The Diminishing Returns of Calendar Culture.
This caught my interest yesterday (originally via the superlative Sentiers newsletter). It covers a bunch of varied ground, but particularly contrasts the tendencies of 'monochronic' and 'polychronic' time and the things they enable and disable (or valorize and denigrate).
This resonates a lot with me, and taps on a point that's cropped up a lot over the past few years, which is that our assumed social structures around time, work, and output aren't in any way 'natural' -- they're things we have adopted (or, really, had imposed upon us), but which it's hard to regard as anything other that 'water' (as to a fish). The article name-checks ADHD specifically, for instance, which is an example of something which is not necessarily an issue for someone in and of itself -- it becomes an issue when they're required to fit into a narrow social box designed for an entirely different neurotype.
By contrast, I think I am actually very well set up for a monochronic working culture. My own brain weirdnesses play some part in this, but they definitely make me very good at the demands of monochronic work (at least without some of the self-defeating negative cruft the article gets into) and also monochronic structure makes my brain feel good.
(It's not always personally good for me, in that the more I have been able to lean into these tendencies, as powerful as they are, the less flexible I have become in other spheres.)
Privilege and situational flexibility obviously play a role here. The article does get into the various social assumptions around what has enabled monochronic time to become what it is to us, namely, depending on and/or rendering invisible certain other forms of labour, usually around caring and maintaining (e.g. all those famous novelists who were famously prolific, but had their wives acting as their combined secretaries and homekeepers).
I -- at least as far as I can honestly see -- do not depend unfairly on other people's labour to work this way. But there are always other vectors of privilege at work that let me devote all this time and energy to working in this manner and the latitude and autonomy to change how I work.
I'm running out of time for this post (case in point -- I'm time-boxing this blog draft so that I can move on to the next thing in my schedule at the appointed time), but I've also found myself starting to think more seasonally in the past couple of years. This might just be an aging thing, or derived from a greater understanding of the flex and flux in my own energy levels, but I'm more aware of wanting to turn the dial up and down at different times of the year. Something to read on and explore more.