This is beautiful, and follows the kind of logics I've been trying to implement. One loophole I've found (i.e. something that helps me hold a rule like this loosely) is that sometimes we can fudge the money earned from work into other categories if we simply have to work more or less than 4 hours a day: like, during seasons when I'm working a lot for pay, I try to donate to causes that matter to me. I also have had to become a wizard at rationalization of what counts as community care when family/household has tried to eat all my hours: writing letters to voters at 5 am before household life kicks off, doubling my dinner prep to contribute to a meal train, anything I can find that fits. It doesn't really approach 4 hours during my life season, but I love the idea of all of us working toward a balance like this. We'd have more margin for each other with this as a flexible ideal. <3
Laura, you are so hard core to be writing letters to voters at 5am. My hat is off to you.
Your comment is also making me think about how we might conceive of the 4-4-4-4 ratio across our adult lifespan: like, when people (especially moms) are in full-time parenting mode, they're getting in a LOT of their lifetime quota of family/household, but then at other times in life they might be able to focus more on community. Different seasons of life might be for different kinds of activity. This is giving me a lot to think about!
Lol 5am works better for my brain than doing anything at 8pm,that's all. I definitely like the idea of both aiming for the 4-4-4-4 and accepting the realities of seasons when we are askew in our hours allocations.
What I like most about this is how it drags the weight of one's days toward care and not achievement or productivity. Maybe that is helpful for most people who are working more than 4 hours a day--are there opportunities to focus on care and not achievement/productivity in your work life?
I love this, Tiffany. It's also making me think, though, about how women (especially women of color) are often prevailed upon to engage in service at work, doing tasks for the good of the community that don't necessarily actually advance our careers. Meanwhile, men (especially white men) are doing less service and able to advance more quickly. I'm not sure how to think about this in the context of the 4-4-4-4 idea. I'm going to keep chewing on it.
This is true and it points to the necessity of including service as part of evaluation for advancement. Care isn't valued in our society. Are we going to wait until it is to do it?
This is so well put. My background is partly in academia, where women -- especially women of color -- are expected to do TONS of service, but this service barely, if at all, counts toward tenure and promotion. So academia is a perfect example of what you're talking about.
For years this has been my personal (and semi-public) struggle as a recently-became-academic after a career in community support nonprofits. I don't know who said it, but the balance that guides me these days is "kindness without boundaries is self-sabotage." Dr. Beronda Montgomery (a Botany professor) said something that has best helped me figure out where to set my boundaries. She once wrote, "I prioritize what I can uniquely do." Those two mantras, plus reading the iconic book The No Club, shook me out of a toxic level of service at work. My work and personal are both better now, too.
A good point about boundaries for work AND care. I am grateful that as a grad student I worked for an organization that taught me so much about boundaries in a helping profession/organization. Helping is not always caring. It made a huge difference in my professional and personal life. Even as someone who does not do compensated work now and thinks that our lives are better when we orient around care, I think it's still important to have limits. Both care and work can expand to fill all our time!
This is what I'm thinking about too as I'm reading this! I have to be at work 8 hours/day. How can I make my work more about caring for the people in my organization and community? And how can I promote my own wellness during my work hours? I think this section is especially applicable to weaving community and care into your work time:
"It’s certainly not about cramming more into your already full days. It’s more about finding slow, small, incremental ways to move in the direction of prioritizing care – care for our communities, care for ourselves."
Oooh, I love this point about weaving self-care into the work day. I think it's something a lot of people (myself included) talk about but aren't always able to carry through on. But if I think of self-care as *part* of my responsibilities, then it somehow feels a bit more legit to make time for self care during the work day.
100% support. A couple days ago it struck me -- this is the year I start including therapy, reflection, life planning, etc., in my time tracking for work. I track my time for my self edification (not required since I'm a university prof). And therapy often deals with my work, as does the rest of the reflection, etc. Dunno why I didn't think of it years ago.
A few years ago a therapist encouraged me to set two check in points for myself during my work day to ask myself “What do I feel? What do I need?” I practiced this for a while and it was a small, but radical way to practice self-care throughout the day. Even if I wasn’t able to meet my need right away, it brought me back to myself and out of my achieving/producing/people pleasing mode. This article and your comment made me think of it again as a way to get the that 4 even when working 8 hours a day!
Ooooh, Caity, I do a similar practice that has helped me so much! When I'm going to sleep at night, I think "May I give myself what I need with a glad heart," and "May I be allowed to feel just as I feel." Very, very frequently, just offering these wishes to myself allows something in my body to relax.
If you would like to unveil the secret behind the French/Argentinian mystery philosopher: I have seen Frigga Haug, a German socialist-feminist sociologist and philosopher, being credited for the 4 in 1 perspective on how we should rethink time. Her categories are devised along slightly different lines (employed labor - reproductive work around house, family, and civil society - lifelong development through learning - political participation) though Haug equally insists that "[this] is obviously not conceived of mechanically, something to be carried out with a stopwatch. Rather it should serve as a compass to steer each of our steps." (https://friggahaug.inkrit.de/documents/4in1_englisch_fin.pdf)
Tabea, hallelujah! Thank you so much for this info -- I have tried multiple times to find the source and always failed. I can't wait to finally actually read this. I am so grateful to you!
I love this idea and am thinking of ways to center these priorities going forward. As a SAHM I don't do even 4 hours of paid work per day, but what I love about this framing is that it centers the ways I DO spend my time (lots on home, family, community) as equally valuable -- a perspective that is all too rare in our culture. Thank you!
I've worked with six categories for the last two years. I don't try to give them equal time, but I try to do something in each category each day (excepting Sunday). Here are my six: Professional activities (things that make use of my education and training), Relationships (family and friendship), House/Garden (including regular domestic tasks), Mind/Body (exercise, time in nature, learning new things), Community (mostly organized community work, but lately more focus on neighborhood community building), and Children (which I separate from family/friends and from professional activities just so they get their own category - and that makes me an auntie!)
Marsha, this is so cool! Do you remember how you arrived at these categories? Did you sit down and decide one day, or come across it somewhere else, or did they just emerge organically over time?
Gosh, I love this idea and lately have been feeling pretty close to this schedule (though am making far less money than I need to be making). But I do really enjoy thinking about how to make this possible.
I'm also feeling closer to this schedule than I have in a long time... and I know exactly what you mean about the financial difficulty side. But I also really enjoy thinking about how to make it possible and I feel like the more people think about it, and the more people include "community" as a full category of activity in their life, the less we might all need to work in order to make ends meet.
Love this, as usual. As I was trying to do "new years resolutions" I came to a slightly different but very related riff on this idea inspired (loosely) equally by both an old study about what old people (70+) say about happiness at the end of their lives, and by Cheryl Strayed's meditations on Mary Oliver in the form of a remarkable essay called The Ghost Ship That Didn't Carry Us that I'm currently in the process of printing and framing for my apartment. Very apropos to the Auntie Bulletin btw, it's about whether or not to have kids: https://therumpus.net/2011/04/21/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-71-the-ghost-ship-that-didnt-carry-us/
I wrote it out as "8 Healthy Living Priorities for 2025 and Beyond"
1. Manage Physical Pain Productively (better than before).
2. Get enough SLEEP!
3. Avoid/manage harmful addictions (esp social media and refined sugar).
4. Eat Well. GLP1s only as necessary.
5. Move Every Day. Aim to hit endurance, strength, balance, and flexibility (all) 1-2x/week.
#8 is probably most important, but the beauty of 4-4-4-4 as a framework is reminding me they're ALL important. Thanks as always for being a font of wisdom on the internet!
Julia, I've literally just been trying to decide whether or not to include the Ghost Ship essay in tomorrow's post about deciding whether or not to have kids. It's gone in, come back out, gone back in, come back out. If it winds up on the cutting room floor, and you have the inclination, you should totally link to it in the comments of tomorrow's post so folks can go read it. Absolutely so relevant. Thanks as always!
As for your priorities, it's a lovely list. I hope you can do a shadow (ghost?) #9 where you practice loving yourself no matter how well you do on the other 8!
Dividing the day into segments of activities is a useful idea. The lengths of time can fluctuate depending upon importance. It’s not unlike school works. Than you.
What radical ideas! So small not significant the possibilities of change there are in this 4s idea. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for being a solid being, too.
This is a great concept (and "do you want to hold a baby's foot?" made me laugh).
I think the way this is clarifying for me is that I have a hard time with activities that don't fit neatly into any of these categories. I run an (extremely) small press, and it takes a lot of my time, is fulfilling and difficult, and doesn't make me money, and I feel like I struggle mentally to categorize it as work, fun, or, values-aligned community project, so it sort of sprawls all over my time and energy categories.
I'll be thinking more about this system, and I especially appreciated the glimpse of your to-do list to see how it actually looks in practice!
This is beautiful, and follows the kind of logics I've been trying to implement. One loophole I've found (i.e. something that helps me hold a rule like this loosely) is that sometimes we can fudge the money earned from work into other categories if we simply have to work more or less than 4 hours a day: like, during seasons when I'm working a lot for pay, I try to donate to causes that matter to me. I also have had to become a wizard at rationalization of what counts as community care when family/household has tried to eat all my hours: writing letters to voters at 5 am before household life kicks off, doubling my dinner prep to contribute to a meal train, anything I can find that fits. It doesn't really approach 4 hours during my life season, but I love the idea of all of us working toward a balance like this. We'd have more margin for each other with this as a flexible ideal. <3
Laura, you are so hard core to be writing letters to voters at 5am. My hat is off to you.
Your comment is also making me think about how we might conceive of the 4-4-4-4 ratio across our adult lifespan: like, when people (especially moms) are in full-time parenting mode, they're getting in a LOT of their lifetime quota of family/household, but then at other times in life they might be able to focus more on community. Different seasons of life might be for different kinds of activity. This is giving me a lot to think about!
Lol 5am works better for my brain than doing anything at 8pm,that's all. I definitely like the idea of both aiming for the 4-4-4-4 and accepting the realities of seasons when we are askew in our hours allocations.
What I like most about this is how it drags the weight of one's days toward care and not achievement or productivity. Maybe that is helpful for most people who are working more than 4 hours a day--are there opportunities to focus on care and not achievement/productivity in your work life?
I love this, Tiffany. It's also making me think, though, about how women (especially women of color) are often prevailed upon to engage in service at work, doing tasks for the good of the community that don't necessarily actually advance our careers. Meanwhile, men (especially white men) are doing less service and able to advance more quickly. I'm not sure how to think about this in the context of the 4-4-4-4 idea. I'm going to keep chewing on it.
This is true and it points to the necessity of including service as part of evaluation for advancement. Care isn't valued in our society. Are we going to wait until it is to do it?
This is so well put. My background is partly in academia, where women -- especially women of color -- are expected to do TONS of service, but this service barely, if at all, counts toward tenure and promotion. So academia is a perfect example of what you're talking about.
For years this has been my personal (and semi-public) struggle as a recently-became-academic after a career in community support nonprofits. I don't know who said it, but the balance that guides me these days is "kindness without boundaries is self-sabotage." Dr. Beronda Montgomery (a Botany professor) said something that has best helped me figure out where to set my boundaries. She once wrote, "I prioritize what I can uniquely do." Those two mantras, plus reading the iconic book The No Club, shook me out of a toxic level of service at work. My work and personal are both better now, too.
A good point about boundaries for work AND care. I am grateful that as a grad student I worked for an organization that taught me so much about boundaries in a helping profession/organization. Helping is not always caring. It made a huge difference in my professional and personal life. Even as someone who does not do compensated work now and thinks that our lives are better when we orient around care, I think it's still important to have limits. Both care and work can expand to fill all our time!
"Helping is not always caring" is so concise and well-put! I really need to remember this.
This is what I'm thinking about too as I'm reading this! I have to be at work 8 hours/day. How can I make my work more about caring for the people in my organization and community? And how can I promote my own wellness during my work hours? I think this section is especially applicable to weaving community and care into your work time:
"It’s certainly not about cramming more into your already full days. It’s more about finding slow, small, incremental ways to move in the direction of prioritizing care – care for our communities, care for ourselves."
Oooh, I love this point about weaving self-care into the work day. I think it's something a lot of people (myself included) talk about but aren't always able to carry through on. But if I think of self-care as *part* of my responsibilities, then it somehow feels a bit more legit to make time for self care during the work day.
100% support. A couple days ago it struck me -- this is the year I start including therapy, reflection, life planning, etc., in my time tracking for work. I track my time for my self edification (not required since I'm a university prof). And therapy often deals with my work, as does the rest of the reflection, etc. Dunno why I didn't think of it years ago.
I LOVE this idea!
A few years ago a therapist encouraged me to set two check in points for myself during my work day to ask myself “What do I feel? What do I need?” I practiced this for a while and it was a small, but radical way to practice self-care throughout the day. Even if I wasn’t able to meet my need right away, it brought me back to myself and out of my achieving/producing/people pleasing mode. This article and your comment made me think of it again as a way to get the that 4 even when working 8 hours a day!
Ooooh, Caity, I do a similar practice that has helped me so much! When I'm going to sleep at night, I think "May I give myself what I need with a glad heart," and "May I be allowed to feel just as I feel." Very, very frequently, just offering these wishes to myself allows something in my body to relax.
I'd love to remember to say these while I'm working, too!
If you would like to unveil the secret behind the French/Argentinian mystery philosopher: I have seen Frigga Haug, a German socialist-feminist sociologist and philosopher, being credited for the 4 in 1 perspective on how we should rethink time. Her categories are devised along slightly different lines (employed labor - reproductive work around house, family, and civil society - lifelong development through learning - political participation) though Haug equally insists that "[this] is obviously not conceived of mechanically, something to be carried out with a stopwatch. Rather it should serve as a compass to steer each of our steps." (https://friggahaug.inkrit.de/documents/4in1_englisch_fin.pdf)
Tabea, hallelujah! Thank you so much for this info -- I have tried multiple times to find the source and always failed. I can't wait to finally actually read this. I am so grateful to you!
I love this idea and am thinking of ways to center these priorities going forward. As a SAHM I don't do even 4 hours of paid work per day, but what I love about this framing is that it centers the ways I DO spend my time (lots on home, family, community) as equally valuable -- a perspective that is all too rare in our culture. Thank you!
If anything, Lacey, I think the categories you name are MORE valuable than most paid work!
I've worked with six categories for the last two years. I don't try to give them equal time, but I try to do something in each category each day (excepting Sunday). Here are my six: Professional activities (things that make use of my education and training), Relationships (family and friendship), House/Garden (including regular domestic tasks), Mind/Body (exercise, time in nature, learning new things), Community (mostly organized community work, but lately more focus on neighborhood community building), and Children (which I separate from family/friends and from professional activities just so they get their own category - and that makes me an auntie!)
Marsha, this is so cool! Do you remember how you arrived at these categories? Did you sit down and decide one day, or come across it somewhere else, or did they just emerge organically over time?
Gosh, I love this idea and lately have been feeling pretty close to this schedule (though am making far less money than I need to be making). But I do really enjoy thinking about how to make this possible.
I'm also feeling closer to this schedule than I have in a long time... and I know exactly what you mean about the financial difficulty side. But I also really enjoy thinking about how to make it possible and I feel like the more people think about it, and the more people include "community" as a full category of activity in their life, the less we might all need to work in order to make ends meet.
Love this, as usual. As I was trying to do "new years resolutions" I came to a slightly different but very related riff on this idea inspired (loosely) equally by both an old study about what old people (70+) say about happiness at the end of their lives, and by Cheryl Strayed's meditations on Mary Oliver in the form of a remarkable essay called The Ghost Ship That Didn't Carry Us that I'm currently in the process of printing and framing for my apartment. Very apropos to the Auntie Bulletin btw, it's about whether or not to have kids: https://therumpus.net/2011/04/21/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-71-the-ghost-ship-that-didnt-carry-us/
I wrote it out as "8 Healthy Living Priorities for 2025 and Beyond"
1. Manage Physical Pain Productively (better than before).
2. Get enough SLEEP!
3. Avoid/manage harmful addictions (esp social media and refined sugar).
4. Eat Well. GLP1s only as necessary.
5. Move Every Day. Aim to hit endurance, strength, balance, and flexibility (all) 1-2x/week.
6. Take care of mental health/manage stress.
7. Learn new things always.
8. Invest BROADLY in Relationships (partner, family, friends, professional, community, etc etc).
#8 is probably most important, but the beauty of 4-4-4-4 as a framework is reminding me they're ALL important. Thanks as always for being a font of wisdom on the internet!
Julia, I've literally just been trying to decide whether or not to include the Ghost Ship essay in tomorrow's post about deciding whether or not to have kids. It's gone in, come back out, gone back in, come back out. If it winds up on the cutting room floor, and you have the inclination, you should totally link to it in the comments of tomorrow's post so folks can go read it. Absolutely so relevant. Thanks as always!
As for your priorities, it's a lovely list. I hope you can do a shadow (ghost?) #9 where you practice loving yourself no matter how well you do on the other 8!
Dividing the day into segments of activities is a useful idea. The lengths of time can fluctuate depending upon importance. It’s not unlike school works. Than you.
Ooh this really has got my brain whirring!
I love the idea of holding these rules loosely!
What radical ideas! So small not significant the possibilities of change there are in this 4s idea. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for being a solid being, too.
This is a great concept (and "do you want to hold a baby's foot?" made me laugh).
I think the way this is clarifying for me is that I have a hard time with activities that don't fit neatly into any of these categories. I run an (extremely) small press, and it takes a lot of my time, is fulfilling and difficult, and doesn't make me money, and I feel like I struggle mentally to categorize it as work, fun, or, values-aligned community project, so it sort of sprawls all over my time and energy categories.
I'll be thinking more about this system, and I especially appreciated the glimpse of your to-do list to see how it actually looks in practice!