Week 10 Reading Response

I have been using some of my newly acquired COVID-19-related-at-home-work time to catch up on reading many books my father-in-law—an entrepreneur, accountant, and consultant—has recommended over the years. These books fit the “guru-style” self-help books described by Gregg (“Executive” 53). Somewhat serendipitously, as I began these readings, I also began reading my father-in-law’s recommended Timothy Ferris’s The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, a text which works to eliminate “presence bleed” by focusing on extreme efficiency in productivity achieved through automation (Gregg, “Introduction: Work’s” 19). Like the texts analyzed and discussed by Gregg, Ferris’s book focuses on veiwing time as a commodity. While Gregg critiques factors that have contributed to a work-centric worldview, Ferris feeds into the work-centric worldview by offering “life-hacking” skills to outsource work to lower paid individuals and machines globally. In Ferris’s attempts to eliminate the problem of productivity in his own life, he has simply forced his problem onto others, rather than directly addressing the systematic problem of productivity. Reading the three texts by Gregg in accompaniment with the Ferris book left me asking: What does it mean that literacy activities occur in work environments where such activities must become formulaically productive? And what is the position of literacy when it becomes an outsourced, low-paid activity? As an educator who teaches writing as process-oriented rather than product-oriented and who offers flexible deadlines, I was left questioning how my relationships with my students fit into a world focus on knowledge work as a needfully time-filling, product-oriented, resource-saving activity. Gregg says “the priority for employees [is] ‘never to be short of a project, bereft of an idea, always to have something in mind, in the pipeline’” (“Introduction: Work’s” 13). I wonder to what extent this mentality carries over from corporate sectors into academic work and how does this alter the quality of work actually accomplished.