Thursdays and Fridays are my stay-at-home-and-write days. My normal process is to have breakfast with Significant Other, wave him off to work, yell at the eejits on morning tv for about 30 mins before I turn tv off in disgust and toss the remote somewhere it will later take me 15 mins to locate. Then I have a shower and put on comfy clothes … and I proceed to be relaxed for the rest of the day.
And I think this is where my productivity is suffering.
In being relaxed, I treat it as a ‘day off’ … so I am inclined to potter. Don’t get me wrong: I do stuff. I do the stuff I’m meant to do … I just suspect I do less of it than I might otherwise do if I were to wear uncomfortable clothes.
One of my favourite Eco essays is “Lumbar Thought” (from Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality), in which he observes:
It’s strange that the traditionally most informal and anti-etiquette garment should be the one that so strongly imposes an etiquette. As a rule I am boisterous, I sprawl in a chair, I slump wherever I please, with no claim to elegance: my blue jeans checked these actions, made me more polite and mature. I discussed it at length, especially with consultants of the opposite sex, from whom I learned what, for that matter, I had already suspected: that for women experiences of this kind are familiar because all their garments are conceived to impose a demeanor—high heels, girdles, brassieres, pantyhose, tight sweaters.
(He also says that ‘A garment that squeezes the testicles makes a man think differently’, but I’m not in a position to comment on that.)
Eco also opines that (and I paraphrase, obviously) comfy clothes enrich thought as the body is freed from the confines of ‘lay armour’. I suspect I don’t work very well like this. I need the confines of lay armour in order to remain productive on a day spent working at home.
My point? I’m sure I had one … it’s around here somewhere. Ah, yes. So, in line with Eco’s principle of lumbar thought, today I am wearing non-comfy clothes to see if it tricks me into thinking it’s an ordinary work day and chases all relaxation tendencies away.
Thusly, I am dresses in jeans, which by their very design remind me they are there. Just like work clothes remind me that I am at work coz they compress certain bits, highlight others, and lengthen yet others. Not that I wear jeans to work, but equally if I dress in proper work clothes I may simply find myself writing newsroom stories and comms strategies – but I figure jeans have the potential to recreate a faux sensation of work clothes … and jeans are the writer’s uniform, right?
I’m full of theories.
Let’s see how I go … I mean, I’ve already written this blog post instead of the other blog post I was supposed to write, or the PhD presentation I’m meant to be doing …