Last week was a doozy. We had touchdown on Mars. The camera work was incredible. Turns out an engineer who observed their daughter wearing a camera to film her gymnastic routines inspired that innovation. Now the world benefited from a spectacularly clear view of the Mars landing. It’s breathtaking to watch, actually. (Thank you, engineer’s daughter.)
This mission was not the first of its kind, but it does feel like the world was watching. While working remotely on a video call, I witnessed a colleague’s daughter, maybe 7 years old, run onto the screen’s view in the middle of a presentation. She had so much excitement for the moment: Mommy, we landed on Mars! Mom proceeded to extract her child from the room to avoid further interruption. It was pure joy. (So, why weren’t we watching? Oh, right, we were supposed to be working.) We were on the clock. Although in this case, I was not being compensated for my time. However, I did think I would benefit from participating in this listening session to help inform a new project I am working on.
There may be a lot of time we invest and don’t get paid for immediately, when we work for ourselves. Once we reach a certain size, we begin to outsource work that would be better off not doing. In early stages of growth we make choices about paying someone else for things that will allow us to spend more time creating value that will likely payoff in the long run. There might be some things that we are unwilling to let other people do, especially because we hold the expertise. And then there are the things we never get paid for doing, whether we have the expertise or not. Truth is some work — a lot of that work done by women — goes unpaid.
I am experiencing great empathy right now for the many unpaid workers, often mothers, that get the work done, without an expectation to be paid. They are shapeshifting between work, life, play and care. They are also among the estimated 50 million caregivers bolstering our economy, while reaping no rewards. Caregivers are constantly time shifting, supporting multigenerational households, often families of color with an aging parent living at home. I was one of those caregivers last week trying to expand time.
We are seeing things in a new way in this pandemic economy. Time is shifting, and the boundaries we used to try and create seem useless and unimportant now. Sometimes the awe-inspiring efforts of aerospace remind us that there’s something bigger in the universe. Whether light years away, or closer to home, we are reevaluating our relationship to time.