Thinking Work: a guest essay by Nancy Reddy
"how do we make or preserve space for our thinking work?"
Today’s newsletter features a guest essay by poet & writer Nancy Reddy on a topic that I think will resonate with many of you: the power of “thinking work.” If you’d like to pitch an essay, interview, or prompt for this newsletter, or recommend someone you know, you can just reply to this email. 📝
This newsletter would not exist without Nancy Reddy. When I was dithering about whether I should start Be Where You Are, Nancy advised me to dive in and learn as I went, rather than my usual habit of lining up all my ducks and taking forever to actually do the thing (thank you, Nancy!) A powerhouse of a writer and editor, Nancy is also deeply generous. She continually shares with others what she learns along her own path.
Today’s essay started with a conversation about a piece Nancy published on her newsletter, Write More: Be Less Careful: “how do you care for your attention?” In that piece, Nancy mentioned a course she teaches on Jenny Odell and Doing Nothing (if you’ve been reading my newsletter, you know I’m a huge Odell fangirl). I asked Nancy if she would write a piece about her course, and voila!—we have this essay below.
I love how Nancy digs into the “murky stages” of writing that are often uncomfortable, but are also necessary to getting to a strong finished draft. As Nancy says, “It’s much easier to answer an email or tweak the graphics in a set of slides or scroll instagram than it is to think deeply about what it is we’re doing and why.” Read on, friends for Nancy’s wisdom and a link to pre-order her next book, The Good Mother Myth, coming out this January💥
Nancy, on thinking work
Late last spring, when I asked students in an upper-level interdisciplinary course I teach called Resisting the Attention Economy what they’d remember from the semester we spent together, there was one answer that surprised me: thinking work.
The phrase came from a video we’d watched in the first weeks together, of the Finnish performance artist Pilvi Takala, after we read about it in Jenny Odell’s How to do Nothing, which is the core text for the class. (I’ve written a bit about the class in my own newsletter.) The video is just under 14 minutes long, and in it, we watch a woman sit at her desk, go up and down the elevator. While her coworkers chuckle and type and chat, she sits at her desk, quietly refusing to perform either productivity or office collegiality. Each time a coworker asks what she’s doing, she answers, “doing thought work.” In the elevator, she elaborates a bit: “It helps to see things from a different perspective.”
Her coworkers’ question takes on an edge sometimes. One woman enters the frame, she abruptly turns to Takala and exclaims “You don’t even have a computer!” They often seem to want her to account for herself. Why isn’t she working?
Standing beside the lectern in my classroom that day as the video played, I couldn’t tell how it was going. The video is honestly kind of boring. It’s awkward to watch someone refuse to bend to workplace norms, perhaps especially hard to watch when it’s a woman who’s not smiling or apologizing or smoothing things over. But the concept resonated. I’m not sure my students had ever seen someone engaged in thinking work. I’m not sure they’d really considered that thinking could be work.
Our educational system places such emphasis on what’s measurable and observable: worksheets, test scores, writing that can be rated on a standardized rubric. It’s hard to value the thinking work that can’t be seen. When I walk the halls of our campus, where students sit at tables between classes, I can see how they’ve staged the scene they understand to signify work: laptops out, notebook open, sometimes a textbook or a planner. (Almost always, a phone is the actual object of their attention.)
It’s the pose of work. What I can’t tell is if anyone is giving themselves space to think.
But this isn’t just a “kids today” complaint. Our culture’s obsession with productivity makes it hard for any of us to value work that can’t be ticked off a list. It’s much easier to answer an email or tweak the graphics in a set of slides or scroll instagram than it is to think deeply about what it is we’re doing and why.
How many of us have space in our working lives or our home lives for thinking work?
Even working on this short piece about thinking work–maybe especially while working on this piece–I’ve had to think about the role of thinking work in my own writing process. It’s easy to love a productive writing day, to feel good and smart and accomplished when you’ve hit a word count goal or clicked send or submit for a finished draft. But the satisfaction of the finished product is always, in my experience, preceded by the murky stages of not-knowing and wrong turns and rethinking where it was you thought you were going with a piece. There’s almost never a clean line from first thought to published draft. Dreaming that I’m going to get there–that I’ll be able to transform myself into a more efficient typing machine without all the horrible human work of thinking mucking it up–has mostly been a source of misery in my writing life.
It’s embarrassing, honestly, to have to do all this thinking when it would feel better to just get words down on the page, to watch the word count clicking toward completion. I learned this lesson again when I was writing my next book, The Good Mother Myth. Because I’d worked on the proposal for so long before the book sold, I tricked myself into believing that writing it would really be a matter of just typing it up, and I spent a really miserable week or two trying to just grind through to hit the target word count for the first two chapters. It turns out, of course, that even with a detailed outline and meticulous research notes, writing is never just transcription. You have to think the whole way through your book.
The problem with thinking work is that you often feel like a real dummy when you’re doing it. But thinking is the thing that we can do. It’s what distinguishes writing from generating text. Thinking work is the difference between a writer and a chatbot.
So how do we make or preserve space for our thinking work?
In my life, walking is an essential part of my thinking work. Cleaning–vacuuming, wiping down surfaces, folding laundry–works sometimes, too. (The trick to all of that is: no phone, no podcasts, just head in the world, brain working while your body is a little occupied. Why does this work? I don’t really know, though there’s some interesting research about why we get our best ideas in the shower and how even small movements can help with creativity. I do find that there’s something magic about how my brain untangles itself when my body is in motion.)
Sometimes I cheat and think when I’m supposed to be working–when I’m at a meeting that’s moving on just fine without me, when my students are writing during class, even, on a good day, walking between classes. I find there’s often a moment here and there to think, even on days when I know I can’t really sit down to write.
In this way, valuing our thinking as work can help, too, in fighting the time scarcity so many of us experience. Most of us don’t have the hours we might wish for to sit at our desks and type. But maybe you don’t need those endless uninterrupted hours. After all, you can take your thinking work with you anywhere, as you travel that meandering path from the inkling of an idea to the final draft. If you’re longing for hours alone to write, maybe you can give yourself a little more room to think.
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Nancy Reddy is the author of The Good Mother Myth, forthcoming with St. Martin’s Press in January 2025. Her previous books include the poetry collection Pocket Universe and the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, which she co-edited with Emily Pérez. She writes the newsletter Write More, Be Less Careful. You can find her on Instagram at nancy.o.reddy.
Be Where You Are is a newsletter about how to use writing and mindfulness to be where you are. If you’d like to pitch a guest essay, interview, or prompt to share, you can reply to this email or email me at emilymohnslate@gmail.com.
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Love Nancy’s wisdom, here and elsewhere, but the quote that most resonated for me today was “You have to think the whole way through your book.” Such a great guest essay!
"In this way, valuing our thinking as work can help, too, in fighting the time scarcity so many of us experience. Most of us don’t have the hours we might wish for to sit at our desks and type. But maybe you don’t need those endless uninterrupted hours." I love this. When I remember that time spent thinking also "counts" as work, it takes the pressure off.