Screen Time
One of the big problems many advice columns, posts, and articles have addressed in this new isolated world we inhabit is work/life balance. Since so many of us are working from home, it’s very easy to slide, still pajama-clad, into a desk chair and start answering email before you’ve even had breakfast. My husband and I, both community college professors, have unofficially instituted a policy in which we declare to one another, from different corners of the house, that we are now “home from work.” This usually isn’t firmly upheld — it’s far too easy to go back for just one more thing, but it is a good reminder. He’s gone one step further, affixing a post-it with the words “Stop Working” to his home office door, so he has to read his own admonishment if he tries to go back in.
But by and large, we are doing okay there. At least, we’re doing no worse than we were before, when grading and student emails and lesson planning followed us home.
My problem, I’m finding, as we conclude our third week away from our respective campuses, is not getting away from work, but getting away from the screen. In the classroom, I stood in front of and walked among students for hours at a time, looking at their faces and their notes, talking them through concepts and moderating discussions, projecting on a screen, yes, but mostly facing away from it as I lectured about the material. When I left the classroom, I did return to a laptop in my office, but that glare was tempered by colleagues and students walking through my door, by meetings, by stacks of papers I wrote on until my hand was sore.
Now it’s all on screen: the powerpoints have to be edited and posted, the lectures — only a few, and they are short now — are recorded through a video program, the office hours are a chatroom. Meetings require a new window, but not a new location. And all papers are electronically submitted, read, and commented on. My hand’s not sore, but my gaze is certainly glassier.
So take a break, you say. Okay. Let’s get away from work. So I’ll scroll through Facebook and Instagram to update myself on lives happening in other places, now one of the few ways I can see and interact with those beautiful humans. Or I’ll have a virtual happy hour with some friends. Or I’ll get creative: write a post for one of the two blogs I contribute to. All screens. My dearest, most favorite form of brain shutdown is watching food TV.
And yes, before you ask, I do go outside. I am lucky — so lucky — to have a yard with some flower and some vegetable plots; I garden, I walk my dog, I revel in the Southern California spring. I want to want to fall into any number of the dozens of books in our house I haven’t read. But those seemingly more virtuous activities just don’t hold a candle (a flashlight? a floodlight?) to the cold, bright, ever-so-inviting pull of all of those screens I’m so beholden to…
