Making time to do nothing with Chris Barr
Sometimes I wonder how different conversations about the way people do their work can possibly be and then I find myself talking to Chris Barr about the time he shaved off all his body hair as part of an art project in the earliest days of the internet.
The reason it came up is that when you read up on him, one of the things he is associated with is this idea of ‘radical interconnectivity’. Naturally this piqued my interest, since he is also an early adopter of Tempo which, on the surface of it, kind of does the opposite.
It turns out radical interconnectivity is a concept he was first experimenting with through art and media back in the mid noughties.
“…that belief was a really optimistic belief about the internet and the power of the internet and the power of social relations and an openness to meet strangers and a very naive belief that I still hold, which is that there’s a lot to be gained by opening yourself up to serendipitous experiences with people that you don’t know” — Chris Barr
Projects he created included one where people from all around the world could book an hour of his time on Thursdays and ask him to do something for them. The body shaving was an anomaly though. Mostly he says that he was profoundly moved by the things strangers on the internet asked him to do, from giving blood to standing on a highway with a sign telling people to use their bikes more.
Clearly, times have changed but he says his fundamental belief in people and the basic power of the internet to connect people has not. And in fact that does have lot in common with our own mission at Tempo.
Today, Chris Barr helps arts and nonprofit organisations with little tech experience make good decisions with limited resources. When I call him as part of our series on how people work he’s in his home office in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Join us for the latest Tempo community conversation with Chris Barr about how he does his best work, making time to think and a few side tracks in between.
Okay let’s get started. So what does a working day look like for you?
I am someone who personally does need routine and structure to the day. I start every day, and this is a new habit, by taking a morning walk to create space for some thinking.
I really enjoy sports and that’s my main exercise activity so not being able to be with people (during the pandemic) and get on a basketball court was really hard. Something about that competition makes exercise fun for me, it presents a challenge in a way that going to the gym doesn’t. So I just started taking a morning and an evening walk and walking five to six miles a day.
It’s a really good personal space because at the end of the day much of my work is knowledge work. It’s about cognition and giving your brain the space to chew on things.
So that morning walk becomes really important as I’m thinking through problems that I’m trying to solve either for my clients or for an organisation I’m working for.
This realisation has become really important to me in the last year. Often I’d find that I had a habit of sitting in front of a computer and expecting that this was the place where work happens.
But a typical day: go for a walk, eat a good breakfast, sit down and process the morning correspondence, prioritise a set of things that I need to get done that day. I use to-do lists and then chunk out the time to do it.
A lot of time is spent in Zoom like so many of us. So it’s about ensuring that we show up to conversations ready to move the ball in those meetings that land on your calendar.
How do you prepare for that?
I come from a creative background as an artist and designer. One of the challenges moving into managerial and administrative roles is that often the design side of my brain - that’s how I enter a flow state within work.
So how to provide that level of focus when you’re moving a lot of small things and managing people? Figuring out how to do that for me has been challenging and it requires redesigning how you do the work. You have to invent these tricks for yourself to optimise how you do your own work.
Part of it is knowing when to get away from the screen and to go into a deep thinking space. It’s knowing about how to prepare yourself for a conversation so that the conversation is fruitful for everyone involved. It’s about thinking about the people that are involved at every stage of that because so much of the work is inherently based on relationships and how you build relationships and trust.
You mentioned flow state, how do you deal with emails or messages or Slack in that context?
This is the context for the conversation, right? I’m an early adopter of Tempo and in this case with email what I think is really wonderful about this product is it is really prescriptive of a workflow. And that particular workflow has worked really well for me. It feels humane. It helps guard against the dopamine casino of checking email and hoping something comes in. It tries to build some discipline around the practice of dealing with communications.
That’s not to say I don’t pop into Gmail and check things on my phone. That still happens. But twice a day, I sit down and really process things and that becomes really important. Like I said, I use to-do lists heavily, so I’m already prioritising work within a list and then coming back to it when it’s the right time to execute on it.
Having an email application that helps you process the email and then prioritise it into spaces that really allow you to come to it when you’re mentally focused on it and not forget about it. That’s really wonderful. And I was never an inbox zero person — I was never a GTD person and it’s so odd to see my inbox down to zero all the time.
But what I like about Tempo is that it’s opinionated. It adds some discipline and workflow to email and it’s humane. It cares about me. It recognises that the way that we deal with email and the information space is overwhelming to people. We’re all sort of swimming in overwhelming information available and it tames that a bit.
So I appreciate the software quite a bit. It’s odd to pay for email in 2021. It’s as if we just assume it’s free but I treat it as: I’m not paying for email here, I’m paying for a system that makes my experience of email and information overload a lot more manageable.
You talk about the kind of email information load and blocking time, do you do the same with other media?
I’ve taken myself off of most social media in the past year. It wasn’t adding a lot of value to me.
And that’s a very privileged thing to say. I’m still on Twitter and LinkedIn for work-related purposes but my social media is more professional than personal at this point. It’s still hard to escape the addictive nature of those tools and I would love something that offers some of the sanity that Tempo brings to email for those spaces.
A tool like Tempo shows you quite literally how to time block a task, like email processing. How can you bring that to other things that haven’t built that into the system because those other systems are optimised for you to spend as much time as possible with them.
It’s a really challenging problem for someone to solve at the same time. I’m a person who still uses RSS feeds and I’m a bit of a weirdo with the tools that I prefer. It’s hard to say how to control your information space. Most people don’t have control over theirs.
In reality they sort of opt into the thing that is available to them. It’s quite a luxury today to be able to have some control over your information space.
When you think about something like Tempo obviously you’re paying for that, right? You’re paying for that luxury and privilege. I wonder when we look at society at large and the challenges that we’re having with misinformation, disinformation et cetera where people are in these really dangerous information spaces and it’s leading to challenges even within our own democracy. When do we start to say that having some control over your information space is not a luxury it’s important for society at large?
Definitely. I read this tweet recently talking about how the truth is paywalled, but disinformation is not. Pretty devastating. I read about you talking about radical interconnectivity. Is that connected to communication?
Yeah, it’s absolutely connected to communication.
So this was a tagline I had on my website for a long time. My background is as an a media artist doing digital performance, art, social practice art when I was a practicing artist in grad school and in the years after.
At the time when that started to appear on my website I was doing these unusual internet projects. One was called, ‘Chris Barr is available on Thursday’.
And this was in 2005 so you have to put yourself into the head space of what the internet looked like in 2005. I happened to have Thursdays off from class and from work and I allowed anyone on the internet to schedule my time on Thursday to do things.
So people from all over the world made little assignments for me. And you look at it now and it’s funny — now we have products like Calendly that allow people to schedule your time.
Then I was doing a project that followed that one, called the ‘Bureau of Workplace Interruptions’. And here people were sharing, with this fake Bureau their work contact information, what they did, their work hours. And then we would surprise them with something while they were at work.
Well, that sounds amazing . Was that domestic US or international?
That was pretty international and it turned into museum exhibitions and those sorts of things.
So these would be welcome interruptions at work?
So the thought is, how do we disrupt the wheels of capitalism with some surprise and delight and basic humanity inserted into the day. These are the kinds of projects that I was doing in grad school and a while after.
And I think that that belief, you know, was a really optimistic belief about the internet and the power of the internet and the power of just social relations and an openness to meet strangers and a very naive belief that I still hold, which is that there’s a lot to be gained by opening yourself up to serendipitous experiences with people that you don’t know.
The radical interconnectivity piece is about being open to being in relationship with others and learning from those relationships and allowing joy to be part of that process.
The first project you mentioned was that like someone could call you or is it like they could ask for some of your time?
I built a website, there was a form and you could request a certain hour time slot to schedule me to do something.
And after doing this project, what made me start to believe in something like this as a positive force - opening yourself up to strangers - is that what people asked me to do were often quite beautiful and profound, using my little art project as a way to insert their own meaning and purpose into what I was doing.
So all of a sudden I’m connected to their meaning and purpose. For example one day I’m standing next to a road in Buffalo, New York, holding a giant sign that says, ‘Hey guys, ride your bikes more often’ in German. One day I’m giving blood. Thursdays I’m going to nursing homes and handing out flowers.
People are really beautiful. They also asked me to do silly things, like shave off all my body hair and stuff like that.
Did you do it?
Of course! Turns out to be very itchy the next week.
Oh yeah, I know. My God. Did you send them a receipt that you had done it?
If they built in documentation. They had the hour so if documentation was built into the request, I would typically document it. I tried to document most of it myself.
But it’s also thinking about this myth, you know, from the art side. Right? Coming out of art school and visual art, especially in a Western sense, tends to be hung up on this idea of the individual genius and individual authorship. And that’s really not how the world works.
It’s all a team sport, it’s all in community with people. And so doing artworks in this kind of way for me, was about challenging authorship and my own role as an author and even notions of free will. Like freewill doesn’t extend too far when you realise how you rely on others.
An artwork like Chris Barr is available on Thursday, doesn’t work if no one participates. It’s an artwork in the time where we were thinking about the read-write web and web 2.0 and what participation online could potentially look like. For me it’s about creating frameworks for people to express their own meaning and then be part of something bigger that has a meaning in and of itself.
So that’s the story of how that phrase got to the top of my website.
I think that was all I had. Unless there’s anything you want to say about focus or doing good work or communications that you think is important?
I think the one thing is that we’re so saturated with information and processing information, it can be quite taxing on our brains.
The other thing that becomes important is how do we make sure we have ways to turn our brains off? How do we put ourselves into a rest phase so that we can come back refreshed and able to do the work that we need to do. Figuring out those personally, whatever it is. For me, it’s playing the drums. I can’t think about other things while playing the drums while trying to move four of my limbs simultaneously.
That helps turn my brain off and makes a really wonderful racket. Whatever that is, invest, invest in that. Doing work that’s cognitively based requires us to care about our minds and treat our bodies kindly.
Thank you so much for your time Chris. It was such an interesting conversation.
You too. Thanks Sarah.
Tempo is the email client that helps you focus. If you have a unique way of approaching productivity, we’d love to hear from you.
