Time Spent

Note: I’m currently on maternity leave and will be publishing a little less frequently than usual.

What is Time Spent?

Time Spent is a place to reflect on our relationships with the parts of our lives that aren't our jobs yet often filled with invisible labor. This includes our relationships with:

• Family: caring for children, elders and our chosen family

• Health: mental, physical and emotional

• Home: domestic and maintenance work in the places we live

• Media: information management and navigating media

• Art: self-funded creativity, learning and production

• Civic Life: journalism, democracy, movements and volunteering

Invisible labor underpins everything else we do. It impacts how we treat the people around us, how we treat our own bodies, how civically engaged we become, how we survive with the peaks and valleys of the economic season, and how, through it all, we support our elders, our children, our communities and ourselves through change.

And yet we rarely talk about it.

These letters are a place we can think aloud about our relationships with work, media and care, specifically through the lens of things we do outside of our formal jobs.

Each month, I’ll offer:

📝 A writer’s note about my own reading+writing intentions for the month or what I’ve learned lately.

And some combination of:

🌌 A constellation of resources or readings on a particular question I’ve recently asked or had answered.

💡 A “how might we” prompt on making a small modification to some everyday behavior that might help us see things differently.

📕 A reader’s note on something I’ve read that has helped me better understand why we have the relationships with time, home, work, and media that we currently do.

Here are some popular past posts:

• Why do people exchange misinformation? (a psychological perspective)

• The work of awakening (how to unlearn+hold space)

• Week-beginnings, clusters and constellations (how I read)

• Introducing a needs-based approach to news consumption

• Bodies + information (how does what you consume make you feel?)

• On the choice to become parents (readings categorized by emotion)

Who I am

After producing and consuming journalism for about a decade, I’ve come to view it as a mindset (and corresponding set of tools) for observing the world and listening to people that can be applied to virtually any situation. I’m currently trying to apply this mindset to my daily life. You can see the formal stuff here. I am also occasionally on Twitter and Instagram.

Do I have to pay to subscribe?

At the moment, all content is free, but paid subscribers ($5 a month or $30 per year) make my work possible and I deeply appreciate the support.

How can I reach you?

Simply reply to any newsletter or, if you are also working on these questions in your life, request a virtual coffee date to brainstorm together about any aspect of these questions (schedule-permitting!)

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