Neil Bardhan - How Do I Work?

In this episode I talk to storyteller, connector, and comedian Neil Bardhan about how we work from scheduling to values to measuring productivity to reducing anxiety and all of the things that a COVID-induced work from home environment forces us to think about. How do we manage ourselves when we have a fair amount of freedom? What does it mean for our jobs to be, to some extent, being ourselves? And why are salary negotiations a terrible way to begin a working relationship? All this and more.

Books mentioned:

Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
Deep Work by Cal Newport

Transcript

(Transcript courtesy Louise Boydon)

David Dylan Thomas

All right, welcome everybody to “Lately, I’ve been thinking about…”. I’m your host, David Dylan Thomas. I'm coming to you from Media, Pennsylvania which is land once occupied by Leni Lenape folks. I have today with me a guy named Neil. Neil Bardhan, and I'm going to let him introduce himself and tell you what he gets into.

Neil, tell us a little about yourself.

Neil Bardhan

Hey there! So yes, I'm Neil Bardhan. I live in South Philly, also historically Leni Lenape land and I see myself as all sorts of things, but so often I get to say that I'm a storyteller, I'm a connector. I'm a comedian at times.  I just like hearing people's lives and helping them shape messages about those lives and what they get up to.

David Dylan Thomas

Awesome! So, Neil, let me ask you the question. What have you been thinking about lately?

Neil Bardhan

I am so glad that you asked! I have been thinking about how do I get work done? How does anybody get work done? 

David Dylan Thomas

That sounds like actually a very deep question, because now that you ask it, I'm like, how the hell do I get anything done? Do I get anything done?

Neil Bardhan

Yeah! It's interesting in the context of the past couple of years of society and culture and work culture and it's interesting in my own life, within that time span as my roles have shifted professionally, and as I've dealt with things in my house, things outside my house, examinations of how do I want to get things done? What am I even trying to accomplish? And how much does it matter how it gets done?

This is a chapter for us to discuss maybe! How does it matter how other people whom I work with are getting their work done?

David Dylan Thomas

I mean, I’d almost like to start there because I feel like that has been a much bigger discussion in the time of Covid because you have a lot of people who didn't like the idea of not being able to physically see their employees working.

Neil Bardhan

Right! I like that I can walk around the office and see people at computers doing stuff and suspect that hopefully they're not just checking Facebook.  I super don't like the idea of them all being at home because on some level, to be a little ungenerous, I suspect they're trying to get away with something!

This goes even to like time-based work versus outcome-based work. It's sort of like, “I want you to tell me what you were doing with every hour of your day this week”.

David Dylan Thomas

Right!

Neil Bardhan

Truly, sometimes it comes down to minutes.

David Dylan Thomas

That sounds horrible!

Neil Bardhan

Not yet minutes.  At this moment, nobody's asking me for a minutes, but something that popped into my head a couple of times recently is the idea, the practice – call it what you will – of having smoke breaks for people who smoke cigarettes. 

A quick little story here is I had an internship for two summers in a row when I was a teenager. I was not a cigarette smoker at the time, never have been, but during my first internship I learnt that a bunch of my teammates would take a smoke break every – call it two hours – I don't actually remember anymore.

It was a time for them to connect, do a little gossip, do a little chit chat, whatever. It was clear that the smokers had a little clique to themselves, got certain things established between them, if not productively taken care of, and after maybe a month or so I happened to be out on a break once and my supervisor was out there with me. One of the teammates who didn't oversee me turned to him and said, “Hey, does it bug you that Neil, your intern, is out here on smoke breaks, but not smoking?”

Mike just shrugged because he said, “what do I care if he is getting the things done?”

That seems like one of those societal things that we've agreed as an acceptable excuse to subtract from your hours of productivity, if that's how you're supposed to measure things. Almost nobody's been clocking it ever I'm guessing.

Obviously, there's a lot of layers to this about tobacco use and blah, blah, blah, but I think of that now in terms of work from home where I'm like, okay, if I don't take a smoke break, but I take a laundry break, is that okay? Or is that unacceptable?

David Dylan Thomas

It's funny too, because I absolutely smoked and I absolutely took smoke breaks. Actually, my first job was at a record store by the way, when I was at the record store sometimes our smoke breaks, especially on the leaderships might not be cigarettes! But still, you know, and low stakes, we're not driving buses! Low stakes, someone’s covering the front.

I feel like a lot of these lessons…have you ever worked retail?

Neil Bardhan

I have not. 

David Dylan Thomas

Okay. Retail is an interesting space to talk about these things, because it is at this great intersection of old-school factory work where we get a lot, we inherit a lot of these time-based measures for productivity. Because no-one’s going to a farmer and saying, “Okay, how many hours did you clock?”, “When you get to the market, do you have anything to sell?” That's what we're measuring, right?

Sort of the somewhat looser kind of work we get to when we're actually in an office space where we're doing “knowledge” work, because it's all customer relations. 

I feel like if you do have the opportunity to work in retail in your life, you've learned so much about human behavior!

Neil Bardhan

Human behavior, exactly!

David Dylan Thomas

But it would never have occurred for two seconds to be like, “Oh, let me make sure I mark in my time sheet how much time…”. It's like, when did you get here? When did you leave? And honestly, at the end of the day, are we still selling records? 

Neil Bardhan:

Yeah. Did you clock in on time? Did you leave on time and did you sell records in between? There's a threshold of acceptability. If you had an eight-hour smoke break during your eight-hour shift, that’s not okay.

David Dylan Thomas

There's like inter-accountability because usually that smoke break is, “Hey, I'm going to go take a smoke break. Can you cover for me?” There's a little bit of community going on there too. It's not like I go to my boss and say, “Hey, I'm going to go take a smoke break.” He’s probably not even there. 

It’s interesting. So how did you have you come to a conclusion? How do you get work done?

Neil Bardhan

No, I don't have a conclusion and that's part of what has been so fun is looking at models, methods, philosophies – call it whatever you need to – about how to get work done or how to get work done best and wondering if I can kind of treat those like a buffet.

Every time I read one of these or hear about them, the one I was reading, Make Time, is the book that I was reading most recently, I looked at that and I said, this has something to it. I can't subscribe whole cloth to it for all sorts of reasons, but I'm interested in some of the things that they have to offer me. 

Let's bring those in. How do I integrate that with somebody who I haven't read, but have listened to a bit, Cal Newport and Deep Work. Are you familiar with this?

David Dylan Thomas

No, no.

Neil Bardhan

The gist of it is many of us knowledge workers need to get deep work done a couple hours, basically in a silo, no notifications, just head down, getting to the heart of the matter. To me, that's a great idea and I can do some of that, but his approach is a bit hard line sometimes it sounds like.  

It seems like he can say “40 hours a week. I get to set my schedule. Nobody has any demands on me”, I'm like, nobody schedules you into meetings that you don't want to go to go to Cal? I definitely have to go to meetings that are out of my control. I'm not saying I necessarily don’t want to go to them but different people have different possibilities within their environment. 

So, again, I like this idea of protecting some time for myself saying this is two hours where I'm going to do some research, do some notes organizing and so forth. I'm not saying I get to do that every day, certainly, but looking at my weekend, being able to say, oh, okay, I can block out Tuesday afternoon because that's light on meetings right now. If I go ahead and protect that from the jump or the week before, I'm more likely to be able to go into that mode that sounds so attractive to me and that importantly, I don't think I've ever put a name on before, but I've probably needed to do in various other roles in life that I've had.

David Dylan Thomas

Named what? The protected time?

Neil Bardhan

Named the protected time, yeah.

David Dylan Thomas

So, it sounds like you're almost taking like a mixed martial arts approach?

Neil Bardhan

Yeah, like a little bit of a Cal here, but then I mixed that with a little bit of this other guy…

David Dylan Thomas

We’ll call it MPA - mixed professional arts. 

Neil Bardhan 

There you go!

David Dylan Thomas

Now, I know that you've sort of moved from a freelance-ish role to a more permanent role. Did this investigation proceed that, or has moving to a more full-time role, sort of been like okay, now I’ve got to figure this out?

Neil Bardhan

It seems like they're tied, but that the investigation of how do I work has been ongoing for ages for me. It's just, maybe now it's ramped up a little bit in the past couple of months as I've thought about goals.

I have certain goals in this new role that I didn't have a year ago. How can I work towards those? When do I need to sit down and revisit? How many clients did I talk to this week? I should do that Friday afternoon, protect that time. How do I track that? How do I integrate this particular roles’ needs with other things that I'm trying to do in my day, in my life?

Email my accountant. Clean the kitchen. I have to-do lists galore, but are they the right to do lists? Should I be doing them all on paper? Leave the philosophy part of it out entirely and just look at the hardware and software in the most basic sense. I don't have any good answers, but I feel like I'm making progress on it. 

Luckily, I think I'm doing it at a time when lots of people are talking about it and so I have a wonderful world of things to check out and say, does this work for me or is this something that I just want to hear about and maybe I can turn it on for somebody else.

David Dylan Thomas

So, what's kind of at stake with this question, why is it important to answer, how do I work?

Neil Bardhan

I think some of it is what I was just saying about goals. If I have explicit measurable goals within my professional life, and I do now at a level that I didn't a year or three years ago, how do I get to those goals?

I don't believe that I can just fly by the seat of my pants as much as I have in the past. If I am supposed to track some of these metrics as I am on a weekly basis and not just like a quarterly basis, then I have to do things at the weekly basis on Friday afternoon, write to our team coordinator and say, “here's the following people that I reached out to this week.”

David Dylan Thomas

Right.

Neil Bardhan

I was also going to say, I think that some of this also relates to kind of the past two years, thinking about work-life balance. The joke I was saying for a while, which is true is in January of 2020, I was looking around at my situation and I said, you know, I think I'd like to spend more time in my home office.

David Dylan Thomas

It’s your fault!

Neil Bardhan

It’s my fault! But it raised the question over – certainly 2020 – how porous is the membrane between my life at home and my life at work? When do I stop? When do I close my computer for the day? There were periods, call it 2018, where I would have my laptop open until two o'clock in the morning.

I don't do that anymore. I have my phone open, Slack is open, but it's still a question of when do I do work and how do I get that done so that I can say I've done enough for the day? Or I need to stop for the day, or any number of ways to set a boundary and go on to making dinner, but not checking Slack.

David Dylan Thomas

Yeah. I hear some people do that!

Neil Bardhan

It’s funny, my interaction with social media, it's almost 100% limited to wait times. Like, I'm waiting for the coffee to get made, I’m waiting for the microwave to go off but it's a short enough time where it doesn’t make sense to just leave and come back.

These just very discrete moments which add up to probably your daily allowance of social media, but the one thing I actually never really do is say, “I am going to sit down deliberately to check Slack. I am going to sit down deliberately to check Facebook.” No, it's there for when I get bored. That's its purpose.

So, I've been very active on Twitter for a very long time now, 14 years or so, early Twitter and I've gone through many phases of my relationship with it. There were periods where I was managing seven to eight different brands on Twitter, 24 hours a day. That was bad for me. Then this December, and I'll drop his name in here because truly he did inspire me, Cal Newport, dropped a newsletter and he said, “Take a break from Twitter in January folks, you can do it.” And I thought, yeah, I can do dry January, but for tweets, and I have.  

I'll admit I've checked in on some DM’S twice because I knew that something was waiting for me in particular there, but I haven't scrolled Twitter since New Year's Eve. 

David Dylan Thomas

How has that been? 

Neil Bardhan

Amazing! I can read and write and think again!

David Dylan Thomas

Let me ask you this. Are you going back?

Neil Bardhan

I will.

David Dylan Thomas

Okay, can you can just unpack this for me because I feel it too. The number of people, I did a similar thing with Facebook, not too long ago where I greatly limited, downshifted, turned off notifications, all that stuff. I never completely, and yes, it was better, but I hear that so many times people are like, oh, I took a month off from this or a year off and I felt so much better, but then they go back. From your experience, unpack that for me a little bit. What is the benefit of being away, but then what is the benefit of going back?

Neil Bardhan

So, the benefit of being away is reevaluating what it does and doesn't do for me. I get that distance and time to think about it. I didn't always give myself time to think about is Twitter serving me? Do I enjoy this? When I’m four threads deep into some fighty discourse of any given Tuesday in a sub-sub-sub field that I don't work in I don't actually care about. I barely know the players. I just get excited by information and gossip! I don't need to do that as much.

It was harder to pull myself back from that when I was actively using Twitter regularly because for so many reasons, it's harder to filter, it's harder to stop. Now I think of it as, okay, I want to be able to dip in, see what the quick conversation is, see if there's any messages for me and then run away.

I want to use it for one comparison, like LinkedIn. I don't sit around LinkedIn clicking, clicking, clicking, reading, reading, reading. I say, anybody reached out to me? Anybody I love go get a new job that I need to know about because they might not tell me until three months later? Okay, cool. We're done for the day. It’s minutes, it's like waiting at the microwave for you, right?

David Dylan Thomas

It's funny though, because LinkedIn, I have found in that time because like I said, I'm going through a similar thing where all like I'm getting away from Facebook, but then starting to gravitate back. LinkedIn was sort of what I replaced it with in terms of idle time. LinkedIn is getting so – like gossipy, isn't the right word, but emotional – there is so much drama on LinkedIn now. 

I'm getting a lot of, hey, this is how I am showing up to work and pictures of people with, you know, black hair, or whatever their culture is. Being like, “see right here, me in the city, this is professional. Fuck you.”

It's a mix of that and a mix of just like what if we dismantled capitalism? In LinkedIn! I am getting thread after thread of this stuff. I don't know if it's who I subscribe to – because I have way more friends than I should on LinkedIn.

Neil Bardhan

Who are these people, I wonder sometimes?

David Dylan Thomas

It’s sort of like, whoa, LinkedIn is getting more socialist than Facebook right now and I'm loving it, but it's like what is going on?

Neil Bardhan

Yeah. The other comparison that I've thought about it is my mailbox. My physical USPS mailbox. I don't need to stand at that all day long!

David Dylan Thomas

Although to be fair, a new piece of mail isn't being put in every two seconds.

Neil Bardhan

That's true. That's true! But it might be!!

David Dylan Thomas

Actually, there's something to that. Like what if we created a social media site that acted like the mail, where there was a defined time every day, new stuff showed up and you go and you see it. You know you've seen all there is to see. And then tomorrow you come back.

I think that's part of the success of Wordle is there's one a day and when you're done, go do something else. You don't need to come back to Wordle until tomorrow.

Neil Bardhan

Yeah. Part of my email inbox is like this. I use unroll me for digests.

David Dylan Thomas

What is that?

Neil Bardhan

There are privacy concerns. Let's layer that on top of this, of course, but it's the internet, so of course there are. 

The majority of subscription emails I get, whether it's a notice from Twitter that I have a DM waiting for me, or there's a sale at L.L. Bean or there's somebody who searched for me on LinkedIn or, my favorite bagel shop has a sale.

Those all get filtered through the software that almost immediately archives them from my inbox when they come in. The way I have it set up is the following morning I get a digest. So around 8:00 AM every day, I know that my digest shows up and I look, and I see 10 or 50 or whatever it is, emails from the previous day, almost none of which were time sensitive. 

The rare thing is there's a 12-hour sale – very rare – but by and large, “we've hired somebody new and it's exciting”, or, “let us tell you about this new product.” I don't need all those immediately. Seeing one message instead of 100 a day – and when it deals with hundreds of different subscriptions for me, again, it adds up over time. I see many fewer emails in my inbox across a week or month and I just sweat it less. 

David Dylan Thomas

Well, and I think this kind of ties back to the how we work thing, right? Because there are very few situations in our line of work. There's a handful of lines of work where urgency is common. So, firefighters, people who work in emergency medical services. Urgency is routine. Most jobs, like a guy who goes out and gives talks. You're a person who works with non-profits or whatever. There was rarely a story-telling emergency. There was rarely a workshop emergency. But our means of communication connote emergency, connote urgency. We get it instantly and we get it pop up on our screen as if it were breaking news. And I feel like that's confusing us.

Neil Bardhan

That's exactly it. It's very confusing and getting back to the idea of how do the people around me work? It raises these questions of what should be in a meeting versus an email. Classic, you know, this meeting could have been an email and vice versa. Sending an email costs nothing. 

Here's the difference between this and the, the USPS mailbox. If it costs you 29 cents to send an email, I realized that's probably not what a first-class stamp costs anymore, if it costs you 29 cents to send an email, you would do it a hell of a lot less. 

David Dylan Thomas

Oh my God! I can't even imagine, okay, this is for all of our listeners. I want you to act as if it costs 29 cents to send an email. I want you to act like that for a week, and I want you to keep track of how many emails. It's almost like an email chart. Put a quarter in every time, although I like 29 cents because it's a much more annoying amount of money.

Neil Bardhan

That's a very irritating number, but it was back in the day!

David Dylan Thomas

I want you to keep track of how many emails you send and find out how much it would have cost you and see if it changes your behavior. Even if you don't ever actually have to pay it. Just the idea of the effort of writing down that I spent 29 cents. I want you to try this out for a week and tell us how it was for you, because that fascinates me.

It's funny because I found out where Blockchain came from. My understanding is that Blockchain started as an attempt to make emails cost money, but to reduce spam. Because it costs nothing to send an email, so I can send emails to a billion people and hope that one of them is stupid enough to click on my attachment.

Blockchain basically said, Hey, before you send that email, you need to figure out this really complicated algorithm or a complicated math problem. Okay. You did that. Okay, fine. Now you can send the email. 

If you tried to do a million of those all of a sudden spam isn't fun anymore. That then grew into this whole distributed ledger, blah, blah, blah and now we're just where we are. But it's funny to me that it started out as an attempt to reduce spam.

Neil Bardhan

Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas

So, getting back to this notion of how do you work? Part of it is like you said, I have certain metrics I need to meet in the week. What is your filter for “I like working this way.” Is there something in what you value that's also driving “I want to do it this way. I want to do it that way” beyond just the logistical, “Oh. That won’t work with my schedule”?

Neil Bardhan

Yeah, I value not having anxiety. This is one of these flippant, but dead serious...where I've realized that the way I work often has led me to anxiety on all sorts of levels over the past, however many decades of my adult life, and you know what doesn't serve me? That. And has it been actively destructive sometimes to my enjoyment and or productivity and or relationships? Absolutely.

So, if I can steer away from that or steer into it for that matter, when that becomes useful, by all means, let's do that. Let's be aware of my own limitations and tendencies and behave accordingly. 

The joy of so much of this kind of work, this knowledge work, is nobody's standing watching over me, moving my arms in a way that is like, this is how I move the tractor to move the things around the field or anything like that. I do have a lot of freedom. I might as well find a way that feels good to me and feels like it's the best move for myself as a human, the best moment for myself as a professional person, the best moment for myself as a teammate, as a partner, as all these things. Let's do that. 

The sky's kind of the limit and I think we've seen this in so many different ways, sometimes in disordered ways, where people are like, “Look, I'm going to work 80 hours a week because I can.” Well, you can do that, but is that good for your innards? I doubt it! Or is that good for your brain? You're going to burn out in a couple of weeks. 

David Dylan Thomas

It’s good for capitalism, Neil.

Neil Bardhan

It’s good for capitalism, thank you, I always forget!! That old guy!

David Dylan Thomas

Capitalism's greatest trick was to make you think it was socialism.

Neil Bardhan

Even a lot of the people working 80 hours a week, they weren't necessarily earning 80 hours a week. They’re serving the idea of capitalism.

David Dylan Thomas

Very likely the opposite!

Neil Bardhan

So yeah, I need to do it for my own health basically. I need to be able to say I'm working this way so that I can be working either in this role or whatever I want to do next, in two years, five years, two months sometimes.

David Dylan Thomas

Was this something – it's going to sound like a weird question, but sadly it isn't – did you always value your health or did you have an aha moment where you're like, oh right, my health is more important than whatever bottom line my clients or bosses have set down?

Neil Bardhan

No, I did not always value my health. Going back to that period where I was managing a bunch of social media brands, I certainly wasn't getting compensated at the level that it made sense to be working until two o'clock in the morning writing tweets. Nobody should be writing tweets until two o'clock in the morning unless they really want to, but I felt compelled to, because I thought I have to go way above and beyond to prove to everybody how good I am at all of this. Really what I was doing was depleting my own energy resources and shifting my own relationships as a result of it.

David Dylan Thomas

II you don't mind sharing, what was your journey like to, “Oh wait, maybe this isn't the best way”?

Neil Bardhan

I think it was all sorts of pieces along the journey. It was realizing that I was up late when I didn't necessarily want to be and nobody was expecting to be. It was getting dragged into drama with people I cared about over things that were really quite inconsequential, but I felt like they had a lot of value. It was when I stepped back and said, “oh, this doesn't matter.” We both need to divest from the situation a little bit.

Some of it was also saying that some of these people that I'm working for don't have my best interests at their core and so I can delete them from my life and readjust everything that I'm doing. That was healthy too for me. It took me longer than I wished it had, but it was part of the journey of saying what do I value getting paid what I'm worth? 

David Dylan Thomas

I had a similar journey and for me, a lot of it was sort of trial and error on what I valued. It's sort of like, oh, I have the opportunity through this agency to work with a super big-name company that I admire.

And then you get in and you find out, oh, that was one of the worst engagements I've ever had. What was I really hoping to get out of it? What was actually there? Then reevaluating and then having this other engagement with some company I'd never heard of, but the people were awesome.

That's been my journey, honestly. My work journey is very much a journey of going from thinking about the name, oh, if only I could work there, they look awesome. If I worked there, everything would be awesome, to the people. It's like this person I am working with, this relationship. It’s geared toward this relationship is awesome. How do I get more of that? 

Then it filters how you look for work to going from, this is a really prestigious company that's going to pay me a lot of money, to that person is awesome. If I get the chance to work with that person, I am working with that person. If don't care if they're an industry I couldn’t care less about.

Neil Bardhan

Yeah, I've definitely had this experience a couple of times, fairly recently for some people where I looked at how I talked to them, how we emailed, how we got things done. I said, Okay. There are certain people where I will do all sorts of things to be able to keep working with them. Maybe we're not even working in the same organization, but I just think let's keep this going, see what it could be together. Maybe it doesn't need to be under such and such an umbrella, but they are really great people out there and when you find that you can click with them, it's great.

And, you know, on the flip side, there are wonderful people who I've worked with, who we haven't worked well together. This is also valuable. It’s saying, “I think you're talented. I think you're special. I love being friends with you. I've loved being colleagues and we are not going to work directly on projects anymore”, and that's also been very informative.

David Dylan Thomas

I can definitely picture people that sitting down and having a drink with is awesome. Trying to have a working relationship. It's like, we do not work together. That is not the right context for us.

Neil Bardhan

Yeah, and I think that's kind of a modern privilege. In the seventies or eighties, most people didn't get to do that very often probably. But you and I, and many of our pals have had a little bit more mobility and flexibility and allowance to just say, this is not working for me. We’ve got to go in a different direction.

David Dylan Thomas

I mean, honestly, it feels more like being an artist than being an industrial worker. You talk about different artists collaborating and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but they might still be friends. But that level of choice, that level of power to put a name on it, it feels more like an artist's life necessarily than a “worker's” life.

Neil Bardhan

Correct. Yeah, you have some agency as the human collaborator and that is a ton of power.

David Dylan Thomas

Something that I feel like this conversation begs is a bit of defining work, because we talked before about choosing at what point I close the laptop. That feels like a very final, I’ve shifted from work time to not work time. 

So, my journey has been interesting because I recently at the beginning of last year, went from working a full-time job to being completely freelance. Now I give talks and I do workshops and that's my income. That particular role means that my time is very free.

The only times where I'm super limited is I am in fact, now giving this talk, I am giving this workshop or I'm having a meeting about giving that talk or workshop. Other than that, it kind of doesn't matter whether at any given moment I'm doing laundry or playing with my son, if I'm answering you most at 11:00 PM or 11:00 AM, if I'm sleeping until 11:00 AM, the outcome is the same.

I'm giving the talk at this time or the workshop at that time. What's been interesting is kind of not caring, for lack of a better word, what is work time or not work time and perfect because I don't have to write it down.

That, I’ve got to say, is the best thing about being freelance, it's not having to fill out a time sheet, but I don't have to keep track of that. I just have to keep track of, did I get paid? Did I show up at the thing? That's what I need to keep track of but again, it's very time fluid and so there is no closing the laptop but there's also no opening the laptop. I've had that be a very fuzzy thing for me and I'm wondering if you're thinking about well, is that instance of activity, work? Does it matter? I’m curious how you’ve been thinking about that?

Neil Bardhan

I would say I have fuzzy, less fuzzy and clear versions of this.  Let’s say a clear version of something is am I in a meeting or am washing the dishes and only thinking about dishes?

I'm never just thinking about the dishes. I'm very unhelpful that way. Fuzzy things are the, I'm listening to a podcast interview and it sparks something for me, or I'm getting something out of it personally, but also it gives me something to talk about at work the next day, or I say, oh, that's somebody I should track down and share with my colleagues or any number of things.

Then how do I call it clear, fuzzy and less fuzzy? Maybe the, the less fuzzy ones are those moments of, yes, maybe I'm not actively engaging in content or an activity, but it comes to mind while I'm scrubbing the shower tiles but what I'm really doing is thinking about a curriculum that I'm developing.

That to me, I don't really classify as work, but there are days when I look back and I say, okay, maybe I didn't do laptop work all day and maybe I didn't do podcast listing work, but I was absolutely spending time doing thinking work. That has value too and recognizing that that is okay, or it can be part of how I see my workday, has been really useful.

David Dylan Thomas

Well, it's interesting because as you described those activities, I began to think a lot about how increasingly – and this for me, it's personally always been the goal – increasingly our job has been to be ourselves. I am not hiring you to drive a car in a such a way that well, as long as there's a body driving that car, it happens to be you, versus no, the way you drive that car is unique. I need you, you personally driving a car and I want to pay a premium for it to be you driving that car. 

So that notion of, well, all the things that make me, me, and then that make me drive the car that way, are things that I'm experiencing all the time. What is an “hourly rate” look like if I’m me every hour of every day. How do we think about those identity jobs?

Neil Bardhan

Yeah, it's interesting. What comes to mind for me specifically because of your car example, but then let's move away from that, there’s chauffeurs and then there's NASCAR drivers. That leads me to think about athletes where they carry the ball a certain way. They can run a certain way. Am I comparing myself to an NBA star? Yes and no.  I know very little about the NBA.

David Dylan Thomas

I was just going to say, you’re the LeBron of storytelling.

Neil Bardhan

Ah, you're very sweet! But, yeah, I've developed a way of working, a way of thinking, a network of people that I can turn to and a body of literature that is running around inside my noggin and or at my fingertips. So yeah, these days, I like to believe that I'm hired for all of this.  Maybe it's not as authentic of myself as I could be, because I do more spreadsheets than my authentic self loves, but there's a lot there that you're hiring Neil Bardhan thinker and guy and human with a heart and mind, not just Neil Bardhan guy who can do spreadsheets and emails good.

David Dylan Thomas

Yeah. And this again is kind of where I'm like pushing back on work time versus not work time, because I'm always me. There was an incident where it was clear a client was wanting to be on a project, basically because I'm black. What I really wanted to say was, “Okay, well, I charged by the hour, and on Saturday I was black for 24 hours, on Sunday I was black for another 24 hours and here's the bill. That’s how it’s going to be.”

But it is right this notion of – I'll tell you part of the reason I've been thinking about this is I am working on a screenplay. I eventually want to make it into a movie and I'm thinking deeply now about what it means to hire equitably and to pay equitably on a film set, which notoriously has been one of the most inequitable places you can find in work.

I think about things like, okay, what would it look like to pay everyone $100,000 to work on the movie. I don't care if you're the lead actor or if you are doing the catering. We're all getting the same amount. 

On the one hand, I love the idea of that, but at the same time, if I were the lead actor and some extra was working on the thing for two hours and was getting paid the same as me, I'd be like, that feels unfair.

So, then I think, oh, well, what if it was based on everyone gets the same hourly rate, but I know from experience based on a lot of the conversations we've had, that is also a pitfall because it's sort of like, okay, am I paying them for the time they're on the set? While the actors prepare, am I paying them?

If they were in the shower thinking about their role and had this great insight that changed the performance, do they have to write that down in a log and then I get to pay it?

They’re extremes obviously, but it is an interesting question, especially if you're looking to be fair versus just get the best deal.

Neil Bardhan

And so many things have just been, let's just get the best deal and don’t worry about anything about justice and equality, unless later on if people raise a stink about it. 

David Dylan Thomas

Exactly. It’s sort of like, okay, if you complain, I'll figure out a way to make a “bonus” and it will go away. Or if you complain, I’ll wield my power and say, yeah, I'll get somebody else to do it because there's always somebody willing to do it for free. 

David Dylan Thomas

I was that guy, by the way, in the early, in the early aughts, who was sort of like, oh, I can write for your blog for recognition. Where do I sign?

Neil Bardhan

Eight, nine years ago when I was starting a career transition, trying to figure out how to spend my time, and I was happy to just be engaging with people and figuring out if any of it was worth it. When really, I was giving away a lot of very valuable resources and time and effort – and shame on me, but also shame on many other people.

David Dylan Thomas

Yeah, so how do you think about that? Because I know going freelance my big issues was figuring out pricing. How much do I charge for being me? And what is the market willing to bear? How have you thought about defining your value, and sort of what you think you are worth or what your effort is worth?

Neil Bardhan

I think when I've been freelance before, and even now when I kind of write my time into budgets for projects that are multiple organizations, there's a fluidity of – we just call it prep time, right? It's five hours of prep time that's required. 

I'm never going to write down which minutes it was, I'm just going to say, look, let's approximate that it's going to take me five hours of dish-doing and tile-scrubbing and reading some tweets about it and that'll kind of slop in and that if you have enough of that, it adds up nicely to feel compensated for what you're being.

Other times, and I've done this again, kind of largely in the freelance role, but again at times now, I get to say, look, I am an expert in certain things and you have your choice off the menu. You can have me at this rate or we can bring in somebody else who maybe it doesn't have the experience or doesn't have the same interest that I do. And maybe that's a better fit for your budget. 

That's really what it is sometimes. Often people are not actually looking for the best cultural and thought fit. They're looking for the budget fit. I think more people need to be clear about that because they can say, “we really want you” all they want, but if they can't pay for you, then they don't really want you that badly.

David Dylan Thomas

Do you ever negotiate?

Neil Bardhan

It's been a while, but I've done it before.

David Dylan Thomas

I ask, because I know that's also something and again, on both sides of this, something people aren't very comfortable with, especially women and people of color. I didn't negotiate until my very most recent and last actual job, like full-time job and when I did, I was terrified.

It is this weird kind of on the one hand, the journey to equality is always a mix of fitting into the existing inequalities and getting comfortable with them, while also trying to change this with the inequalities. 

So, on the one hand, I'm like, okay, it's important for people of color and women to get good at negotiating. On the other hand, maybe you should just post the damn salary and maybe we should enforce that.

I'm going to shout out Content + UX Slack which is this amazing online community where if you want to post a job in their Slack, you have to say how much it pays. 

Neil Bardhan

That's great!

David Dylan Thomas

It creates this great pressure where, because they have a lot of great talent there, if you know some big company wants to post a job there but doesn't want to reveal the salary, they are missing out now on some great UX talent and it creates this wonderful leverage. 

So, acknowledging that on the one hand, maybe the practices should change. It's also this flip side of in the interim, how good do we need to get it playing the game?

Neil Bardhan

Yeah, I think a lot about a particular negotiation situation I was in five, six years ago, where for lack of a better word, I failed.  I asked for a particular quote for, you know, “I'll take care of this every month for you.” I think I said 600 bucks a month. It wasn't about time; it was just an estimate of 600 bucks for the little project thing. 

The person immediately said, “I can't do that, but I can do 500 for you.” I said, “That's fine” and then a week later they said, “I'm so sorry, I can do 400”.  I said, “Do you know what? I'll take that into account and just do it at the 400 level, not at the 500 or 600 level of intensity that I intended.” But sure enough, scope creep, scope, creep.

All of a sudden, I was always worth way more than the 600 even and I took the 400 and now I'm in a real pickle because I've shown that I'm willing to do a lot at that 400 level and that's not okay. 

That stings still, and I think from what I know of the other person involved, I bet he hasn't lost any sleep over it.

David Dylan Thomas

Yeah! There is this power struggle and the thing I don't like about that, and I don't know if there's a fix per se, but it starts off at business relationship, whether it's client, vendor, or whether it's employer, employee, it starts it off in an adversarial nature. Each of you is trying to get one up on the other, and that is a terrible way to begin a relationship, whether it's a relationship or a relationship-relationship.

That is a horrible starting point because however that turns out the rest of that relationship, there is somewhere back there, the shadow of that person got one over on me. And if I had been a better negotiator, I could've gotten one over on them. That is always going to be somewhere back there for at least one of those people.

Neil Bardhan

Yeah, and honestly, probably both. It's a dangerous wielding of power. Maybe this person did think at some point for a little while, “No, Neil had asked for a bit more. I wonder if I've hosed myself by not compensating for what I know would be good or what I know would be better for all of us?”

Dangerous is the best word for it, which sounds very scary, but I think it's true. For these relationships it's dangerous. Maybe not for the work or actually living humans, but it's not a good place to be because everybody could have been a little more plain and honestly, kind, about it going in.

David Dylan Thomas

Kindness is a good word and it doesn't pair well with capitalism per se. But, I think that that as an almost – I like to think of that almost when we're answering, how do we work, are we kind in the way that we work, both to others and to ourselves? That, I think, would be a fantastic kind of load stone for making those things.

Neil Bardhan

I think it would change things for a lot of people.

David Dylan Thomas

One last topic I kind of want to touch on before we close out today. So, emotional labor is another thing that we don't value, but that is definitely labor. Sometimes way more labor than the labor-labor. I wonder if in your journeys, I know in mine this has come up, and in your journeys if you've had thoughts about how do you charge for it? How do you quantify it? Do you quantify it? Do you try? How do you think about it in your how to work journey?

Neil Bardhan

Possibly a word for it that you just used is adversarial. It becomes something that – and this isn't kind, but I'm working on it - it becomes something where I say to myself, “Oh, I did that emotional labor for you last week. Screw you. Now you're losing out on hours of my labor-labor, because I've decided that that hour long conversation I had to have with you is worth the same amount.”

Then you're going to be pissy that I didn't make that widget happen last week or this week. But in my heart, I get to say, “that's on you,” because I had to do emotional labor that honestly I shouldn't have had to do. 

Again, it's not great, but I think it's very hard to negotiate certainly beforehand. Imagine drawing up a contract?!

David Dylan Thomas

I'm seeing the contract. If a third-party can agree that you or I are being an asshole, we will Institute the asshole tax and a multiplier for whatever. I would love to see that on a contract!

Neil Bardhan

Oh yeah. Oh yeah! Sometimes in a practical sense, I slot that into those hours of prep that I do for sure, or consulting time that is not otherwise specified.

It becomes much trickier, sticky, or worse – use your word of choice here – when it's like, I'm going to do three hours of meetings with you or three hours of coaching or whatever you call it and I don't add in the extra layer of, ok things might have some awkwardness that we need to work through as well. 

That was on me as a freelancer and that's on other people as clients as well, where they should say, “we recognize that you're going to need some other time that isn't just these specific meetings, but that you're going to need even meetings around meetings.”

Sometimes people need to be able to look at a project and say, “yes, I'm hiring you to do five hours of work, but you'll also end up probably in two other hours of meetings in between those five hours, because that's just how it works sometimes.” 

Many clients don't do that. They just say, “we're paying you for the hour.”  Pay me for the hour meeting too! That's also my day and that's also me not getting to watch Netflix or pet dogs or whatever I'd rather be doing. That's me doing my job, and I'm not even doing my job, I'm telling you about doing my job, which is almost more important.

David Dylan Thomas

The amount of products where I've had to put in prep time to presenting the work versus the amount of time of actually doing the work, the ratio is almost at minimum 50:50, but usually like 70:30 or something like that. 

Again, I would sort of love to have that kickoff meeting where they're like, “Oh, you're going to have to deal with Bob in accounting for this one, so we're going to pay a little extra for this one.”

Neil, thank you so much. This has been an amazing discussion of work. I'm glad that's what you were thinking about, so thank you for being here.

Neil Bardhan

Thanks for having me, a real pleasure to get to talk to you in real time for the first time in far too long!

David Dylan Thomas

Yeah, it's been a minute!

So for “Lately, I've been thinking about…”, I'm David Dylan Thomas, and we will see you next time. Thanks!