I am a big proponent of microactivities these days. I wanted to be a plant lady, so I got a plant. That plant started dying right away. GPT suggested it was either being underwatered or overwatered, but would not give more clarification. It was a pothos. I shamefully took it back to the plant lady where I bought it, she looked at it, laughed, and said she would babysit it for a week and bring it back to life. She did, and it’s been doing well since.
I told the woman that I would buy another plant if the pothos did well, and I did: a parlor palm. Now I have two plants in terra cotta pots.
I told myself if the parlor palm did well, I would buy a third plant. It is doing alright, but I’m still only at two plants. A third plant might change the dynamic in a nice way, but I haven’t been ready yet. I am still making sure that I am giving adequate attention to each of my plants, and sometimes I am not. They each are not dying but neither one is growing too much more, even though they have adequately large pots. Perhaps they need fertilizer.
And so I am not a plant lady but I do have two plants that I am doing activities with. My planty microactivity.
I have a Masterclass account. I don’t know anybody who has one other than me. I really like them. When Masterclass first started, they would have a lot of really Big courses that were really cool. Marc Jacobs for example has a fashion design course with a lot of projects for you to do as cumulative homework, like an actual class. As they continued to make deals with celebrities in different fields, some of the courses ended up being pretty small. But they are still awesome.
It used to be the case that going through a course felt like a Big Hefty fancy thing. This was a really cool feeling. However, they have since updated their website to encourage more casual viewing. They made playlists, so that you can hear different perspectives on the same subject stripped from multiple classes (a feature I don’t use because I like hearing the same person talk for a long time). And so with this encouragement, just hanging out on their website not really paying attention but absorbing great content feels fun. My masterclass microactivity.
I think there could be a case for elevating microactivities to Microactivities, but I think it depends on the disposition of the person doing them. There can also be a game around trying to make your microactivities feel as large as possible, without them counting as a mesoactivity or a macroactivity.
In my own life, doing the laundry, loading the dishwasher, and changing the bedsheets do not actually make it to the level of microactivities. I had at some point decided that I do not want these activities to feel hard or in the way of anything else, and so I do them when I am pitter-pattering around anyway, metabolizing energy from a different activity.