Communities of Practice in the Age of Immediacy - Adventures in Advising

In this experimental solo adventure, Ryan slips out of the usual interview cockpit and takes us on a narrative ride through meme history, advising philosophy, and the warp-speed culture tugging at all of us. What begins with Sweet Brown’s iconic “Ain’t nobody got time for that!” unfurls into a thoughtful exploration of how academic advisors navigate immediacy, burnout breezes, and the dream of true community in a profession built on quick turns and quicker expectations.

Ryan digs into pop culture as public pedagogy, communities of practice that don’t always behave like communities, and the yearning to slow the academic hamster wheel without grinding it to dust. You’ll hear scholarly breadcrumbs, conference echoes, and a few philosophical lanterns lighting the way through modern advising life.

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Transcript

Ryan Scheckel  
Well, hello there. Welcome to what might be an unusual episode of the Adventures in Advising podcast. My name is Ryan Scheckel and flying solo in an experimental sort of way. One of the things I love about working with Matt is that he's he's always up to try something new. And one of the things he suggested was maybe a little bit more of a individual sort of video essay kind of format, doing a presentation that I gave at the annual conference 2025 for NACADA in Las Vegas this past year. And, and, yeah, I thought I'd give it a try. So you know, this is going to be a little bit different, not guests, not questions, just exploring possible ideas, which is always something that I'm down for as well. So appreciate you listening in or maybe watching wherever you are and and and giving this a try, let us know what you think. You know. We certainly are open to our feedback from our audience, and we'd love to know more what you think about these sorts of things. So you know, the annual conference and any sort of gathering of professionals is an opportunity to revisit some themes or some ideas, a chance to reconsider how we do what we are doing and and I was grateful for the opportunity to do so more directly with two specific points of reference that we'll talk about during this presentation. But over the years, since I first talked about them and was conducting my research around these topics, I've really come to embrace the value of popular culture, not just for the fun that we can have, but using popular culture as sort of a an entry point, what some scholars refer to as public pedagogy, and we'll talk more about that and and the the video that you see if you're watching a newscast in Oklahoma from a few years back. I'll give you all the specifics later, but it's one you might be familiar with. The title of the presentation draws directly from a line from this video, "Ain't Nobody Got Time for That." I added the subtitle, how to build community within a culture of immediacy. But I wanted to start by playing the video. That's the way I started things in Las Vegas, in the room where it happened, the presentation there began with, I think the thing that maybe people were most familiar with, and I think that's a good way to start. So we're going to watch the video first, or listen to it, and then we'll come back and we'll talk through the specifics of the presentation.

Voice from video  
One resident describes her horrifying experience when she first realized the complex was on fire. Well, I woke up to go get me a cold pop. Then I thought somebody was barbecuing. I said, Oh, Lord, Jesus, it's a fire. Then I ran out. I didn't grab no shoes or nothing, Jesus, I ran for my life, and then the smoke got me. I got bronchitis. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Voice from video  
According to the apartment manager, the fire started in a woman's home who is a wheelchair bound. She was treated for smoke inhalation at a local hospital. There were no other reports of injuries. The Red Cross is helping those families displaced by the fire. 

Ryan Scheckel  
So if you're not familiar with eight, nobody got time for that, the the video that we just played, listened to, turned into a meme, and it's something that stuck with me. It was always in the back of my mind. And when we had the chance to submit proposals for the annual conference for 2025 and I was looking to pull these other concepts back together. This just really resonated with me, just like it did back then, and so one of the things that I do in most of my presentations is give a little bit of context of where I'm coming from longtime listeners of the podcast will be familiar with some of these things, but I talk about my advising background, working with undecided and undeclared students, starting in 2002 and moving into the School of Art, from working with exploratory students first and then into the degree plan space, definitely inform the way that I think about academic advising. And it's important to note that the experiences we have, the students that we work with, the context that we do so shape the way we consider our work. And I'm grateful for my path, but it might be different than yours. Now I'm the administrator for our pre health advising office at Texas Tech University. I work with the. Team of six full time primary role pre health advisors. And you know that transition point in my life, both professionally and personally, is where a lot of the topics that we'll be talking about in this presentation came from. For a while, I was chair of the theory philosophy and history of advising community in Nakata, and taking that perspective on the work that we do was a deliberate choice. I spent a lot of time trying to find a home, as it were, in academic advising, and you know, it wasn't necessarily my discipline or the majors or student academic areas that I was working in, it wasn't necessarily a type of student. It was more about the big questions and the more thoughtful ways of considering academic advising that really resonated with me, but my time connecting with folks from around the world talking about academic advising through this podcast and and the many other ways that I've gotten to do that definitely have shaped my understanding of of the work that we do. And every time I have a chance to see academic advising from a new perspective, I am so grateful for it. The agenda for the the presentation is pretty brief, but really dense. Like I said, we'll talk about the video. Her name was Sweet Brown as how she introduced herself. I'll tell you more about her and this idea of popular media and pop culture as a public pedagogy. We'll talk about the theme of communities of practice and how academic advising is maybe not the most fertile soil. And then we'll talk about the concept of slow advising and dealing with the pressures of immediacy. Communities of practice and slow advising were both topics that I was interested in prior to the pandemic, prior to moving into my administrative role, and it was specifically the sweet brown video and the annual conference in 2025 for NACADA that gave me a chance to revisit these topics. So if you're wondering about my sources, I will talk about, know your meme.com, at length with anyone who would like, anytime I'm like, Where? Where is that coming from? What is that thing on the internet? What's the reference? What's the joke? How did, how do we get to this version of it? Know, your meme.com is a big help. And there aren't many sources where you can find your answer. But usually Wikipedia there you can usually track things down there, and those are where I started my search. But the person in the video, while she introduced herself as Sweet Brown. Her name is Kimberly Wilkins and and she is from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, here in the United States. It was recorded in April of 2012 and you know, there's a bunch of people who have thoughts about the way audiences engage with it. Dr. Charles E. Williams II specifically, has an article where he talks about being asked to comment on this video. And you know, he was reflecting on his experience as a black man with the people being interviewed in the videos, and then sort of the cultural virality of the videos, the different ways that people interacted with the folks in those videos, And and he talks about how he declined to be interviewed about those videos, primarily because he knew what his pressures would be, that there are people who we work with on a daily basis who are in academic advising and higher education settings, and of course, beyond those settings, who constantly have to code switch. They have to be mindful of the way that they're speaking and the words that they choose and and the way that they sound to other audiences. And one of the things that Dr. Williams mentions in his article is just how authentically comfortable Kimberly Wilkins sweet brown seems in this video, and the the joy that he took in listening to someone who didn't feel like they had the code switch, and the context that that provided for him and how different it was for other audiences myself, you know, the phrase ain't, nobody got time for that is just so real, even though it's got this upward sort of laugh at the heart of it. It's something that I've experienced, and I know that I am at times in spaces, and have been in spaces where I couldn't say it that way. I couldn't be that honest. I didn't feel like it was professionally advantageous, or that I had the kind of flexibility to just say the way it felt, or say it in a way that was authentic. And so, you know, I want to be very clear by using this video, I want to acknowledge its context, that it wasn't just a funny video, it wasn't just a viral moment, it wasn't just something in popular media that's a real person experiencing a real thing, and we, I think, in some ways, respond to it on that human level, because of how real it is, and how much we often feel like it would be helpful if we could speak that truthfully. So at the core of this launching point is jumping off point, this amazing sound bite that went on to be a song and so many other interviews. I mean, you can find the interviews online. It's not hard. If you just search sweet brown on YouTube, you will find them all. But it's important to note that there's more than just the funny sound bite. In fact, in the back of the video, there is a young man sort of pacing, and that's that's her son, and they had asked to interview him first, but Kimberly specifically wanted to talk, and he was worried. He was worried what she was going to say. He knew the type of person she was and and how she spoke her mind and, and he was worried that she wouldn't say it in a way that might come across as positively as he would hoped, and certainly, if you watch any of their later, subsequent videos and and interviews, you know they've definitely come to terms with the 15 minutes of fame, so to speak, that it bought them. But but in reality, there are other people in our lives who are worried about the way that we're representing ourselves, and maybe we have a colleague or someone that you're worried how they're going to speak up, they may say something that isn't in the right code for that setting. And those are all things that we should consider, the types of expectations and pressures and frameworks that we throw at other people that aren't always as helpful and productive if you have a chance, though, if you get your 15 minutes, you know the question is, are you going to make the most of it? Certainly, we have some examples that we can draw from, and I think Sweet Brown's approach is worth learning from as well.

Ryan Scheckel  
If you're curious about this idea of popular media or pop culture as public pedagogy as a legitimate scholarly base to operate from, I want to draw your attention to some publications. There's there's so many more out there, but if you start with Guro and Simon from 1989 it's called Popular Culture, schooling and everyday life. Hayes from 2010 popular culture is public pedagogy. And then Sandlin et al, 2011 mapping the complexity of public pedagogy scholarship from 1894 to 2010 there's tons, but if you start with those, you will find that sort of pocket of scholarship over the years, especially in my partnership with with Matt, I've really come to appreciate that starting point that we can all gather around a common place, something that's understood and known and that is legitimate, that is legitimate scholarship, from the perspective of not only these scholars, but the idea of boyer's four different realms of scholarship, one of them being a scholarship of synthesis, you know, taking two scholarly concepts and sort of mashing them up. Well, it's important to note that there are people who are doing the work and have done the work to say that pop culture is just as a legitimate point to start from, as any other points that you might choose to start from, as I mentioned, though, before becoming an advising administrator in 2015 as we are moving through that experience, I was personally and my team was learning what it was like to have someone who used to advise now being an advising administrator. One of the concepts that kept coming up in scholarship and articles and chapters that I was reading was this idea of communities of practice and how they were being promoted as a sort of highest level formation of a grouping of people. And I was curious, for those who know me, I love to collect ideas and track things down and where they came from. I was wondering where this idea of communities of practice came from. So I started looking into it. And Jean lave was a sociologist. Etienne Wenger was sort of educational scientist, specifically information or data transmission, looking at the way that people learn. And they collaborated on a book in 1991 called situated learning. That's really the first entry in the scholarship and the literature the concept of communities of practice. Since then, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger have sort of gone different ways. They're no longer a scholarship or research partnership, but Etienne Wenger has continued with the communities of practice concept, developing it in multiple ways. Hildreth and Kimball in 2004 sort of detail how the concept of communities of practice changed in the decade or so since its introduction in the scholarship. And I think it's important to know that it changed a lot in in just those 10 years or so. And so you can find their article talking about the first decade of how communities of practice really evolved in its first 10 years in the scholarship is as people were testing the concept, making sure it made sense, and adding to our understanding of it. One of the articles that I came across though in my search for understanding of communities of practice was Cox in 2005 where he reviews how the concept has been adopted and sort of reinterpreted in other settings. And I think that's the point that really resonated with me is in his article, the framework that he provides on the conditions that really undermine the development of communities of practice, which we'll spend some more time on in this in this presentation. But if you're looking for an easy way to understand what communities of practice are, Etienne Wenger and his now wife, have a consulting company and have developed communities of practice into a product. And on their website, they define it. Define communities of practice as groups of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. I've added emphasis on the slide if you're viewing this one and and the idea that groups of people who share a concern or passion for something they do, learning how to do it better as they interact regularly is pretty watered down, pretty general. I think a lot of people can fit under that umbrella, especially compared to the characteristics that lave and banger talked about in their 1991 book. In particular, there is this concept of legitimate peripheral participation, the idea that in a lot of communities of practice, especially in the sociological or anthropology anthropological sense that there were sort of apprentices and masters, and that the apprentices, the people who were learning, were legitimate participants, even if they were on the periphery, they weren't masters, yet they weren't at the core of the discipline. And sometimes I wonder if other frameworks, like learning professional networks, or professional learning or adult education. Might be a better understanding of the types of communities that develop in and around academic advising, but this is sort of the commonly understood definition of communities of practice now, groups of people sharing a concern or passion for something they do, learning how to do it better through regular interaction. I think the main reason, at least in my review of the scholarship of communities of practice, that they really took off and gained a foothold in so many different disciplines, was an article from the Harvard Business Review in 2000 van ger and Snyder contributed to that publication, and one of the nuggets in that article was that at Shell community coordinators often conduct interviews to collect these Stories and then publish them in newsletters and reports. AMS organizes a yearly competition to identify the best stories. An analysis of a sample of stories revealed that the communities had saved the company two to $5 million and increased revenue by more than $13 million in one year. So if you're going to advocate for something, certainly you would advocate for the thing that saves you money, especially to the tune of two to $5 million or generates a ton of money, like $13 million in just one year. If. And you know, again, as a young concept, I think there's lots left to understand about communities of practice. But if you're wondering why, you might hear about them in different places, this is certainly part of it. There was a lot of promise. Communities of Practice were supposed to change the effectiveness, the efficiency and the bottom line for organizations who wouldn't want to adopt them. There are a couple of places in the scholarship of academic advising where communities of practice are promoted. There's specifically the beyond foundations, the master academic advisor. Book published by Nakata in 2016 McFarland and Thomas have a chapter where you advocate for academic advising. How do we develop a sense on our campuses and in our institutions that academic advising has value and purpose? And they advocate for the adoption of the framework of communities of practice. Pasquini and Eaton. In 2019 looked at the Twitter chat hashtag acadv community as a community of practice. And in 2020 McGill and others published an article around professional social socialization, where NACADA and other advising organizations are represented as communities of practice because they fit the definition that's currently promoted as the what a community of practice is, and I think it's worth considering, is this really The best representation of academic advising, and as I mentioned, are there other frameworks, but communities of practice are out there, not just in academic advising, not just in higher education, because of the work of Etienne Wenger and others, I think we have to contend with this concept of communities of practice and really ask ourselves, are they delivering on the promise? As I mentioned, there was an article from 2005 Cox reviews the different ways that communities of practice have been adopted in certain disciplines and professions, and one of them is the nursing profession. But in that article, he sort of almost as an aside, because the purpose of his article is to sort of review and not go into depth on any one topic.

Ryan Scheckel  
But he highlights eight conditions that limit the growth of communities of practice. And as I was reading through those eight conditions. Again, this article was just talking about the different places that communities of practice have been adopted, and the ways that they have changed through that adoption. And here's this little list of eight things. And my man, my mind, loves a list. Anytime I see them, I'm immediately thinking that there's some sort of secret formula that if I just internalize that list, I'm going to know all the secrets. But as I was going through these list of eight things, it really sounded a lot like academic advising. Again, these are the eight conditions that Cox found in the literature that limit the growth of communities of practice. Typically, when I'm giving this presentation, whether virtually or in person, I use live polling to see if people have these same experiences. And so oftentimes I'll launch that and I'll just ask the questions, how often have you experienced this in your work among advisors? It may come as no surprise to those listening or watching that some of these are familiar. The first is frequent reorganization, again, structural change in an organization limits the growth of communities of practice. Second is that the people come and go, not just through turnover and loss, but the the nature of administrators and and other people that it's highly transitory. Number three is that others define how work gets done, not the practitioners themselves, but other decision makers. Number four, the work is highly individualized, meaning that it's very rarely done in groups, in community. Instead, it's done with one practitioner at a time, separated from other practitioners. Number five is that the work is done in competitive environments, whether it's limited resources or where genuinely resources have to be, one in certain sort of competitive nature. Number six is that the work takes place in time pressurized environments where there's not enough time or deadlines or frequent changes. Change in the structure of the calendar define the environment that the work is being done in. Number seven, the work is spatially fragmented, meaning the actual space that practitioners are working in are not close to each other, or they're divided up that there's there's not the physical community that can develop, let alone the numerical community. And number six, the work is heavily mediated by technology, meaning most of the work that we're doing is going through a technological filter of some sort. Now, in conclusion, when thinking about communities of practice, I go back to this quote from Cox conditions of much, perhaps most, of 21st Century work inhibit sustained collective sense making, and thus communities of practice, academic advising, practitioners number two, who want to leverage the benefits of communities of practice must contend with the conditions that work against their development. And three, as academic advising scholars, consider the efficacy of the concept of communities of practice for the field, they must also address its ambiguity and limitations. So communities of practice are here. The question is, what do we know about them, and are they the best model for academic advising? So back in 2012 2013 when I was advising in our School of Art, I had what might be thought of as sort of a crisis of faith. I i started to really question if academic advising is what I wanted to make my career of in particular. One of the reasons I felt that way is if 10% of the faculty had an immediate question for me, I couldn't meet that expectation. If 2% of our students needed to see me right away. I was running out of the capacity to do so, and I started asking questions about this expectation. And I was wondering, How did everything get moving so fast I really wanted to slow down and enjoy things. In fact, my time in the School of Art really helped me appreciate exploring ideas and considering the many ways we can talk about them. But I started to wonder, is going slow all the time best? Because fast isn't all that bad. There's things about it. And I really was wondering, What am I supposed to do with all these thoughts and feelings. I felt like it was necessary for me to continue in my work, to start to come to terms with the sort of spiral of uncertainty. And I know this may sound like it's not the case, but I am not, naturally, the person who goes to books and articles and journals to answer these questions. That was not my first thought. So, you know, it must have been bad if I started thinking, There's got to be a book about this, that somebody else, some expert somewhere, had to have already answered these questions. But that's exactly what happened. 2012 2013 I was thinking, somebody has to have answered these questions already. So I searched in my library's website, culture of immediacy, and John Tomlinson's book came up. It's called the culture of speed, the coming of immediacy. You can see how it came up in the search terms. So I went and I grabbed that copy, and I started looking through it for answers. And back then, I was sure that there was a simple solution to it, that I would find the answer, and I would be able to say, Here it is. But instead, I went on a bit of a journey. Tomlinson says that speed has cultural significance. It has a technological dimension, and that there's an economic element as well, that it's multifaceted. This idea of everything going so fast doesn't come from one direction, immediacy, however, was his conclusion of the inevitable destination of all of this, which wasn't the answer I was looking for then. Certainly now, I think that a lot of what Tomlinson said has come to pass, and I'll explain why that is. But this sense of everything happening right now, so fast, so quick, with very little time, this culture of immediacy didn't come from nowhere. He talks about three stories in the cultural significance of speed. First, there's a story of disciplining the inherently violent and unstable, impersonal impulses of modern social and economic speed in a culture of rational regulation. So what that means is that the world, at a time in our cultures, started speeding up, and the speed was inherently violent. It was unstable. This modern world needed to be regulated and brought under control. That's one of the first stories that we tell through the history and the cultural perspective of speed. But then, as we started to control through the Industrial Revolution and regulation and mastery of the speeding up of society, speed started to have another story where it's encountered escaping that regulation and discipline, and it conferred this sort of complicated and often dark association between risk and danger and violence and this sensual esthetic with experiences of pleasure, meaning speed became fun and dangerous, but an escape from society and all of its rules. And finally, as immediacy emerges, it's fueled by the ubiquity of telemediation, essentially telephonic Internet and other technologies that altered the cultural impact of speed with entirely new possibilities and problems, and just that section of the Book is enough for its own presentation. But what Tomlinson's work demonstrated to me is that when I am experiencing difficulty with how fast everything is going, some people are going to see it, though, as a good thing, that it's going fast, that it's the cutting edge of things, but that also everything else is catching up, and not everyone's going to experience it the same way I'm experiencing it.

Ryan Scheckel  
Judy Wiseman has a book called press for time that addresses some of the technological dimensions of speed. The first and most measurable form of acceleration is the speeding up of transport, communication and production, and then eventually a technological acceleration. The second is the acceleration of social change, so people catch up to the rate of change in other areas. Third is this sense of like daily life, right? Like everybody's individual pace of life seems to pick up. And the driving forces, Wiseman says behind that acceleration are globalization and the innovation of internet connected technologies. They facilitated this fast turnover of capital across the globe, and that's leading, in a little bit, to this economic dimension of speed. But internet connected technologies fundamentally changed everything. But we're not the first thing. They were not the first technological acceleration. And as we, as a society and then individuals, sort of accelerate along with it. It's been these internet connected technologies that have really changed it, she argues. Jody Wiseman does that fast capitalism annihilates space and time. And look, this isn't some sort of political point of view. Capitalism, its purpose is to turn resources into profit. That is, by definition, its intention. And so if there is space or time, which is just another kind of space that's slowing that down, then its goal would be to overcome that. And fast capitalism is a particular brand of capitalism that is trying to do so with as little delay as possible. Internet connected technologies, as much reflect this high speed culture, though, as they shape it. So Judy Wiseman is saying that now is the time to contest this euphoria of speed and this technological impulse to achieve speed by harnessing our inventiveness to take control of time, more of the time. Tomlinson talks about the economic element of speed by noting how everyone's had a pass at trying to understand time, sociologists, economists, engineers and philosophers, they've all taken turns in ways of trying to understand what time is, but clock time still dominates process time and wait time, which are part of those temporal realities. They're still related to clock time, and that is the way most people still think about the passing of time, punching the clock. How much resources are involved? What does it cost you? So it bears repeating that fast capitalism annihilates space and time. Harvey in quoted in an article by most all, says that global capitalism sets as its goal at least 3% compound growth per year. So any new domain, any new geographical or social territory, will be turned into an accumulation machine. And it's worth noting that advising is a social domain, that new offices, new programs, those are might be thought of as geographical territories, that anytime we feel like there's space, if there is profit or efficiency that can be gained. It will be gained. So that's why Tomlinson arrived at this conclusion that immediacy is inevitable. He chose the word immediacy because it means both immediately, now in time, but also immediate, as in close next to it has a multivalent concept, and he says in his book, it is the integration of communications technologies with modernity which is transforming all of its dimensions, globalizing, deterritorializing, shifting its methods and relations of production, delivery and consumption, producing new conveniences, excitements and delights, but also new anxieties and pathologies, like I said, reading this in 2013 I was not thrilled. I was looking for ways to slow down, but then my life, it took a different turn. I'm asking, How can I slow down? Is there any way to make this work, and I moved from the school of art as an advising office of one into an advising administrator's role. Right when Berg and Seeber's The Slow Professor, came out, and this time management and timelessness chapter, understanding both pedagogy and pleasure as something to achieve, to aspire to, research and understanding where they come from, collegiality and community, collaboration and thinking together. These were all things I wanted, but my role had completely changed. I went from being in charge of so many things to being in charge of so many things, and it didn't help me that I was learning a new way of being while I was hoping for fixing my old way of being. And then 2020 happened, and everything slowed down, and I was talking about things needing to slow down. So one of the books I came across during that time was Carl Honore In Praise of Slowness, where he challenges this cult of speed, and he talks through the slow movement there, specifically in the late 1980s specifically 1986 Carlo Petrini and others in Italy protest the opening of a McDonald's in a very culturally sensitive space of Rome. 1999 Gerbert ilson founded the World Institute of slowness. And Paolo founded citizen slow, which is a way of building communities, towns and cities around slowness. 2004 is when honorees book in praise of slowness came out, and they talk about these values that I don't know. Who would disagree with them, this idea of being local and traditional, close and intimate, sustainable, eco friendly, abstinent, balanced and restful, conviviality, pleasurable, patient, focused. These are things that I want in my life. Jennifer rout published a book in 2018 called Slow media, and she says after reveling in the wonders of digital media for 20 years, she abandoned the internet for six months. Her cell phone, she turned it off for a whole year an exhibit of exquisitely illustrated letters by the whimsical, macabre artist Edward Gorey had gotten her thinking about the loss of material artifacts that accompany digital communication. She missed the creativity of making printed correspondence and the fun of receiving it, and that sort of mild wistfulness sparked her to try to reshape the contours of her mediated life. And I was considering the same thing, you know, what does it look like to disconnect and to slow down? How do I do that in my own life? But then I came across Isaiah Berlin's three critics of the enlightenment. And I came across this idea that the slow movement was just a new romanticism, romanticism, which happened between 18 118 90, if you're not familiar, is part. Reaction to the industrial revolution, it emphasized emotion and individualism. It glorified the past and nature, and Berlin, in his 2000 book, Drew connections between the Romantic movement and something like the melting away of the very notion of objective truth, and thus, not only nationalism, but also fascism and totalitarianism. And so I had to start really inquiring about and examining my desires to slow down, because there are some dangers to that kind of thinking that came out of the Romantic movement. Most all wrote in 2019 despite its progressive feel, slow down also stands for. One, a capitalist commodity. I mean, I was reading books about it. Two, a dangerous political objective that weaves together parochialism with fear driven social sentiment. And three, an undesired subjective experience. There are people who wonder if slowing down is really healthy, and besides, is fast all that bad. Fast made slow, as vostol argues in 2019 fast makes slow possible, as Judy Wiseman argues in her 2015 book, Connolly argued in 2002 that fast actually brings change, and if we want to change things, shouldn't we adopt a fast approach? So I was pretty confused, and I wondered what I should do with all of this. And I realized this isn't a new thing. It's important to have a very specific thing, a target, so to speak, that I'm working on, that there are aspirational models all over there. It's not just one. And I ran across this quote. Vostol argues in 2019 that we should adopt what he calls a normative ambiguity, neither fast nor slow.

Ryan Scheckel  
I have argued that we need to problematize simple claims that everything is speeding up or everything should be slowed down. My main argument is that there is no theoretical reason for arguing that slow is normatively better than fast, or fast is any better than slow when it comes to the question of how democracy and governance should be practiced. Instead, we should adopt a more ambiguous and ambivalent attitude towards speed and modernity that was quoted in Fawcett 2017 this idea that cities should be slow or that technology should be fast. What ambiguous attitude means is not I can't decide, but that I'm not going to decide that one is forever, always better, that my norm would be it's dependent on the situation. Sometimes speed is necessary, sometimes immediacy is best, but other times slow is better. So what do I do if I feel like my time is being squeezed? One of the things we recommend is that you assess which temporality is being squeezed. Is it the amount of time spent on tasks or the volume dimension? Is it the coordination of tasks with others, that's the organizational temporality, or is it just the number of tasks during a unit of time, that is the density of the temporality. It can be helpful if we feel sped up and overwhelmed, to take a moment to really assess what the issue is, volume, organization or density. You can also, as I mentioned earlier, identify the temporal orientation of the people that you're working with and with yourself. Sometimes, there are those who are going to feel time in an urgent way. It's viewed as scarce and it needs to be conserved. But there are others who have a pacing style and they distribute their effort over the timeline or near the end or right at the beginning. People have different ways that they approach their pacing. Some people's focus or attitude can be positive or negative toward different dimensions of time, past, present and future. The distance between things is known as the temporal distance, and that's the extent to which individuals focus on events, either as near or far in a sense of time. Some people have a preference for synchrony, meaning they have a willingness to adapt their pace and rhythm to others, but others don't. And there are the polychronicities. Basically, the extent to which one prefers to perform tasks simultaneously or sequentially. Now, most of the research shows that multitasking is really just a switching cost, but there are some for whom switching has a low cost, and there are others who that switching actually affects their performance. So knowing the temporal orientation of others and yourself can be a way to deal with this question of immediacy. It can also be helpful to use weight characteristics to your advantage. If other people are going to have to wait on you, you might let them know the temporal features How long are they going to have to wait, and the pacing of that is it going to go quickly, letting people know the features of the time that they're going to have to wait. It can be helpful to know the reason for the wait, if it's anticipatory, if there's an inefficiency or scarcity, if, if it's deliberate, if it's individually chosen, also understanding the nature of the weight. Are they going to be on their own while they're waiting or with others? Is it going to be a pure weight? Meaning, is it going to be the only thing they're waiting on? Are they going to be waiting on multiple things? How critical is the weight? Which can be defined by the degree of disruption the weight causes, or might cause. There's always a context to the weight. Is it just the nature of the occupation that we're involved in? Is it the organization? Is it the social issue? Is it individual? There's a power status that making other people wait can be an exercise of power dynamics. And what I really recommend is giving people agency while they wait. It's also called equipped waiting. While you're waiting for this, you can do the following things makes the wait seem different, but the slow folks out there do have some recommendations on things you can do to slow down first. It seems sort of obvious, but if you're always hurrying work to slow down your hurry. The more you hurry, the faster things feel. Multitasking contributes to this feeling the things are going too fast, finding time to do nothing and just daydream can really slow the pace, putting balance as the priority, as opposed to productivity, getting good quality sleep, not over scheduling yourself back to back to back in your calendar, but giving yourself room, disconnecting and as they say, controlling your mobile being early can really slow your heart rate down and the pace of things, but your personal clock, what do you do when you're not working can also have a big effect on your feeling of slowing things down, and one of the biggest indicators that people are not only good time managers, but they feel like life is balanced, is if they give of their time, because then they feel like they're in charge of it, and they see the value of it. As I was moving through this question of immediacy, a quote from 2017 from Rosa at all really stood out to me, and I started to wonder during the pandemic if we were seeing Finally, a definitive slowing down of things they say the most pressing question is whether or not a liberal, pluralistic, democratic society that values the self determination and autonomy of individuals as well as political communities, can be saved through a transformation aimed at founding modern society on a non escalatory mode of stabilization. Such a transition obviously requires a pacification of the engines of economic appropriation, cultural acceleration and political activation in the first place, these engines eventually will be shut off anyway. The only question left open then is whether this will happen by design or by natural or social disaster, and in 2020 I really felt like, here we go. What Rosa and colleagues said was happening, these engines were being shut off, and now in 2025 it's hard to say that it didn't slow down, but I think we've got those engines going again. Certainly, if you're viewing this video, I'm not leaving you with any answers if you're listening. I'm not giving you anything that isn't room for more discussion. And so I would encourage you to check out my references on communities of practice and this question of immediacy and the slow movement if you're not watching, if you're just listening to this. Feel free to reach out anytime, if you would like to, I'd be happy to share them with you, but I'm glad that you took the time to listen to this, and I hope you found it helpful. If this isn't exactly your thing, don't worry. Adventures and advising will return to its normal format in our next episode, but if you do like this kind of stuff, let us know we could find other people who might have a little bit more, longer form stuff to share with us. But I do hope that you find community. I hope you do find purpose and a sense of balance, and I hope that it's coming, if you haven't real soon. Thanks for listening.