Gregg Week 10

For this weeks reading I will be focusing on two readings: Works Intimacy: Performing Professionalism Online and On the Job and Time Management and the Quest for Organization. Although both readings focused on how we can function within the intimacy of the workplace setting, I particularly found one piece of Performing Professionalism Online interesting. Gregg states, “the autonomy of salaried work comes at a price: to constantly prove responsibility”(13). This struck true to me because at my job during the summer I am salaried and what I do is sometimes not at work. Some of my responsibilities include running errands, emailing and prepping events at my house. Although I am technically getting paid for all that I do, sometimes it is easy to think that since I am salaried I don’t have to put in the best effort because I will get paid either way. When I apply this to teaching practices I think completely different. Knowing that I am salaried on a graduate assistantship and that my work makes a difference in students learning, I continually find myself putting in more and more effort in hopes that students will gain a better experience and improve their overall writing skills. Like Gregg initially mentioned, salary work makes you continually prove responsibility in the fact that you are completing all of your work and with an adequate effort.

Within the article, Time Management and the Quest for Organization it mentions that, “productivity improvements manifest as the ability to detect inefficiencies and eliminate waste from ones schedule” (56). I was thinking of a way to apply this to my writing and how I could be more productive when I sit down to write something without getting distracted. I remembered at orientation they told us to set a timer and then take a break for half the time we worked. So if you worked for 30 minutes you would then take a 15 minute break. I then thought how does this connect to economics of literacy and I realized that we are all working to produce research for the university that they can further expand and profit from. However, as this ended on a depressing note, I do recommend the above method of work because it does eliminate those distractions that we all tend to fall for.