Loadshedding: Keeping Your Lights On
It has just been a long weekend which was a good time to recharge our batteries because this year has been a lot already.
In South Africa, our national electricity provider, Eskom, does this wonderful thing called loadshedding or as it now calls it ‘load reduction’ so that it can keep the power grid from collapsing completely. We’ve been hit by loadshedding on and off for the past two weeks and as of this morning, we have now moved from Stage 2 to Stage 4 (poor Stage 3 never seems to get a chance to shine). Before loadshedding is announced, Eskom urges South Africans to switch off all unnecessary electrical appliances to ease pressure from the grid. I’m not sure anybody actually does this because, in reality, we aren’t very good at switching off.
A friend of mine was saying last week how loadshedding forced her to stop working the previous weekend. She felt she was able to unplug and just be in her space. Otherwise, she can’t bring her best self. This is true. If your energy is depleted, you can’t bring your best self to work or anything that you’re trying to achieve.
We often talk about the need to switch off or unplug from work so why don’t we do this type of loadshedding for ourselves more often? We too, like the national power grid, have a limited amount of energy.
When I was working full-time, I used to work non-stop. If I saw a friend during the week, I was probably talking about work or still taking work calls. It would get to the end of the week, and I was completely depleted. I developed this habit I termed Silent Saturday when I wouldn’t talk to anyone and just be by myself for the whole day to recharge. It helped a bit but, like with the unpredictability of loadshedding, you can never predict when you need to have all your devices charged so it didn’t always work out.
I had a colleague who was worse than me and took great pride in the fact that she worked until 10pm every weekday and almost all weekend, every weekend. She never left the office floor. The difference between us was that she had a husband and child. She often missed out on school events and making dinner with her family. I’m fairly sure she slept with her laptop open next to her bed, just in case. She was Eskom’s worst nightmare, she never switched off unnecessary appliances.
For my Futures Thinking course, I have been doing some research on the Future of Work. I have been looking for signals for the future and came across this article in The Guardian about ‘time millionaires’*. These are people putting more value on leisure time than on work time. Although the term was first coined in 2016 by Nilanjana Roy, more and more people are adopting this way of life since the pandemic. The entire article is worth reading but there is a particular section that I want to point out:
Any time we scrounge away from work is to be filled with efficient blasts of high-intensity exercise, or other improving activities, such as meditation or prepping nutritionally balanced meals…We holiday with the solemn purpose of returning recharged, ready for ever-more punishing overwork. Doing nothing – simply savouring the miracle of our existence in this world – is a luxury afforded only to the respectably retired, or children.
“In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living,” writes Jenny Odell in her anti-productivity tract How to Do Nothing, “and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook … time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing’. It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive.” Odell exhorts readers to recognise that “the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are … enough”.
The calls to end the fetishisation of overwork, and its concomitant self-optimisation culture, are gaining traction: both the UK and US have prominent campaigns for a four-day week. Futurists such as Pang advocate a world in which technology is not a straitjacket but a force for liberation, enabling “us to be more productive in ways that allow us to reclaim more of our time”. Pang quotes approvingly from Bertrand Russell’s 1932 essay In Praise of Idleness. “Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all [but] we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines,” Russell wrote. “In this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.”
We don’t switch off. We are constantly on and using energy. I know I am guilty of doing this. I am always finding ways to squeeze in some extra tasks in those 15 minutes that I am waiting for a friend or a meeting. It might even just be checking my Twitter feed. You aren’t fully switched off then because you are consuming news or might come across something work-related. We also wear devices nowadays that remind us to stand or walk around for a minute; keep using that energy!
With loadshedding being a regular reality in South Africa for the foreseeable future, we should see it – to borrow Bertrand Russell’s words – as no reason to go on being foolish. We should take the chance to switch off like our power is switched off. Sit in your garden (if you have one) and look at the birds for a bit. Invite a friend or family member over and put away your phones. I’m not going to advocate to do absolutely nothing because that would be way out of my comfort zone (feel free if you feel you can). Just do something that will give you your energy back so you can be your best self. You don’t need to be productive; you just need to recharge. I promise, your laptop and work will still be there when the power comes back two and a half hours later. On that note, my power will be going off again shortly and I’m looking forward to practising what I preach.
Alex the Generalist
*If you're interested, this is the future scenario I came up with for the assignment. We had to pick a future of X topic and then describe a possible future around that topic in a paragraph based on a signal that is happening now as if it has already happened. You also had to show both the opportunities and the challenges this might bring. So here's the scenario:
In the year 2030, a new software called TimeKeep has been developed. It switches off access to any of your work (email, documents, cloud) after your allotted work hours for the week have been completed. These work hours have now been shortened to a four-day week by national legislation, with some companies adopting even shorter workweeks. TimeKeep was designed to prevent overworking and burnout and increase leisure time. It has been adopted by many employers as a way to improve their employees’ productivity and wellbeing. But people are also worried that if they don’t complete a work task in time and have been 'locked out' of work by TimeKeep, it will mean they could be under even more pressure, and it could cause more anxiety.
Originally published 19 April 2022
