Towards yuletide
There’s been a lot of dialogue this week about how to spend your holidays. There are some terrible takes:
Whatever you’re hustling for, take note: most people/companies are shut down until ‘18. That means you get 2 extra weeks to outwork your competition. That’s 3.8% more time. For perspective: Usain Bolt won his gold medals running 1.2% faster. These 2 weeks are a gift. Get to work.
— Nathan Hubbard (@NathanCHubbard) December 18, 2017
There are some much warmer ones:
hey
— moth dad (@innesmck) December 23, 2017
If you're able to take time off for the holidays, it's ok to do nothing. You don't have to have a side project. You don't need to get ahead on work.
Your portfolio might be important for you career, but so is rest, perspective and self-care.
I remember the now-semi-infamous Dear Future Homejoy Engineer post:
> so it’s xmas eve and i’m in the office with several other folks who didn’t have plans for xmas either. everyone is cranking away. we’ve decided to watch the interview later and then get dinner and drinks together. i can’t be 100% sure but i think people choose to work here because they believe homejoy is not just another cool startup; it’s a mission; it’s a passion. we’re building things that enable and will change the way people live and work. this is not an overnight venture; we know it’ll take a long time, and we’re all committed to it.
(Homejoy shut down two years ago.)
It feels particularly unfair to critique or criticize the way people spend their waning hours in a year. Not everyone has the requisite mirth in which to bathe themselves; not everyone has the requisite resources to allow themselves a week of self-care and leisure. I think it is tempting to say this is what is best when what we mean is this is what works for me.
Here is what I will probably end up doing this week:
- Finish They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us
- Finish the new season of Search Party
- Write my year-end blog post.
- Finally rebuild my blog so I actually publish that year-end blog post.
- Set up my notebook to automatically tweet when I add new notes.
- Do some casual work on Buttondown and consulting projects.
Of course, I enumerate those things on a plane on Christmas Eve, hurtling (why is my verb always hurtling when it comes to air travel?) towards Florida.
Towards Florida, sure, but also towards family, towards hugs, towards Diet Coke under the kitchen sink, towards Mario’s Pizza and roast beast, towards It’s a Wonderful Life, towards long sandy roads inset by marshland, towards the prospect of spotting a family of deer one quiet morning while eating German pancakes, towards upholstery immune to the passage of time, towards the pool table, towards yuletide.
Maybe I’ll land in two hours and forget about all of those things; maybe I’ll end up more productive than I imagined. It’s a luxury, I think, to not have to worry about the outcome.
Happy Sunday.
I hope you get to rest, either for a minute or for a week.