Reclaiming the boxes

A good friend just called me out - and properly so - for neglecting my audience (well, he said my blog) for so long.
I'm sorry.
Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned. I did not meet your expectation that I'd say something from time to time. I committed the writing sin of letting the material get stale. I demonstrated poor work habits by failing to treat this blog as work. Mea culpa. This is one time when it would have served me better to do a very 20th century thing: compartmentalize all the messy bits of my life.

Remember compartmentalization? It was the notion that you could chop up your life into chunks and put aside the bits you didn't want to think about at any given time. Remember what a bad reputation it had? Such an unhealthy thing to do - denying parts of your experience, your personal narrative. We're so much more emotionally healthy if we throw away all those little boxes that we use to compartmentalize our lives. And a lot of people did that.

You can identify the people who threw away the boxes, and don't approve of compartmentalization. The extreme cases are the ones at the next table over in your favorite restaurant, Having Issues (maybe even breaking up) in public; the ones in the office who are always on the phone, talking to friends about other friends, doing that thing we call "homing from work".

My office is in my house now. I was once skilled at compartmentalizing the parts of my life that don't need to come to work with me, but changing the way I work is changing the way I handle the rest of my life, too. I think I've still got the mental boxes for compartmentalizing my life; they've just gotten a bit muddled up. I work at home; does this go in the work box or the home box? It's easy to get sloppy.

Some things happened recently in my personal life, and rather than risk having them spill into the professional side of my life, I stopped blogging for a while, on the theory that it's just my blog and I can take a break if I want to. That wasn't a good way to deal with things. Old-school compartmentalizing would have served me better.

You'd think that after living through a couple decades of radical changes in people's assumptions about how we work and why we work and what we do for a living, I'd be better at adapting - but this isn't a matter of learning anything new; it's a matter of going back to what was considered good business etiquette a generation ago. Clothing styles from the '70s are back; maybe it's time to give retro work habits another look, too.