Hi, my name is Anne and I am a researcher an educator.

Of course, I’m both. But the reason I work at a university instead of doing research somewhere else is because I love teaching. Not every moment of it, for sure, but my best moments with students have been amongst the best moments of my life.

And now, just in time for the start of term in the northern hemisphere (and not too late for those of us in the south) my friend and colleague Matt Ward has offered some excellent reflections on what it means to be a facilitator of learning. The whole post is worth reading, but here are some of my favourite bits:

1. Teaching is really difficult
It’s a fine art. I started my career feeling that my job was to create ‘great designers’. I would crit work and deliver lectures to promote a certain way of designing, a certain way of thinking – hopefully engaging students enough to inspire them to do ‘good design’. However, as I progress in my career I realized that this isn’t actually my job. It’s merely a convenient side effect. My main job is [to] promote learning, the fine distinction is that students can produce unsophisticated design work but still have an excellent learning experience.

4. Sparking imagination
The most important reason for us to be here is to spark our students’ imaginations. It’s important to stand back from the content, the detail, to understand the impact and relevance to our subjects to our students’ lives. The good part, is that we live in fascinating world, your job is to show them how wonderful it is. This means that it’s important to remain enthusiastic. The daily, yearly grind of an academic can be tough, but the best way to make your job brilliant is to show your love and excitement for your discipline. Enthusiasm is contagious… be proud to be a cheerleader.

6. Debunking complexity
One of the most important roles we have as educators is to unravel the messy complexities of our subjects. It’s very difficult to remember what starting to study a subject at university is like, our students sometimes miss the ‘most basic’ of skills, language and knowledge. Therefore, breaking down complex language and difficult concepts is essential.

8. Humor / Humility
Don’t be superior, people learn best from people they connect with and admire. Academics have the tendency to act superior – they waft in, deliver their words of wisdom, waft out. Most people in the position to lecture are smart, but being clever isn’t enough, be nice.

On the first day of my doctoral studies, Charles Gordon told me that we were all brilliant so the best way to distinguish myself was to be kind. I don’t always succeed, but as time goes on I can think of no more important academic aspiration. Reading Matt’s post this morning reminded me why I teach, and reminded me to never get complacent about it. I do a lot of the things he suggests, but I also learned a few things that I can’t wait to put into practice. Thanks Matt!

I’ve put in two conference abstracts this week: the first one below for the ASAANZ conference on Anthropology & Imagination in Wellington, and the second for the CSAA conference on Materialities: Economies, Empiricism & Things in Sydney, both in December.

The Possibilities of a Fantastic Ethnography
Anthropologists have long grappled with questions of empiricism, cultural representation and performance, but these debates almost exclusively maintain the assumption that ethnography is, and should remain, a realist endeavour. Even in discussions of ethnographic fiction, stories are expected to resemble those that could actually have happened, or might actually have been uncovered through anthropological research. But what could anthropology become, and ethnography do, if it were not bound by realist aesthetics? Raymond Williams wrote on science fiction as a form of “space anthropology” and Ursula K. Le Guin has created anthropologically rich fantasy worlds that offer pointed cultural critiques. Using examples from speculative fiction and creative non-fiction, this paper explores what fantasy can, and cannot, offer the practice of writing culture and the application of anthropology to everyday life – from the cultural power of utopias and dystopias, to the decline of anthropocentrism and the rise of the non-human.

NZ Merino, into the open
Sheep and humans have lived together for more than 10,000 years, and the impact of sheep on the history, culture, politics and economics of Australia and New Zealand can hardly be over-stated. But sheep themselves have rarely been examined beyond purpose or function – or, as Donna Haraway would have it, as companion species “brought into the open with their people.” To bring sheep into this space of potentiality is to trouble their emergence as subjects and objects, practices and products. It is also to examine the expectations, hopes and promises for our shared futures – or those spaces “where what is to come is not yet…and might still be otherwise.” In these ways, we can trace sheep, people and technology becoming together, and this paper aims to apprehend the assemblage of humans and non-humans known as the New Zealand merino. Merino sheep comprise 80% of the Australian national flock, but less than 10% of the New Zealand flock. Despite these smaller numbers, New Zealand merino is well established in global markets as a sustainably grown fine-wool breed that produces luxury fibre. But how does a sheep become a NZ merino? In following our sheep from high-country stations and agricultural shows, to university labs, corporate offices and beyond, a picture of production and reproduction begins to emerge. Critically, at multiple junctures along the way, the NZ merino is made and remade according to specific combinations of people, technologies and ideologies that allow us to question what is at stake when we abandon human exceptionalism, and treat non-humans as companion species.

I’m also working on a short paper submission for OzCHI in Melbourne, and looking forward to catching up with Gitte Lindgaard while I’m there. Gitte was on my PhD committee at Carleton, will soon be joining Swinburne’s Faculty of Design, and is giving one of the keynotes at the conference.

UPDATE: Pleased to say both these conference papers were accepted but my short paper for OzCHI was not. Since the ideas weren’t fleshed-out enough but still “show promise,” they invited me to give a 7-min flash-talk instead–but that (and nothing published in the proceedings) isn’t enough to justify a trip to Melbourne. Maybe next year.

If you’re an early career research you should read Mel Gregg’s recent post, “In praise of strategic complacency.”

(Seriously, no matter what anyone says–and you’ll hear it even more if you’re a woman–it’s NOT selfish to figure out what you need to do to take care of yourself and your career. I didn’t learn this lesson soon enough, and it’s hard to get back what others got used to you giving up.)

Mel starts by reminding us what’s at stake:

“It’s not enough to have gotten the job. No, landing the job is just the first step in a constant process of planning, assessing and maximizing ‘opportunities’. From now on, there will be little if any time to sit back and acknowledge your achievements, and yet part of what I want to suggest today is that you must fight for this time. And beware of people offering ‘opportunities’! This is because the system is set up to make you feel that you are never doing enough, just as technology has accelerated the amount of things we are expected to be able to do. This results in us all feeling like we are constantly behind, always ‘catching up.’

[...]

[M]ostly it presents as a chronic low level internalized suspicion of incompetence, that there just isn’t enough time to do everything you need to do properly. While it feels highly personal, these are in fact the routine affects of organisational life today. It is worth recognizing the extent to which they are also the principal conditions of your labour that you can control – that is, once you appreciate that there is no temporal or spatial limit to the networked information economy that employs you.

The network, which is to say the office, which is to say work and the prospect of doing it, will always follow you home. So part of what we need to imagine collectively is the degree of compensation we want for that new reality, as well as strategies to cope with it.”

And that means that, first, we need to recognise different forms of academic practice and how to make them work for us:

Expand your imagined audience
“In teaching and research jobs, your audience includes your students (undergrad, postgrad) and your colleagues (department peers, committee colleagues, superiors). You probably engage in written communication daily with all of them – but do you count that writing as output? Do you count it as part of your intellectual project? If not, why not? Here I’m trying to offer ways to think about scale: the audience for your work can have local, national, and international reach. It’s a continuum of interaction and it all matters.”

Publishing: realistic outputs, actual numbers
“How many publications is enough? Homework: check your university’s minimum requirements for research output … Also think realistically about how much time you have free to write without interruption, at which times of the year. i.e. without teaching, without meetings, without someone waiting for you to come home for dinner.”

Grants: motivations for them – different types – which one is right for you?
“Time spent working up a collaboration should be weighed against more time spent on your own writing (track record) … Also against how much the focus will change. Assessors will reward something that’s coherent and distinctively yours.”

Teaching and service: making it work for your research goals
“[R]arely will your teaching directly match your research. But even overview courses can help keep you in touch with the field … Committee work: inevitable, so try to find things relevant to your research.”

Offloading: Claiming time for research
“Make time to plan what you want to do. Keep that time factored in to each week … Write lists. Try to distinguish between things that you must do, should do, or what would be nice to do. Have daily/weekly lists and don’t be hard on yourself if you need more time. Learn to say no, and when you do, say why, or suggest alternatives.”

There is some solid advice here and it never hurts to remind ourselves of these things. But it’s the next part of Mel’s post that I find most intriguing, and promising: Invoke strategic complacency.

“Academics, like other professionals, navigate a range of internally and externally imposed pressures to be productive – and to conclude I want to get you to start getting in the habit of asking: to what end? The model of worker that is rewarded today is that which is endlessly, limitlessly productive. The university will take everything from you if you let it. There are minimum performance levels but you’ll note that there are no maximums.

Replace productivity with strategic complacency. Use the discourse of productivity against itself. Start by using the language you hear routinely around you: ‘I’m just so busy’; ‘I can’t do it that day, today’s impossible‘; ‘This week/month is crazy, I just can’t’. The best line I’ve ever been told to use is the simple: ‘I’m sorry, I’m fully committed’ … Take your own goals seriously, and set boundaries on doing more. Setting up these strategies will help to see clearly the source for the multiple pressures you encounter – where they come from. Are they intrinsic (part of the make up of being an intellectual) or externally imposed? Are you just being polite when you don’t say no? Can you still be polite and excuse yourself from certain things?

Making time to organize and rationalize your time can mean you maximize the ‘good’ parts of your job and make better decisions about minimizing what takes you away from them … Learn whose job it is to take responsibility for things, who has the last say, so you don’t take on more responsibility than you will ever be recognized for.”

Alex Burns replied to Mel’s post by suggesting that emerging researchers need to follow the university’s unwritten rules and learn to “tame, rather than game, the administrative systems” at hand, but her approach is much more compatible with my personal politics. I can see strategic complacency operating as a tactic in De Certeau’s sense, something that must “make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse” (The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 37). It is, as I read it, not entirely unlike “la perruque” or a worker’s ability to get her own work down while appearing to be working for her employer.

Along these lines, Glen Fuller offers further insights into the matter of career “opportunities”. Here, I find his identification of three kinds of opportunity to be particularly helpful: first, opportunities can be offered by those in power; second, an opportunity can present itself; and third, we can create opportunities. This last one interests me the most:

“If a worker creates ‘opportunity’, then it is because he or she has critically appreciated the mechanics of labour relations and relations between worker productivity and the market in its virtuality (an example of what Deleuze called the ‘fourth-person singular’ and the practice of counter-effectuation); that is, the worker does not perceive the situation though the identity and horizon of experience of a ‘worker’ per se. The worker actively differentiates a new set of relations that can only be apprehended through action. This is a tactical relation to opportunity.”

Put a bit differently, even though it may be the most difficult path to take, it’s still in my best interests to create my own opportunities. The challenge is how to actually do this without passively accepting the imperative to perform, or else, and without capitulating to organisational expectations to maintain the status quo–and I think Mel’s suggestions go a long way in that regard. Thanks Mel!

Update 21 Jan 2013: Ben Kraal kindly linked to this post on Twitter, and it’s really good to be reminded of Mel’s work and my reflections on it. (I hadn’t realised how quickly I had effectively forgotten this!) We’re at that point in the southern hemisphere’s academic year when the end of summer is sooner rather than later, and pressure is mounting to finish the research projects we started during the break. Added to that, school meetings are starting to fill the calendar again, next term’s course outlines are being finalised, and Very Important Research Grant proposals are being readied for submission. And yet here I am, perhaps for the first time in my academic career, feeling quite good about all this. So what’s changed? The answer, I think, is simple if a bit dramatic: serious health problems over the last year or so have forced me to rethink how I do my job (and generally live my life, but that’s another story).

Basically, I just can’t heal and work as much as I have in the past; my body simply isn’t strong enough to do what I–and dare I say others–have come to expect me to do. (Don’t get me started on the oppressiveness of expectations or the relationship between overwork and health problems.) Consequently, I’ve become a bit ruthless in deciding what I can, and cannot take on, and I’ve had no choice but to say “no” to a host of interesting opportunities. I often wish I could have said “yes” to people I like and projects that excite me, but I’ve also learned to pay attention to–no, to actually appreciate–the part of me that feels a sense of relief at not having to do Yet Another Thing. (Why did I want to say “yes” in the first place?) This relief has taught me that I really don’t want to primarily consider myself, or be remembered by others, as a “productive” and “efficient” professional. You see, I want to be–no, I already am–much more, and thankfully much less, than that. And I like myself best that way.

It’s good to re-read this post with this new found awareness. I don’t want to compete with my colleagues over who is busier; I don’t want to find pride in being stressed out. I want to do less and get more out of my work. I’ve recognised that my primary focus for this year has to be finishing my Marsden research project. I’ve determined 2-3 journal articles that need to be written and I’ve chosen one major conference at which to present my research and forge new networks. I’ve also identified the best research grant for what I want to do next, and have put all my efforts into one proposal. And last, but certainly not least, I tried out some of Matt Ward’s excellent teaching and learning advice last term and I know that I want–and my students deserve–more of it this year.

As a final thought, I read a few things this year that have stuck with me. I think they’re related to this post and worth sharing.

Tim Kreider’s The ‘Busy’ Trap:

“Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. [...] Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice…The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”

Oliver Burkeman’s The Positive Power of Negative Thinking:

“What if we’re trying too hard to think positive and might do better to reconsider our relationship to ‘negative’ emotions and situations? [...] From this perspective, the relentless cheer of positive thinking begins to seem less like an expression of joy and more like a stressful effort to stamp out any trace of negativity…A positive thinker can never relax, lest an awareness of sadness or failure creep in. And telling yourself that everything must work out is poor preparation for those times when they don’t.”

And rather than reading yet another list of ways to be more productive, I appreciated many of Kerry Ann Rockquemore’s suggestions in her Inside Higher Ed series on how to accept being less than perfect and still do what you love. After all, what’s the worst thing that can happen?

The Costs of Perfectionism
Breaking the Cycle
Writing and Procrastination
Are You Over-Functioning?
Do You Measure Up?

Last week I read Rosalind Gill’s “Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of the neoliberal university” (pdf) and it continues to weigh heavily on my mind and spirit.

The chapter starts with a conversation between academic colleagues that “speaks of many things: exhaustion, stress, overload, insomnia, anxiety, shame, aggression, hurt, guilt and feelings of out-of-placeness, fraudulence and fear of exposure within the contemporary academy.”

I’m familiar with many of those feelings, and it has also been my experience that they remain silenced in professional or public situations as much as they proliferate in collegial and private contexts.

Contrary to what many non-academics think, I don’t work in “a rarefied haven of detached reasoning and refined culture.” Universities are workplaces, like so many others, with complex and often contradictory micropolitics that operate at interpersonal and institutional levels, where power and authority are too often at odds.

So I’m grateful that Gill dares to ask these questions, to put these issues on the table:

“What would it mean to turn our lens upon our own labour processes, organisational governance and conditions of production? What would we find if, instead of studying others, we focussed our gaze upon our own community, and took as our data not the polished publication or the beautifully crafted talk, but the unending flow of communications and practices in which we are all embedded and enmeshed, often reluctantly: the proliferating e-mails, the minutes of meetings, the job applications, the peer reviews, the promotion assessments, the drafts of the RAE narrative, the committee papers, the student feedback forms, even the after-seminar chats?”

But I’m distressed because I’ve tried to raise these issues as well, and I felt a profound sense of betrayal and defeat when my concerns were dismissed, just as Gill describes, as “a ‘moan’, as an expression of complaint or unhappiness, rather than…as an analysis or a (political) demand for change.”

We are, it seems, expected to sacrifice ourselves for our jobs:

“A punishing intensification of work has become an endemic feature of academic life. Again, serious discussion of this is hard to find either within or outside universities, yet it is impossible to spend any significant amount of time with academics without quickly gaining an impression of a profession overloaded to breaking point, as a consequence of the underfunded expansion of universities over the last two decades, combined with hyperinflation of what is demanded of academics, and an audit culture that, if it was once treated with scepticism, has now been almost perfectly internalized.

[...]

This is a collective, structural problem that is a direct result of workloads which leave many people with no ‘slack’ to take on anything beyond that which is directly required of them. Yet once again there is no discussion of this as an institutional or organisational issue. Instead universities ‘help’ staff to deal with these new intensified conditions with a barrage of ‘training courses’ (most of which we have no time to attend) which cover topics such as ‘time management’, ‘speed reading’, and ‘prioritising goals’, and require each individual to work on the self to better manage proliferating workloads, as if there were a technical fix (oh it’ll all be alright if I only check email once a day – why didn’t I think of that?! I’ll just pick all 115 of them up at 5 o’clock then I can stay up all night answering them!) while actively refusing any ‘reality check’ on the sustainability of contemporary academic workloads.”

Too true.

I’ve also noticed that this element of personal sacrifice is expected in some countries or cultures more than in others–which is even more problematic given how mobile the academic workforce has become in recent years. Failure to comply with this always already gendered and classed expectation can result in feelings of not only personal failure, but also of cultural discrimination.

Gill goes on to describe the “extensification” of academic work. In other words, it’s not just that we have to do more but we have to do it more of the time, in more ways, and in more places. Most commonly, current communication technologies not only allow us connect and share more, but have created the expectation in both colleagues and students that we will.

The final part of her chapter addresses the often negative experience of peer-reviewed publication and I agree that it’s crucial to acknowledge that rejection tends to be met with one of two possible responses:

“Some will have concluded that they really aren’t good enough, they can’t ‘hack it’. But others will have already devised ‘solutions’: I must try harder, read more widely, understand theory better, etc etc — the solution, then, for ‘us’ good neoliberal subjects, simply to work even harder.”

Ouch.

Why do we hold ourselves responsible instead of the system that encourages and normalises this, or the institutions and people who enforce and perpetuate it?

Have we really become nothing more or less than Foucault’s docile subjects constantly working under Agamben’s state of exception?

“Neoliberalism found fertile ground in academics whose predispositions to ‘work hard’ and ‘do well’ meshed perfectly with it’s demands for autonomous, self motivating, responsibilised subjects … The lack of resistance to the neoliberalisation of universities is partly a result of these divisive, individualizing practices, of the silences around them, of the fact also that people are too exhausted to resist and furthermore do not know what to resist or how to do so. But it is also understandable, I suggest, in terms of the inherent pleasures and fulfilment that many people derive from their work (when they find time to do it) or at least the promise of/idea of it, as well as to the seductions of relatively autonomous working lives — though this autonomy is eroding fast, as universities import business models which require for example that all e-mails be answered within 24 hours, or that academics are present in the office five days a week. In reality, the much vaunted autonomy often simply means that universities end up extracting even more labour from us for free, as we participate in working lives in which there is often no boundary between work and anything else (if indeed there is anything else).

[...]

The challenge is how we might begin to resist.”

Three years have passed since Gill wrote this piece, and Mel Gregg’s books and articles continue to touch on related subjects, but I honestly don’t see that these issues are being given much more explicit acknowledgement or attention.

So. What are we going to do about that?

This is my third year teaching in the southern hemisphere and it still feels strange to be kicking off the academic year in March! I teach one third-year course this trimester, called Cultures of Design–but if I could rename it, I’d call it Design and Everyday Life. Here are the highlights:

Course description
Original and world-changing design was long considered the product of solitary geniuses, masters and heroes, but recent research has argued that cultural innovation is often the result of everyday actions by ordinary people. This course critically and creatively examines the dynamic and collaborative networks that characterise professional and amateur design today, and prepares students to face the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

Course aims
Building on multi-disciplinary approaches explored in CCDN 231 and CCDN 271, this course aims to situate creativity, design and innovation within everyday lived experience. With a focus on critical practice and practical criticism, students will be introduced to social and cultural theories of everyday life and ethnographic methods that can help them understand and explain design in a variety of ordinary cultural contexts. Lectures will introduce students to important concepts in design and cultural studies, and a variety of films, readings, discussions and activities will support further exploration and engagement. Ultimately, students will learn to apply this knowledge through the research and presentation of three artefact ethnographies that critically and creatively evaluate material, visual and discursive culture.

Course content
The course comprises eight interconnected topics of study:

• practices of everyday life;
• object culture;
• aesthetics and ethics;
• creativity and innovation;
• professionals and amateurs;
• technology and media;
• speculative design; and
• possible futures for co-creation.

Each topic will introduce theoretical concepts and related methodological approaches to understanding, doing and explaining design in cultural context. Assignments will require the application of this knowledge to the critical and creative assessment of design in everyday life, and design as everyday life.

Course assignments
To complete this course, students are required to submit and present three original artefact ethnographies, as well as one revised artefact ethnography.

Ethnography involves the systematic exploration, examination and presentation of social and cultural phenomena that make up the lives of people across space and time. Artefacts—objects designed and created by people—have always been central to the expression and experience of everyday life, and can be used as platforms for social and cultural commentary. Artefact ethnographies combine analytical and creative work to explain the social and cultural dimensions of designed objects in everyday life.

Assignment 1: Something Past
For this assignment, each student will select an individual artefact, a class of artefacts, or a single collection of artefacts in order to critically and creatively engage PAST social and cultural phenomena, and how they relate to people, places, objects and/or ideas that exist now or may exist in the future.

Assignment 2: Something Present
For this assignment, each student will select an individual artefact, a class of artefacts, or a single collection of artefacts in order to critically and creatively engage PRESENT social and cultural phenomena, and how they relate to people, places, objects and/or ideas that existed in the past or may exist in the future.

Assignment 3: Something Future
For this assignment, each student will imagine an individual artefact, a class of artefacts, or a single collection of artefacts in order to critically and creatively engage FUTURE social and cultural phenomena, and how they relate to people, places, objects and/or ideas that existed in the past or exist in the present.

Assignment 4: Revised Artefact Ethnography
For this assignment, each student is required to revise and resubmit their favourite artefact ethnography. With student permission, the Course Coordinator and tutors will select up to five artefact ethnographies for submission to the Material World blog.

The submission format is open, but each artefact ethnography must include a 1000-1250 word written component based on a relevant and appropriate combination of academic literature review, observation, creative writing, photography, drawing, video-making, web design, audio recording and/or object creation.

To get started, students are required to complete the following task (adapted from The Exercise Book) for the first tutorial:

1) Go for a walk with a notebook and pay close attention to what’s going on around you.

2) Compose one written page with three sections. Start the first section with “I see…”, the second section with “I remember…” and the third section with “I imagine…”.

Image credits: “Remade” household objects by Jennifer Collier

Issues related to professional women and mentoring interest me, and I’ve got a bunch of links floating around that I want to put in one place before I forget:

HBR: Women Don’t Go After the Big Jobs with Gusto: True or False?
“[Y]et another myth is busted: the one that says women fail to pursue their career goals as proactively as men. The truth is that women do, but even when they make use of the same strategies, they still don’t get as far ahead … [But] the women who did more to make their achievements known advanced further, were more satisfied with their careers, and had greater compensation growth.”

How To Self-Promote Without Being A Jerk
“Inform, don’t brag … I like a low-key approach with facts and information and not a lot of bravado.”

‘Quiet Desperation’ of Academic Women
“[W]omen were picked disproportionately for service assignments, especially those that are time-consuming. Then those same women are criticized for not doing more research, and the theoretical credit awarded service is never to be found … [And] many feared backlash and retribution if they agitated openly for change.”

Women and Mentoring in the US
“52% of women who said they had never had a mentor said it’s because they never encountered someone appropriate.”

Jill Ker Conway
The Road from Coorain & True North

In my job I have a lot to do. Notice I didn’t say too much to do, but rather a lot to do. And despite recognising the difference, every so often (like today) I still manage to feel so overwhelmed that I don’t know how I’m going to get it all done. When those days happen, I procrastinate by blogging find myself sitting back and taking stock of what I need to do and what I want to do–and the anxiety is almost always attached to the realisation that once I get everything done that needs to get done (and it will all get done eventually) I will likely be too tired to do what I want to do. And that’s depressing.

Last night, at the end of a long weekend, I read an interesting blog post about doing less, and sent the link to myself so that I would read it again today when I got to work. The basic rules seem simple and sensible, but the more I think about them, the more difficult they become. Of course, I’m sure that’s because I’m thinking about them more instead of less (duh!) but I live in a culture, and work in an environment, where few of these things are actively encouraged, supported or rewarded. That being the case, I want to post the suggestions for how to do less, so that I don’t forget:

Go with the flow. Imagine the effort required to swim upstream compared to moving with the flow of a river. If you go with the flow of things, rather than against them, you will naturally do less, and with less effort.

Don’t force things. A common mistake — trying to hard, forcing something that doesn’t want to be forced, forcing people to do things they don’t want to do. A lot of effort, action, and time is wasted. Instead, find a smoother way — think of water, which flows around things rather than trying to force its way through them.

Find the pressure points. In martial arts, instead of using maximum force, you are wise to find the points in the body where less force can be used to greater effect, whether that’s to cause pain or imbalance or some other effect. Well, I don’t advocate finding pain, but the idea of pressure points is a good one: if you can find the little spots where a little action can change everything, can go a long way, you have mastered the Do Less philosophy.

Let others do. Give others the room and freedom to move, to create, to invent, to learn, to work, to do, on their own. Less time, effort and action spent trying to control others means that you do less, but let others make things happen. It means letting go of control, but that’s a good thing. Other people have creativity, imagination, dedication, good ideas too.

Let things happen. Often our actions interfere with events that would happen without our actions. In other words, if we took no action, things would happen without us. Sometimes it’s better to let things happen. Step back, don’t act, things will happen without us.

Now I should admit that most of that advice goes against some seriously ingrained habits of mine, but I’m willing to change. And if I manage to learn to do less, I’m hoping that I’ll have more time to do what I want. And in terms of work, that really means doing more research, more writing, and running a workshop sooner rather than later. Yes. That would be good.

[cc image by Steven Reynolds]