on. The JJ thing wasn't an hour, just a list of promises to tick off you had done them. Some people did language learning, others did sketching, or other arts, or fitness or music goals. I did a little of those things, too - some great paintings and a lot of Welsh.
But with the Productivity Hour, I've been making a lot of small knitted items, and drawing, and thinking about projects I might be able to work on in little 'bites' over the next year to publish or complete if not only for myself... and some great things have come out of this, too. I have a lovely doll pattern that can be made eight different ways - I've let my 'math brain' out to play making new patterns, and tackled sizing on mittens and hats that I used to make only for myself in specific patterns. I've taken back to graphing out images and knitting them, too - for fun and just to see if I can do it.
the Charlotte in question
Last night I watched an episode of a Permaculture class. I have a profound interest still in plants, natural landscape and gardening - but it always dies back when the Fall begins to set in and Winter goes for a long sleep. Sometimes, by this time of year, I have windows full to bursting with greenhouse plants that I coax along and eventually half of them die, but the other half live in the garden until a drought or Fall comes along again... I have lots of goals for my garden and landraces and natural water use etc.. but it is the kind of thing that I could be out there all day every day with a spoon and bucket and be happy, not get very far, - just the smallest amount of success - but be happy - or I could tackle it hard with machinery and 'lots of advice' and get pretty upset and stubborn about it within a few days. I'm not sure what is going on there - but I think it is the fact that I want to take it long and slow and enjoy it and keep myself coming back to it - because of the Rule of Effort.
I know the Rule of Effort is shaped in me by other people. When I try to hold it at arms' length away from me and see where I end and other people begin, it is there - but so hard to distinguish up close. I am the Endurance runner who goes 2 miles an hour and doesn't care if at the end of the day I am still making the same amount of dollars as the person who worked three hours at high pay with a bulldozer. I care, but not in the way you would think. The biggest thing is - am I operating happily at 2 miles an hour and under my own power? Is this still enough to survive? If both of those is 'yes' then I'm happy. But the Rule of Effort brings in other people who scowl at this or that.. tell you to hurry up, analyze everything and raise prices for 'time' which face it - we all have a limited amount of.
So I'm very happy that I made a blanket for my bed that took me three months to complete in the time I wanted to work on it. I didn't buy expensive materials (in fact, some of it just sort of landed on me), and I didn't have some Pottery Barn image in my head I wanted to match. I'm simple. It isn't until the Rule of Effort comes into this task that three months looks like 'a waste of time'... really? Because I could have been working at a soul-crushing job ten hours a day for ten dollars an hour and bought a hundred blankets that I didn't need?
\strawberries in the raised bed
Not sure where I'll be going with this - but I'll leave it for today with this - there is inherent real value in using our bodies in our environment to interact with it and making something as a process. We shouldn't ruin that. We also shouldn't enslave it for other purposes constantly and never let the childlike joy be simple and vibrant.
I feel that - vibrancy, a vibration of happy memory and fulfillment from these 2 mile an hour gardening excursions, picking greens by the handful from the forest edge and feeding it to chickens, gathering seeds from a dead vine, carefully wrapping them in notebook paper, and planting them again in the spring, knitting a garment, fussing over geometry when someone else might say 'It's all been worked out just let some program do that'.. tap into it, and enjoy it. Time is limited.
Comments
Post a Comment