Care vs Efficiency

In collective processes like the one within the feminist working group the relation/balance between care and efficiency is one that is hard to negotiate. Several times during the work process we discussed the traditional feminist strategy of doing personal ”check-ins” of how we all were doing heading into a meeting for example, to take care of each other and for everyone in the group to know where each individual ”is at” so that the group can hence relate to everyones situation when working together. The tricky situation is when the pressure to perform/ to achieve/ to get the work done/ adds in the group then its hard to commit to strategies like these time wise. Committing to strategies like these means that you really have to take care of what unfolds in these check-ins and be able to commit to the personal conversations and give the personal care that is being required between individuals in the group in the situation, even if it means that most of the meeting time will be spent on personal conversations. If the group lacks that commitment then strategies like these run the risk of only becoming symbolic gestures instead of transformative actions. So the juxtaposition between Time and Care becomes explicit when pressure rises in the project and often the act of care is neglected to the benifit of production and efficiency. To find out sustainable strategies to negotiate this juxtaposition between Care and Efficiency is for me one of the hardest tasks of working collectively and an ever trickier balance in the everyday working life of our contemporary institutions per se.

Annotated by AE