Hovering over decline and clicking accept

Photo by MChe Lee.

Ours is a house that cooks ahead. Anytime we're making food, we're making more than is strictly necessary. Rice going in the rice cooker? May as well put in whatever will fit. Just did a big order from the green grocer? How many veggies can you put in a curry before you're breaking some sort of international law?

Leftovers are often unloved. There's an old joke about a preacher saying grace over a plate of leftovers and finishing with, "It seems to me that I have blessed a good deal of this material before."

But you could do worse than a life with lots of leftovers. On the plus side, most of the work is already done by the time you go to reheat it. You also avoid the thing where 40% of food in North American houses goes in the garbage.

But whether you like to cook or not, this is for you. We hope it helps.

We tired

There's a tech reporter at The New York Times who was tweeting earlier this week. She's got a book coming out. And small children. And did we mention a day job at The Times? And it's the middle of a fucking pandemic.

She said mom friends were asking how she did it all. Was she superhuman? And her response was, "Nope, I just cried a lot and neglected other things in my life."

This is all of us right now.

But the specific thing that she's describing - modulo the pandemic part - is deeply familiar around here.

When we started Raw Signal Group, our youngest was a little over a year old. She didn't sleep for the first 8 months of life. We were running on fumes before we even made our way to the starting line. We were writing HFUIYM, trying to get a new business off the ground, and still not sleeping a whole lot.

When you're exhausted, a lot of your poor decision making ends up making things worse. And so the first step in getting out of this awful spot is a loose approximation of the Hippocratic Oath.

First, stop shooting yourself in the foot.

This can be hard to see when you're in the thick of it. Most of your instincts are upside down. And what feels like a shortcut or a quick win often comes back to bite you later. One of the most powerful things you can do from this place of overwhelm is to bring back that visibility. To be able to see what's causing harm. And what's helping.

Borrowing from Future You

When shit gets rocky, a normal and healthy instinct is to borrow from your future self. Most of us learn early to prioritize aggressively during a crisis and that means a lot of things get punted. "Quick syncs" get rescheduled two weeks out, alongside dental cleanings and oil changes.

You know you'll still have to do those things, but it's Future You's problem. You block up some of Future You's calendar because Present You needs that time back. And, in a normal crisis, things do lighten up after the shock. And then Future You pays off the debts that Past You accumulated. And you get your buffer back and your shoulders come down and you can breathe again.

But these eleven months haven't been a normal crisis. They've been a chronic, rolling chain of crisis after crisis. Like one of those mile-long trains trundling through a rail crossing. Delaying everything. Ringing alarm bells and flashing lights but not in any particular rush. With no end in sight except the intellectual knowledge that it can't go on forever. And all the while brutally violent if you try to cross it.

And what we've seen is that a lot of people are still borrowing from their future selves. They're going deeper into debt. More deferrals. More rescheduling. Calendars that are a solid wall of obligations weeks ahead of time. And new, time-sensitive stuff still trying to force itself in. Into the 15 minutes you hoped would be lunch. Or before the first thing. Or after the last thing.

It's hard to blame Past You. Past You was trying to get through their own mess from the month before. And the month before that. But if you're someone staring down this debt right now, you know that you've run out of room. Present You needs to start working differently or else Future You is... fucked.

Investing in Future You

If we're honest, this week is probably already fucked.

The most unhelpful piece of advice for most people during a pandemic is "take some time today for self care." Like, if that's advice you can take today by all means please do. We're serious. If you have room in your calendar and an ability to nurture your own health you should seize that moment. It's precious and important and valid for you to do that.

Many of you don't have the ability to take that advice, though. Because today was already decided days, if not weeks, ago. Past You put some debt on your books that you're paying off today. So be it.

But. For most of you there is some future week right now that is not yet a mess. It might be next week. Or it might be out in March. But there's a week that hasn't piled up with stuff yet, because that stuff hasn't had a chance to happen. Future You is going to live that week. And you have an opportunity to set it up.

The truth about most calendar-run organizations is that calendars are law. If it's on the calendar, it's real. And if it's empty, it's up for grabs. In an ideal world, you would have empty swaths on your calendar where you could breathe. But in reality, the minute someone sees an empty slot, they claim it. And you're right back to the wall to wall meetings you've been trying to get out from under for the better part of a year.

Hacking your calendar to protect yourself

First - book time with yourself. Many of you already do this, but for those who don't it's a bloody revelation. The calendar is law, and if you book a 30 minute recurring meeting with yourself to eat some lunch, that becomes truth. Like putting a rock into a river - everything else just flows around it. It helps to mark this meeting private. If yours is not a culture where private meetings will fly, give it a name people's eyes bounce off of. "Goals check in." Or "quick sync." Invite a colleague who needs the same calendar defense. Calendrical mutual aid is always legitimate, but especially in a crisis.

Second - there are things on your calendar that have to happen, but don't care when they happen. Meetings where it wouldn't be okay to cancel them, but would be fine to reschedule same-day. This is important because the calendar doesn't care what time things happen but you do. You have different energy at 10am or 3pm or 8pm. There isn't a right or wrong there, chronotypes are a real thing. Learning this about yourself, and arranging your day to do the right work at the right time is an executive superpower.

If you don't know this about yourself yet, go look at January's calendar. Which parts of the day felt great and which ones felt awful? (You may need to grade on a curve, here.) You'll likely figure out that 10am is a great time for writing, but that a bad meeting in that time derails your day. Or you'll figure out that you are the bad meeting that other people have at 10am, and need to reshuffle to protect them from your nonsense. Whatever it is. We are in harm reduction mode, here. And these are gifts to Future You that start paying down debt instead of continuing to spend it.

There's so much written about self-care. And much of it starts from a good place but falls apart the moment things get hectic. But this idea of Past You working in service of Future You isn't a one-off. It's not a massage you sneak in one Friday morning. The secret hope that 60 minutes of hot rocks will counteract 12 hours a day hunched over a laptop.

This is an ongoing, daily practice. And through this lens, leftovers are beautiful. They are nourishment that your past self gifted to your future self. Because you knew what you were staring down this week. And that a repetitive lunch was better than a hangry Future You.

- Melissa and Johnathan