Working & Sleeping
Between my myriad of internships and jobs I’ve had since moving to Chicago four years ago, I’ve used a lot of different collaborative and communication tools. One company I interned for used Slack to send announcements and internal messages throughout the company; another company I worked at used Skype before Zoom took over the video-chatting world. Most recently, I’ve been using Trello and Basecamp to help with project management.
My favorite collaborative tool so far has been Basecamp. During my time working on a documentary this past quarantine season, my producer and I utilized the app to upload footage and audio from interviews, b-roll and keep track of our progress. It’s easy to navigate with headers like “Activity”, “Pings” (the instant messaging option) and “My Stuff” which contains the schedule, bookmarks, drafts and recent activity among other modules. Most importantly, you can color-code everything! My short-attention (a symptom of being Gen Z) needs a nice visual-aesthetic in order to stay on task.
What I love most about having tools like this easily at my disposal is my ability to update people without having to reach out to them directly via phone or email because the app does it for me. Being in a pandemic has forced all of us that work in collaborative settings to figure out how to work together, separately. That shift from in-person offices and classrooms to Zoom rooms was incredibly difficult at first, but now I’ve realized how much more work I get done on my own working in the nook of my room from 9 am until 5 pm. As Jason Fried illustrated in his TED Talk “Why work doesn’t happen at work”, there are far more distractions in an office, and most people would swap their office or cubicle for a different setting like their porch or a train or favorite coffee shop. Fried, co-founder and CEO of Basecamp, asserts that the main distractions are not the screens we look at for entertainment but rather our company’s “m&ms” or managers and meetings. Because managers’ job is to manage, they interrupt their employees with check-ins. Similarly, meetings in the beginning or middle of the day interrupt people’s progress. Fried likens work to sleep. We cannot get good sleep with constant interruptions, and the same goes for work. He says:
“ I’m talking specifically about the fact that sleep and work are phase-based. Sleep is
about sleep-phases. To get to the meaningful ones [phases], you have to go through the
early ones. If you’re interrupted while going through the early ones, you don’t just pick
up where you left off. If you’re interrupted and woken up, you have to start again. So you
have to go back a few phases and start again.”
I need to sleep in mostly isolation in order to sleep well. My cat’s proclivity to sleep on my face has forced me to keep my door closed at night so Kayla Cat can sleep either by herself in the living room or with my roommate who isn’t as picky about her sleep setting as I am. The same goes for my work ethic. Meetings aren’t as sporadic and no one is peering over my shoulder at home, so here’s to hoping that aspect of our new normal will stay after the pandemic is a memory.