500 Degrees

Every night that summer I drove from my factory job to the Grains and Grinds Bagel Cafe one town over, turned the revolving stone hearth oven to 500 degrees, and filled the kettle.

The bagels were already proofing when I arrived, pale, plump, soft as baby arms, resting on wooden shelves dusted with cornmeal, loaded into racks twenty tall. I’d slide a dozen into the boiling kettle and watch them drop dramatically, then pop cheerfully to the surface. Out they came with a wire basket, top side down onto burlap-covered metal slats that protected their soft tops from the stone hearth while the cornmeal bottoms dried. Two turns around and I’d flip them all over with my bare hands, moving quickly, getting burned occasionally, then let them rotate until they were perfectly plump, firm and golden.

D’Angelo played loudly. We were both sweating.

The oven only worked if you held the heat. There were brief moments when you could close the door and trap it, but only if your timing was exact. Too slow and you lost temperature. Too much cornmeal in the kettle and it would boil over. Everything was preparation and then controlled focus.

When it was right, it was magic.

I made around 1,200 bagels a night. In my memory they are all golden. I never got tired of that work. Not once. I’d leave at dawn, bite into a still-warm bagel as I walked past the line of customers waiting for their regular, and feel completely satisfied.

That job has become my most frequent work fantasy.

It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t creative in the way we usually mean creativity. It was repetitive, hot, physical. It required my whole body and attention. The structure was tight enough that I could disappear into it. The pleasure wasn’t in freedom from constraint; it was in meeting it exactly.

I thought about that oven as we prepared for the launch of our collaborative scheduling field study with Harvard and Tulane.

For the past several years, we’ve been learning what caregivers actually need to do this work well for the long haul. Before launching the study, I designed a three-week communication workshop to lay the groundwork. We needed people to know exactly how to reach each other, what to do next, and where to bring their worry. We needed to move quickly enough to maintain momentum and slowly enough not to miss anything, or anyone.

The preparation felt like managing heat. A near-constant churn of feedback from caregivers on the front line, adjustments from office support, refining timing, refining sequence. If we rushed, we’d lose trust. If we stalled, we’d lose energy.

When it was right, it felt the same as the bagel job: focused, rhythmic, alive.

We talk a lot about overload, burnout and extraction. We talk less about the pleasure of productivity: the deep satisfaction of being fully engaged in work that makes sense, inside a structure that lets you use what you know.

I’ve come to think this may be true of almost any work. People need to know what they are trying to make. They need support. They need constraints that clarify rather than constrict. And they need enough freedom inside those boundaries to find their own rhythm.

Maybe you have felt this too: not just the satisfaction of finishing something, but the particular pleasure of focused effort inside a well-made frame. Knowing the goal. Trusting the process. Feeling your skill meet the moment. That feeling, in baking, in caregiving, in any work at all, remains for me a very specific pleasure and satisfaction.

This column ran in the Santa Fe New Mexican on March 24, 2026, under Business Different.