Making shadow work work for me
“Shadow work is all the unpaid for labour done in a wage-based economy.”
Shadow work includes: commuting to work, doing the laundry, figuring out how to use self-checkout at the grocery store…
All this unaccounted for labour adds mental strain, called decision fatigue, to our already very exhaustive mental energy. Life hacks that limit shadow work are often circulated. For example, certain “successful people” wear the same thing every day to reduce the shadow labour required to decide what to wear every morning.
While life hacks help you minimize shadow work, what if you can make shadow work work for you? What if there is a way to profit from it?
All this is basically a segue for me to show you some interesting money-earning and money-saving apps.
Slidejoy
Did you know that swiping those intricate patterns to unlock your phone 2617 times per day is chipping away at your precious mental capacity? How can you make that shadow work for you?
Enter Slidejoy.
Everytime you unlock your (Android) phone, you’re shown an ad on the unlock screen, and the app redistributes the earnings from that app to its users. You can get a balance on your Paypal account just for using your phone! In my 2 years of using it, I think I’ve earned some $40 (credits go to Paypal) just by unlocking my phone.
One caveat: Slidejoy removes the passcode protection/lock system from your phone so you’ll have to supplement Slidejoy with an app-locking app to lock your sensitive apps.
Job Spotter
Walking to class, events, etc. is obviously shadow work. Sure, you get some mental and physical benefits from it, but with Job Spotter, you can earn some $$$ on your walks as well.
Basically, you get paid for taking pictures of hiring signs you pass by. In my 2 or so months of using it, I’ve earned almost $400 just from spotting jobs.
Caveats:
- It’s not really reducing shadow work because you need to pull out your phone, unlock it (with Slidejoy!), open the app, and actually stop to take a picture
- You will look derpy to other walkers who wonder what you’re taking a picture of
- The credits you earn go towards your Amazon balance… which is kind of a moral dilemma if you don’t support Amazon’s business model…
Carrot Rewards
Most people already know about this …But our government wants to promote physical activity and health stuff so they have this program that lets you can earn points (towards movies or gas savings) in exchange for your physical activity. Of course, the point is to incentivize you to do more walking than you currently do, but all the shadow work you do that requires walking most definitely counts.
Honey
Do-it-yourself and hyper-customization are two phenomenon of our time that indicate that we’ve fallen into some fallacies. Namely, (1) we think freedom is the number of choices you have access to, and (2) your identity to become the sum of choices you make. Online shopping mixes all the shadow work required for hyper-customization (research, comparisons, reviews, scrolling through pages and page of options until 4am, etc.) with all the shadow work required for do-it-yourself checkout (paying, tracking, picking up).
How can Honey help? Honey is a browser extension that automatically applies known discount codes to your virtual “cart”, thereby allowing you to save $$$ you money on your shadow-labour shift.
Flashfood
I will admit this would be stretching the limits of our “making shadow work work for you”, theme. But I really just want to share this one, because I like the idea!
Flashfood allows grocery store items to discount items that are nearing their expiry date. Since we all know that expiry dates are bogus, it’s a nice way to get a discount if you have to go to the grocery store anyway (<– haha, that’s the only link to the shadow work concept). It’s also very handy to pay via the app and then not have to scramble for your wallet when you pick up your items. It’s still a new/experimental concept so not many (read: barely any) grocery stores are on board right now, so it’s actually a bit of a stretch for force myself to go to grocery stores that I wouldn’t normally go to.
So obviously, the reason I use Flashfood isn’t to profit off the shadow work we call grocery shopping. We all know that there’s so much food being wasted because of bogus expiry dates that (1) legally covers the ass of food retailers (in the event some customer gets sick) and (2) help food sourcers profit (since they are “selling” more of their food). Especially after learning how to dumpster dive in Norway this summer (more on that later!) and seeing how so much food that ends up in the trash is completely fine (and often even more gourmet than I am used to!), I’m up to consider and support any programs/ideas for mitigating food waste (or making dumpster diving more accessible and less stigmatized?)
Some of my favourite finds to date:
- Many varieties of yogurt
Goat milk, Icelandic, Greek, Mediterranean … (as a bonus, I now have a theory that yogurt gets thicker as you move north). - Glass-bottled organic milk/chocolate milk.
At Longo’s you can pay for fancy milk in glass jars. You can reclaim a $2 deposit for the jar when you return it so they can reuse the jars for more milky goodness. Sometimes this milk on sale on Flashfood for $1.99 … which means that–after I redeem the $2 deposit on the bottle–I was essentially paid a penny for drinking milk!
Making shadow work work for … not-me?
All of the above try to leverage shadow work, work I have to do anyway, and returns some of the value to me.
As much as a technoskeptic I am, I am attractive to these creative little ideas (though it seems like it’s usually some variant of crowd-sourcing) that can only be possible because technology is the way it is. I’m pretty conflicting by it on some ideological level.
On a moral level, I am conflicted by the privilege I have to have access to these shadow work optimization tactics. The earnings and savings from these platforms are distributed to middle class people who can apply for a credit cards/bank accounts, have a zip code for Amazon to deliver to, have a mobile device to tap into the potential of these ideas. It takes money to make money. It takes money to save money. Being poor is expensive. As I’m revelling in the savings and earnings I milk (quite literally in the case of Flashfood) from shadow work, I need to remember the larger context that enables me to access opportunities where others cannot.
That said, I also have a list of suggestions to make shadow work works for not-necessarily-me. These are by no means substitutes for non-shadow work ways of contributing, but if I have to be doing the shadow work anyway, I might as well?
World Community Grid
Everytime you leave your computer, your computer is doing shadow work to stay on for you to come back to it. You can donate your computer’s processing power to World Community Grid while your computer is on and not using much RAM. You can donate your processing power to, for example, seismology, astronomy, and genetic research. The project will outsource some of their computation tasks to your idle computer and you can help the world end find the cure for ebola, or extra-terrestrial life, just a little faster.
Cool bonus is that you get a screensaver that matches the project that your computer is currently working on!
Tab for a Cause
Opening new tabs is shadow work. Tab for a cause earns money from ads shown on a “new tab” page on your browser and redistributes it to charities.
Ecosia
Searching stuff on Google is shadow work. What web searches can help plant trees? Ecosia manages to do that ….The only caveat is that the search engine is not powered by Google, so I found that I had to cross-reference some of my more serious searches with Google, heh.
