2️⃣089: The Dead Zone Weather Hoax P 🌦

Spring is a myth ☃️

Not in the sense of "Spring doesn't exist," but in the sense of "Spring doesn't exist the way they sold it to us on TV."

In Puerto Rico, there's no need to check the weather. Every day, you knew it was going to be hot. Well, there were more options. It could also be really hot or super fucking hot. Sometimes, it was so hot and humid that I would sit on my couch in my living room with the windows and doors open and the fans on, and I was still sweating 🥵

(For the record, if you think my childhood was hot, it's probably like 3x hotter now daily. For anyone who thinks climate change is a hoax [hopefully nobody reading this], please get your head out of your ass and stop idolizing political candidates because they're young and rich. Yeah, you know who I'm talking about.)

During my childhood, the only reason you might check the weather was to see if it would rain that day. But you didn't even need to check the weather for that. Just go outside and look up at the sky.

Does it look like it's going to rain?

Are there clouds in the distance?

Are they the type of clouds that signal the weather is changing?

Honestly, it's probably going to rain at one point or another. Just be prepared for it. I remember one summer when it rained so hard every single day I couldn't go to the beach the entire summer ☔️

We never had summer or winter or fall or spring. There was no significant change in how it felt outside, except it got a little less muggy when the holidays rolled around.

But the movies and TV shows would have you think it was like that in many places in the Northeast (and by many places, I mean NYC and the one random town they filmed in that was meant to represent every small town in New England).

Let's take the hit show SUITS, for example, which originally aired on USA Network (a TV channel for those who don't know) and ran until 2019. Many of you are discovering it because it's on Netflix/Peacock.

ASIDE: Isn't it funny how the streaming platforms control the Cultural Zeitgeist? I watched SUITS every week for about six years as it was airing. No one ever gave a shit except me and my brother and my ex-girlfriend, who would fall asleep five minutes into every episode forcing us to rewatch the same episode the following night when she would again fall asleep five minutes in (none of that is Harvey's fault, maybe Mike's, but definitely not Donna #DonnaGang). Now it's on streaming, and everyone has fallen in love with Suits and its characters. The Harvey Specter references I dropped in casual conversations in 2017? No one knew what I was talking about. Now, everyone is discovering that the Duchess of Sussex was a paralegal before she met the prince.

Go figure.

Back to the weather 🌡

If the only thing you knew about the weather in NYC was what you learned from the show Suits, I wouldn't hold it against you if you believed winter in the city wasn't such a big deal. It's nice and sunny most of the year, right? They're just walking around in full suits all the time but not sweating. Maybe they wear a peacoat now and then when it gets a bit more chilly. But snow? Wind? Shitty, ugly weather?

Never seen on the show ☀️

Growing up in the tropics and not going on winter vacations, TV and movies were the things that taught you what the weather was like. Snow is real, except in TV shows and movies where the only action in a small town in New Hampshire happens during the five weeks it's sunny outside.

But eventually, I moved to Boston for college. And in that first winter, there was so much snow my university suspended classes for the first time in 60 years. Oh, shit, this winter stuff is serious. I can't wait until spring rolls around.

But no one tells you that spring isn't actually a season. It's a day in the middle of winter, sometime around March or April. One day, you're freezing, and the snow is sort of melting because the temperature is hovering around 32 degrees. The next day, it's 65 degrees out!

That's what people would say. For the first time ever, I understood what people meant when they said, "It's so nice out." Because it was nice out, the weather was great! It wasn't cold or hot. You could walk around and enjoy the sun without sweating or feeling like an invisible humidity cloud was swallowing you whole without chewing.

The next day, the temperature drops to 25 degrees, and you don't see the sun again for an entire week.

That's "spring."

It's a single day in the middle of winter. Winter starts to end, and it's awkwardly cold around the 40s until one day, it's finally in the 70s, and now it's summer.

But then summer gets hot, and you can't wait until fall, which everyone loves now because it's #SpookySzn. But we all know the love for Spooky Szn is just an excuse to adopt a different aesthetic for your social media profiles (yeah, I said it, the weather's nice, but y'all ain't as spooky as you claim to be 👻).

As I was contemplating different ways of explaining why I think "spring is a myth," I started to think about another significant area of time people claim to be awesome and love while never admitting it's not real: the time on a work day after you have lunch and before you go home from the office (or transfer from your desk at home to your couch to watch TV).

Let's call it 2–5 pm.

Some might say it's actually 1–5 pm. Those are the regular humans who wake up and have breakfast and three full meals a day.

Some might say it's 3–5 pm. The ones who say that are the "hard workers" who keep pushing through the day drinking coffee after coffee because empires will crumble if we don't get this email that promises everyone $25 back on their $2000 purchase out by this afternoon. Or maybe you have a late lunch because your boss is telling you the spreadsheet has to be submitted or the entire company will fall apart, but when you send it to them by the deadline, they don't look at it until a week later.

Figures 😒📊

Now that we've got that out of the way let's call it like it is.

And what I mean by Dead Zone is that NOTHING IS HAPPENING during that time. I don't care what lies you tell yourself. Most people are not getting actual productive work done at those hours.

Either you got the itus from lunch, or you're looking ahead until you can savor the sweet taste of freedom walking out the office door. Freedom for a few hours at least because once you leave the office, you have to make it home and get yourself ready for work tomorrow while trying to go to the gym, socialize, watch that new show about lawyers on Netflix everyone's talking about, and also work on your side hustle because you want to be your own boss one day and not take shit from anyone and your current job doesn't pay you enough to do anything besides go to the beach for free even though you spend most of your time working for said job. You must do all that in the 4-5 hours of "leisure" after work. That is, if you don't have a commute or kids or a pet to walk or errands to run or...damn, it really sounds like most of our day is kinda filled up with "work," right?

Suppose you're dedicating 45 hours to work-related activities every week (which is a lowball because we know you take your work home with you, answer emails during non-work hours, and have that mental stress you carry with you at all times worrying about what is going to happen at work that hasn't happened yet). In that case, that means 40% of your waking hours are dedicated to work.

Do you feel like the amount of time taken away from your ability to live life to the fullest and instead dedicated to work is properly compensated?

I'm just asking questions 🤓

During all that time you spend working, how much "work" actually gets done?

If we're talking about Dead Zones at the office, many would agree the first 1-3 hours in the morning are also a Dead Zone.

You get to the office by 8:50 am so no one can say you're "late." But you have to get some coffee. But there's a line at the coffee machine. So you start talking to everyone you see because you don't want to be rude. You finally get your coffee, talk a bit more, and walk back to your desk. On your way there, you see a few more people to say hi to. Then you sit down, but your desk neighbor arrived while you were getting coffee–you gotta talk to them. Don't forget to talk to the other person from a different department who popped in to chat while walking back to their desk from getting coffee. Did you answer that email that just came in? Let me do that real quick. Okay, let's talk about that awkward thing that happened in the meeting yesterday everyone was too afraid to bring up during the meeting. Oh, shit, it's 9:50 am already? I need to get to that 10 am meeting.

Weekly 10 am meeting? That's another Dead Zone. Just a bunch of people sitting around talking about what they're going to work on or have been working on and how far away they are from finishing it 🤭

Now that you're finished, you can finally get to work. But wait, everything changed after that meeting, so you have to look at your lists and tasks and create a plan to tackle everything you want to do. By the time you're finished doing that, it's almost 11 am (I had to go to the bathroom, remember the coffee). Now it's 11 am, and you're finally getting to the work you planned on doing before anything else happened, but an email comes in. This email is super important. Stop everything you're doing and work on this thing that just came in, even though everything else is also super important.

By the time you're finished, it's noon or almost one, but you still have that list of tasks. Better get started! But you're feeling a little sluggish. Let me get another coffee! You get that coffee, but you also see a few people along the way. That's another 15 minutes. By the time you're sitting at your desk ready to work, it's 12:30 or 1 pm, and if you're like me (always hungry), you're already thinking about lunch 😇

After lunch? We know nothing happens then because you're looking forward to when you can go home!

It doesn't have to be this way.

We could do so much better. We could live so much better.

I promise I can get everything I need done for a day of work before lunchtime if I have no random interruptions or if the Project Manager, who doesn't have a creative bone in their body, didn't decide to change the meme I made because they don't think our audience will understand what a #Bussy is so now they're looking it up on Urban Dictionary and now they know what it is and get the joke but....it's a wonder how I still have a job here.

No need to google “bussy,” I got you covered (sorry, mom).

Here's the first thing we need to do: NO FUCKING MEETINGS BEFORE LUNCH. 

Why do you want me to spend my prime working hours sitting in meetings and listening to other people talk? Why are we planning what we're going to get done this week during peak productivity hours? It's like telling a professional athlete to run wind sprints before a match to see how fast they're looking lately. You're using up all the good fuel before the big moment. It's counterproductive.

If you really want to be productive, you should make a list of everything you're going to work on the day before you work on it. Can you imagine sitting at your desk in the morning with a full list of everything you need to get done that day without spending your first 60 minutes figuring out what needs to get done that day?

No, instead, we spend the morning figuring out what we're going to get done so we can actually get to it at 2 pm. 2 pm. The time all my brain cells are fried from the shit I had to deal with before then.

Now, I know many of you might be thinking, "David, I'm no good in the morning. I'm at my best in the afternoon when I'm finally awake. That Dead Zone you're talking about is the productivity zone for many others."

That's what I have to say about that.

Since I'm listening to your feedback live as I write this essay (and by feedback, I mean making shit up in my head you might be thinking), I think we can reach an understanding.

There is absolutely no need to spend more than half of our days "working" on things that make no meaningful difference in anyone's life. Especially when it's shit we don't care about. No, you don't love your job, and, no, you're not changing people's lives by selling them some new automated email software. We're creating a solution for a bug that would never have existed if we hadn't invented it in the first place (I've written about this before).

I think the real reason you think you need a job to "occupy my time or else I'd go crazy" is because the world never let you figure out who you are. You've never taken the time to sit around and think and explore and discover all the things that truly make you tick. The things that make you smile and feel fulfilled. The things that make life worth living.

It's all because you've been too busy just fighting to survive 😩

You think whatever your job is is that thing that makes life worth living. Hey, maybe it is; some people have been lucky enough to find something they truly love to live off. But most people haven't. And many of the ones that have just found something that doesn't eat at them from the inside out every day, making it tolerable enough.

Let's not get started on the many who claim they love what they do for a living, but really that shit is like 20% of their income. They're being supported through other means (aka the $$ they're making does not cover their living expenses; someone else is paying for those, trust me, I know; I live in Miami).

When everything is said and done, and you're sitting on your deathbed, will you be smiling thinking about all the financial valuations you were able to give to the conglomerate that writes your checks so they could gobble up other small businesses before firing everyone and selling them off for profits that are only felt by shareholders who are already rich but aren't really liquid because all that money is just numbers on a chart?

Okay, David, you made all these great points that I agree with, but what the fuck am I supposed to do? I still need to pay the rent.

I understand. I also need to pay the rent. Every hour I spend working on this is an hour I don't spend working on something that could get me paid because I'm working hourly as a freelancer in an effort to take back control of my life. And let me tell you, this shit is incredibly anxiety-inducing. The system has been made so the easiest, most frictionless way to live is the one that sucks up most of our energy, so we have nothing left to fight back against the systems in place.

So, again, what can we do?

TAKE BACK

THE DEAD ZONE

Take back a couple of hours.

Ignore the emails you receive for the first three hours of the day (or the last three) so you can get some deep work done instead of working on ten different things for five minutes each. Maybe you go outside and walk around a little bit 🚷

Maybe you spend some of that time reading 3,000 words some dude wrote and sent you like he does every 2UESDAY (yup, it's almost 3,000 words already). Maybe you fight for the four-day workweek (while keeping the same salary) because there exists a way we can live better.

I promise you there is a way we can do better.

Maybe this email does absolutely nothing at all, and you think I'm a hypocrite because after I finish typing this, I'm going to respond to a client with a ridiculous request and be angry on the inside, but on the outside, I'll be like, "Yes, Chef, I'll go fuck myself, Chef."

I guess that's life.

But I don't think it has to be.

And I hope you don't believe it has to be either.

PS

All I want is for you not to end up looking like this: