"A Reasonable Life": Rhythmic Attunement and Sustainable Work at the Intersection of Farming and Knowledge Work

Past CSCW work has examined the role of temporal rhythms in cooperative work and has identified alignment work--the work required to bring dissonant rhythms into alignment--as an important aspect of large-scale collaboration. We ask instead how individual workers interact with temporal rhythms to sustain the conditions that make their work possible--not aligning rhythms, but attuning them. This paper draws on interviews with farmer-knowledge workers, people who engage with both farm work (the work of growing food or raising animals for food, on a commercial or non-commercial basis) and computer-based knowledge work. We identify three ways that farmer-knowledge workers interact with natural and structural rhythms to construct sustainable work-lives: anchoring (tying oneself to a particular rhythm to create accountability and structure), decoupling (loosening or cutting ties with a rhythm to create flexibility), and gap-filling (interweaving complementary rhythms to create balance). Together, these practices constitute attunement work.