A Working Woman by Elvira Navarro

Author:Elvira Navarro
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781931883665
Publisher: Two Lines Press
Published: 2017-10-13T04:00:00+00:00

10

During a course I enrolled in after moving to Aluche, when I was mulling over the idea of starting up a publishing services company, they taught us the keys to time management in business; that is to say, doing things in a purposeful way, without thinking about coffee breaks or the beautiful but horrendous landscape of a brick-building neighborhood. The arguments included in the class were supported by scientific studies carried out in American universities that demonstrated the inefficiency, and resulting increased stress levels, of going, as I do, straight from between the sheets to the computer, with a dozen trips to the kitchen or checks of email before returning to bed. The studies included experiments in which freelancers were made to spend weeks in ghostly looking lofts, with no access to social networks, or anything besides their clients’ deathly dull web pages. Their output increased significantly. I made an effort to translate that code into pages and word counts, but sweat, an aching back, cooking oil, dust, my respiration, the images each lexical item or sentence generated all got in the way. It was impossible to convert my activities into pure action. Thanks to the enforced discipline of the experiment, the freelancers in those American university studies (Trevor Harris, Doron Nissim, Robert Herz, Morgan Stanley, Jerome A. Chazen, Gauri Bhat, Ryan Wilson) who, like me, had previously worked very late into the evening seven days a week, were able to finish their tasks in the late afternoon, and take Saturdays and Sundays off. During the course, we did some exercises designed to give us an approximate experience of the levels of efficiency achieved by a good dose of willpower. There were days when I tried to follow those guidelines, summarized on a piece of blue paper in one of my drawers. True, by sticking to them, I was able to finish the work I’d scheduled for the day earlier; however, everything still left to be done the following days only reminded me of how alone and frustrated I was. My anxiety levels then rose a sufficient number of notches to make free time undesirable. By contrast, the constant activity, sautéed with the strange depths of nothingness on the Internet, paradoxically increased the possibility of forgetting my situation. That sense of evasion was no big deal, although it did increase my anger, and the feeling of having had it up to here, so I’d get to the end of the day with my adrenaline pumping. And then I enjoyed my walks.

But what happened was that my volume of work began to increase because they were giving me more books to correct with very short deadlines, and that meant making an even greater effort, with some working days finishing not at nine or ten, but midnight. Despite the fact that they had begun to pay me for those urgent books, I was still owed for earlier jobs. Sometimes I thought about the win-win negotiation strategies I’d also learned in that course aimed at teaching freelancers to make the most of their autonomy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.