This is a guest essay from my dear friend Erica Mukherjee. Erica and I have known each other for (does math) more than twenty-five years — since high school.
Erica is a historian of mud and empire and a Clinical Assistant Professor of History at NYU Shanghai. She is writing a book on the watery landscapes of imperial India and is committed to public history, developing walking tours, historical fairy tales, and botanically-inspired workshops.
You can follow Erica on Threads and send her a DM if you’re interested in collaborating on a public environmental history project.
It is summer and I am at the beach. As I write these words—longhand and in a slightly damp notebook—I can hear the waves breaking on the shore, feel the heat of the sun on my skin, and see a gull starting at me with an intensity bordering on hostility, as if it knows I will not be sharing the pretzels I have tucked at the bottom of my bag. The beach is my summer office, and the gulls, cormorants, and pigeons are my summer coworkers.
For over a decade, I have been lucky enough to live a few minutes’ walk from one of New York City’s beaches (yes, NYC has beaches and yes, we swim there). I am also an academic — an assistant professor of environmental history to be more precise — and while I am not in the classroom over the summer there are still papers to write, books to read, and lessons to plan. My work becomes more solitary and flexible, but it is definitely still work.
Making a habit of working at the beach has helped me understand my work-life relationship. It has also made me mindful of my work process, both in terms of the types of work I do on any given day and the materials and mindset I need to accomplish that work.
Discovering worklife
Like most academics, I am not good at erecting boundaries between my work and my life. And for years, I was given to understand that that was a problem. Achieving a balance between “work” as a distinct activity and “life” as a distinct activity seems to be a preoccupying goal of 21st century labor. A quick online search shows that everyone from Forbes to the National Library of Medicine has something to say about how that can and should be achieved. Even my own university is so dedicated to the concept that it hosts an Office of Work Life.
I have just never been able to do it. Sometimes, through poor planning or my inability to say no (I’m working on it!), I find myself working long hours during the academic year. But these are discrete instances. Rather, there is no functional boundary between my work and my life because I read books about the history of herbariums for fun and go on walks to look for invasive species.
And when I go on vacation, I bring my work with me. Not my department’s annual budget request or the book review that needs proofreading, but a particular way of understanding the world that has me photographing gingko trees on the streets of Shanghai, marveling at Helsinki’s storm water management infrastructure, and dragging my oh-so-patient travel companions to every natural history museum on three continents. In 2024, I developed a public lecture based on a particularly muddy hike I had taken in the north of England, and those vacation photos formed the bulk of my slide deck.
If “work” and “life” are supposed to be separate entities, “beach” is yet another category that is supposed to be outside of the humdrum routine of one’s regular life. Folks don beachwear and pack their beach bags with beach towels, beach umbrellas, and beach reads in order to have a beach vacation. All these specialized activities and equipment support the idea that real life stops as soon as one’s flipflops touch the sand. And if there is supposed to be a barrier between work and life, the distance between work and beach must be irreconcilable.
Or so I thought.
For several summers, I tried to work at home and then take an appropriately light book out to the beach. But it was no fun being hunched over my desk when I knew the ocean was but a few steps away. And then, when I was at the beach, I would often be beset by vague feelings of guilt that I should be working on my latest research project. I don’t like that guilt, and carefully dividing my work time, life time, and beach time was doing nothing to assuage it.
Because of my love of a dramatic narrative, I’d like to say I woke up one morning, threw off the shackles of artificial division, and reveled in the messiness of worklife. In actuality, the process was much more gradual. I started taking those fun books about herbaria or rewilding or 19th century literary representations of whales to the beach with me. In my mind, I called them inappropriate beach reads, and I removed them from the story when someone asked me what I was doing over the summer. It became undeniable, however, that bringing my actual work books out to the sand meant that I could stay outside longer, get more reading done, and, importantly, quiet that nagging guilt.
That’s when I stopped trying to balance work and life as separate entities and instead squished them into a jumbled worklife. Since I’m always thinking about history and the environment, there is no point in fighting it to achieve some artificial balance. And because my job colors how I approach the world, I have thus made myself open to moments of inspiration and serendipity that I would have missed otherwise. The messiness works for me.
How to work on the beach
While my beach-based worklife has become more involved since those first days when I substituted a work book for a beach read, I have not been able to transfer my whole office to the sand. Nor do I want to. Even as working at the beach has helped me to create the entangled mentality and practices I call worklife, it has also helped me mindfully break apart the work I do on any given day into the categories “beach” and “not-beach.” This seemingly simplistic division has nevertheless allowed me to think more carefully about the types of work I do and how best to do it.
It all comes back to the environment (I told you it was never too far from my mind). The beach is a harsh environment, inimical to permanent settlement by most life forms, particularly humans. A beach day requires a lot of supplies to keep the average human comfortable—drinking water, food, artificial shade, a comfortable place to sit—these are not naturally occurring.
Regardless of what I plan to accomplish at the beach, I always bring my reusable water bottle, a snack, an umbrella, and a blanket. I also slather on sunscreen and wear a lightweight coverup, flipflops, and sunglasses. Leaving the house is a process, but this is the minimum amount of material support I need to be comfortable in a place with glaring sun and no fresh water.
Since I’m going to be working, I also need to pack the necessary tools for the tasks I’ve set out for myself on any given day and ensure that they are also protected from the harsh beach environment, most immediately the sand, but also the omnipresent salt spray.
My phone — safely encased — comes with me, but I would never take my laptop onto the sand. Paper books, notebooks, and printouts are fine, and I use a clipboard to make sure loose papers don’t blow away. I also use small metal Book Darts (bookdarts.com is not an affiliate link, just an amazing small business worth checking out) to mark my page rather than sticky notes or lightweight bookmarks that are also in danger of scattering from a gust. Every piece of paper I bring to the beach becomes at least a little wet, either from the spray or from my dripping person post-swim, so I only use pens whose ink doesn’t run. And even though I have my phone with me, the sun’s glare means that I can only use it for short periods of time before I strain my eyes.
Given these environmental and material constraints, my “beach” work most often involves reading, taking notes, brainstorming, writing first drafts, and editing pre-printed material. All of this work is slow and deliberate. It lends itself to the pace of a hand moving a pen and welcomes pauses to stare at the waves or follow the flight of a bird. This kind of work cannot be rushed as it involves developing and nurturing ideas. Whether one chooses to call it daydreaming or thinking deeply, beach work takes time.
My “not beach” work—which is chiefly answering emails, administrative tasks, polishing drafts, and proofreading—is typically more urgent and intricate. I cannot afford to be distracted by a puppy attacking a piece of seaweed that clearly had it coming when I need to estimate my department’s annual budget, nor can I daydream half the afternoon away when a colleague is expecting my reply. All of this work is also tied to my laptop, a temperamental tool that stays indoors.
Some days I work exclusively in one category or the other. Other days, I will only do the bare minimum “not beach” work needed to stay on top of my deadlines, or I will feel ambitious and decide to check multiple tasks off my to-do list before I shift to the slower rhythms of “beach” work. External factors like deadlines or the weather might influence how I choose to organize my workday, but I also allow my mood to dictate what I plan to do.
Since worklife is messy and, at times, chaotic, I try not to judge myself for the choices I make on any given day. This ensures I am doing something to support my worklife goals rather than let guilt gnaw at me for not working the “right way.”
If you love this newsletter and look forward to reading it every week, please consider forwarding it to a friend or becoming a paying subscriber.
Most issues of this publication are free because I love sharing ideas and connecting with others about the future of work. If you want to support me as a writer, you can buy me a coffee.
Have a work story you’d like to share? Please reach out using this form. I can retell your story while protecting your identity, share a guest post, or conduct an interview.