After a long month of travel and training, I am home for the whole week.  It is a bit of a vacation..or, actually, a staycation, since I’m not leaving home except to go berry and peach picking and meet with the church secretary to help her with a website.  But, despite telling everyone I was going on vacation, the first thing I did on Monday morning was write a to do list.  Hmm…certainly doesn’t look like a traditional vacation, does it?  And, I probably could afford to take the whole week off.  Turn off the computer, crumple up the list, and just vegetate.  But the fact is, I don’t want to.  For one thing, I would be absolutely bored by Wednesday.  For another, I would have trouble relaxing completely knowing that I have two presentations on August 14th and a course to teach come August 27th.  Instead, it’s easier and less stressful for me to find a spot along the work/play continuum that falls closer to play with still a bit of work.  (As opposed to where I’ve been sitting…very close to the work end…for the past month.)

The problem with the continuum idea, though, is that it still gets at a division between work and play.  But, a lot of what I do for work blends pretty seamlessy into what I do for play.  Even as I surf the web locating materials to share with my pre-service teachers, I am earning points for PMOG, the online game I play.  And, frankly, I find it a lot of fun crafting presentations about teaching and learning in the 21st century.  It is a rare day that I don’t do something that someone would classify as “work,” yet I don’t feel like a workaholic who needs some counseling.  Instead, I feel blessed to have found something I love to do enough to want to do it all the time.

Before you shake your head at my blindness to my own situation, I should point out that I do plenty of stuff offline as well.  Today is “squash bread” day at my house; I’m filling up the freezer with loaves of homemade bread.  Loaves 6 and 7 just came out of the oven, and I’m planning for at least two more but maybe four before the end of the day.  I’ll also be curling up with my current book–Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry–and if yesterday is any indication, I’ll probably end up taking a nap as well.   Then, there’s the bathroom painting project:  we’ve stripped all the wallpaper and are now waiting for primer to dry before we put on the first coat.  Finally, I’ll be freezing and drying blueberries and canning peaches on Thursday and Friday.

So, what’s the point of this little window on my world?  If the World Congress on the Future of Work is to be believed, I represent the future of work.  Unlike my father, who worked 46 years for the same company before retiring, or even my older sister, who has been with her firm for nearly 30 years, I’m a freelancer who has had 6 or 7 different jobs and now run my own business.  In their summary (pdf) of the 2005 World Congress, these are the relevant paragraphs:

In the “old world” of work we went to a corporate office because that’s where our file were, that’s where the company resources (including support staff) were, and that’s where we would meet with colleagues, bosses, suppliers, and even customers. Now, of course, we can do that work anywhere, anytime, and we meet all those fellow workers wherever it’s most convenient. And all too often we blur the boundaries between our professional and our personal lives. We have a tendency to take our laptops, cell phones, PDA’s, and other “tools of the trade” with us just about everywhere we go (including the beach, the golf course, the living room, and the car) because we can – not always because we “have to.”

Many knowledge workers also mix and match their “work day” and their personal time, to the extent that they run personal errands mid-day and make up for it by working late at night. That’s a real benefit of the information economy, but a major complication as well.

That describes me perfectly.  And, learning how to navigate that world is going to be an important skill for us and for our students:

We believe that learning how to choose, and how to set limits on when and where they “work,” will be one of the biggest tasks facing knowledge workers over next few years as they finally begin to take charge of their work, and their lives.

These are not skills I got at school, where someone else usually determined the timetable for completing work, and there was a clear distinction between work time and play time.  I had to learn the hard way that there is a limit to how much work I can do after I spent one really long summer doing workshops every day and prepping for them at night.  By the end of August, I was exhausted, and it certainly wasn’t fun any more.  Now, I know how to block out preparation time on my calendar, and I have a much better sense of how long it takes me to do different tasks.  As we consider the skills that our students will need in the future, perhaps we need to concentrate on the literacy of work, giving students the opportunity to take charge of their own work and, thus, their own lives.