Crip time, as defined here, is a
"flexible approach to normative time frames"
https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5824/4684
For me, it has meant having to negotiate and educate people and organisations that I am not being "lazy" or "slow", but that time just works differently for me. I often feel like I am in a different time zone, where notions of meeting deadlines, or doing certain amounts of work in a certain time frame is impossible. Unlike others my concept of time has to take into account my condition, and how it fluctuates in and out of needing time spending on caring for and maintaining my wellbeing.
I read somewhere once that you can either have days where
you can just go into the kitchen and make a cup of tea, (a 2 step day)
or days where
you have to spend time and energy to movtivate yourself into the kitchen, then you have to find the cup, the spoon, walk to the fridge, get the milk out of the fridge, put the milk on the counter, pick the kettle up, fill the kettle up, carry it back, put it on, wait for it to boil, pour it out, put the milk in and the tea bag (i dont drink tea so Im not sure o nthe right order :), stir it together with the spoon, wait for the tea bag to work and then carry it over, sit and drink it (a 20 step day)
the emphasis here is on how each of those steps are a usually unconscious part of "make a cup of tea", but for disabled people, sometimes, it is not that simple, and each step takes a great deal of energy and should be recognised on its own as an individual task. On a 20 step day, I am going to take longer to recover from every activity I do, because every activity takes more energy to complete and accomplish. Using the making a cup of tea analogy, sometimes those of us working on crip time have become adept at creating ways of working that cut some steps out and make us more efficient at tasks, not that we can acomplish more, just to make the task possible to complete within our own capacity. Drinking the tea without milk (or using a long life milk capsule) can cut a few steps out, putting the cup or the kettle next to the sink and filling it as we go past another few steps, you get the idea.
This is all very well when working alone, without having to bump alongside normal time, but when you have to work within normal time, especially when normal time is fixed and unmoveable (like a university deadline), you have to get creative or risk getting jet lagged.
What I have found is that although it takes additional labour it can be a useful exercise to spend time trying to blend a normal time organisational strategy within crip time. As I have spent so long studying in higher education I can usually work out a good conversion.
Converting crip time to normal time takes practice and creativity. It also involves a lot of honesty and awareness of one's own capacity and working styles and speed.
The first job, as I did above is to break the task down into it's tiny parts.
Next it's time to look at the tasks themselves to categorise them into different types. There are fixed time tasks that have to be done in a certain order, tasks that can be completed at any time, tasks that can be crip-adapted, and tasks that can and should be done differently.
I then assign each task a rating of red, yellow or green, depending on how easy it will be to complete on different days. The red, yellow green rating is based on my mental energy, but it could be anything that is the biggest barrier to completing the work.
Now as crip time is different, I try and assign each task it's appropriate crip time frame, which includes recovery, breaks, and my own working speed. This is more realistic. Instead of saying
"I'll spend an hour researching papers."
"I'll spend 5 minutes reading my current progress notes"
"I'll write 5 search terms from those notes" (3 minutes)
I'll take a short 2 minute break to make sure I'm on task and check in to make sure I'm still ok.
"I'll do between 5-10 minutes of searching on the main uni library database, downloading anything that looks interesting in the first few sentences of the introduction".
Break time so I don't get frustrated and overwhelmed with searching. completely doing something different and easy. Although my mind likes to wander during this time, I'm giving it time to wander and reflect on the process and how it can be improved. (15 minutes approx)
I'll spend 5 minutes reviewing the search terms and the articles to see if I can refine them any more than I have already for future searches.
So my hour of work is broken up into crip time consideration and normal time consideration. It can get frustrating to be slower than my peers but this is not a competition, it's my own progress that matters. Some days I can do more than an hour, sometimes I can only do an hour.
So converting and working in both normal time and crip time together means that I am able to continue to work, even slowly on my bad days. It usually means I can keep some pace with my peers because I'm able to find something to do on most days. When it gets closer to deadlines though, especially when the task variety reduces and becomes harder is when it becomes challenging. Of course, there are times when crip time doesn't just "take priority" over normal time and it's demands, it takes over completely. It's why I try and make sure everything I do is not left at a point that I can't pick up days or weeks later. Every task has to have an end point, or at least a note of what to do next.
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