This summer has come with lots of time outdoors, gardening, looking after plants and going to visit some nearby gardens, like the one featured in this blog post at Dyffryn gardens.
I have been craving time away from the screen, and spending time outdoors, walking through the woods with the dogs and pottering about in the garden has been just what the doctor’s ordered. Somehow the louder the clamour of digital productivity becomes, the less I want to participate in this race to save time.
Thanks to working across a whole range of institutions, each with their own infrastructure, I get A LOT of notifications from platforms, tools and services and I feel the tone of these interactions is becoming less helpful. From trying to adjust email notifications on LinkedIn (not fun), to worrying needlessly about important security alerts from my workspace account which turned out to be advertising, I am less than impressed with the current generation of digital tools. It doesn’t make me feel more productive, just requires more effort for me to sift through the mass of communication that comes my way in order to do what I need to accomplish.
I’ve blogged before about moving through times of change at the pace of plants and of finding your own cadence, and I return again and again to this idea of pace and intentionality. To have space and time to think about why I am doing things, not just how to do them more quickly.
I feel like I’d like a badge that says “not prone to overwork” or something like “I’m quite productive enough”. Audrey Watters had a great bit about toxic productivity in a recent edition of her Second Breakfast newsletters (Measure for Measure, 18th August 2025), which I would urge you to read (and subscribe to, if you haven’t already).
This summer my pace has adjusted, the cadence of my thoughts has shifted, and I’ve sat with the uncomfortable-ness of change and re-invention that comes with periods of change and transitions.
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