Schedule as Minesweeper: Gaming Your Days

Today's post may be a bit shorter because I am trying to stay away from screens as much as I can this weekend (trying being the important word). This week I managed to end the work week not feeling like my to do list for the week following was some sort of unattainable monster. I am sure I am not alone, judging from the conversations and tweets that I see, in feeling that things are filling up our time more than ever before in the pandemic. You would think that because we are "at home" that there would be more time for the things we could enjoy, you know reading, watching movies, being outside in nature. But instead all of the things that used to be the scope of other people or places during the work week, like education, like childcare, have now become the responsibility of the household. I know this is also very positionality and context dependent, but in general there has been a lot of role and responsibility shifting in this pandemic (this is well studied and documented).

Our scheduled time in turn ends up bleeding into other responsibilities or tasks. Again I am sure I am not alone in this feeling. In a way to try to conceptualize this for myself this week I realized that my daily schedule is like minesweeper. Remember minesweeper? That great game from the early 1990s where you click on a square and you are given a number and that indicates the number of bombs around that one square and you need to proceed in hopes of clearing everything except the bombs. If you don't know what I am referring to or need a good dose of gaming nostalgia you can still play minesweeper online here.

So why are our schedules like minesweeper? So say you schedule a one hour meeting to discuss and do a thing, but then you discover that you need like 10-15mins more to get that thing done. Luckily you have a "free" hour scheduled right next to this meeting so sure let's bleed 15 minutes into that scheduled "free time." Click, okay safe. Maybe you had decided that free time was going to be for email correspondence or maybe to eat some crackers or maybe to spend time with your cat. Now you only have 45minutes until your next meeting which you also need to prep for so let's say 30mins break to be safe. Click, okay safe. In that 30 minutes as you are getting your crackers or giving your cat a treat you hear a "bing" from your instant message app. Someone is in another meeting and they are asking blah blah blah, do you have the info on blah blah they need it now? Okay yes I do know blah blah blah let me just type this real quick to this person in a meeting. Click, careful, number 2. Now there's only 20 minutes left before your next meeting and you are still hungry, probably need a coffee, and your cat hates you. So you return to the crackers and the cat treats knowing you have about 10 minutes left until you have to prep for the next meeting. Click, number 2s, and now a number 3 appears. You start the one hour meeting, still feeling hungry because those crackers were not enough, but you do the things and think okay well I will have a break after this. You look at your schedule and realize that in fact the reason that one hour gap was so important was that you are in back to back meetings for the next 3 hours. Click, boom, game over!

If this felt real and very triggering to you I am very sorry. If this was a random occurrence it probably wouldn't feel this way, but sadly I think this is happening daily to a lot of us. I decided this week that we all need to get better at playing minesweeper. We need to stop clicking when there are 1s because when the 2s and 3s start to appear what that means is we are not going to finish when the work day is supposed to finish, and emails will be done at 10pm (or 2am) and that is not healthy nor sustainable. Is your day like minesweeper? I would love to hear about it. I think the more we share these situations and not normalize it then maybe we can start having more robust and meaningful conversations about what the need for wellness looks like in a global pandemic- sans minesweeper or Medieval tapestry.