January 12, 2009

January 12th?!

12th?! How did that happen?! Hmm. Well, anyway, I’ve got mixed results from my Great Work Habits Experiment over the last few days. First, I remembered why I don’t work in a totally free-form way: I hate it. I need the structure, so sue me. I need to work like I’m at work: like I’ve got a boss and deadlines and performance quotas, etc. It’s too hard for me to measure progress otherwise. My dad and wife asked, so how did it go? Did you get lots of work done? And I said yes, which is true, but without a set schedule, I can’t really say how much I got done.

This has been a theme for me, all through college and grad school. I don’t necessarily want to have every aspect of my life scheduled to the hilt, but at the same time, I really thrive in a schedule. My wife is the same way, which is good. In fact, we’ve decided to schedule other aspects of our lives, too. We both suffer from a pretty profound laziness (which anyone who knows us will doubt, but really it’s true), and without a schedule, we tend to take paths of least resistance that quickly become ruts if we don’t occassionally try to shake ourselves out of them. So, we’re working on work schedules, recreation schedules, social life schedules, etc. It sounds a bit OCD and soccer-mom-y, but I think it’s what it’s going to take, at least initially, for both of us to shake the inertia we’ve both been feeling lately.

Work Habits Experiment Day 2

I’m in the second day of my “free form” work habits experiment, and I have mixed results so far. On the one hand, I have gotten a lot of work done, but maybe not as much as I would have liked. I’m also finding that my blocks of non-work are quite a bit longer than my blocks of work, although when I do work, it’s usually pretty intense and productive.

I’m still basically on my same sleeping and eating schedules, and although my original intention was to only sleep when tired and eat when hungry, I’ve found that these pretty much correspond to my regular routine anyway. I added a cup of coffee to my mid-afternoon routine in the hopes of beating my after-dinner sleepiness, which put me out like a light for about an hour last evening and totally screwed up my evening work idea and made it hard for me to sleep when I did go to bed.

We’ll see what happens tonight, whether I can keep going through the 7pm-9pm crash that I usually have, and actually get some work done. I’m starting to think that this is really going to be the key to getting everything done on time over the next two months. I’m going to try to get all of the brain-intensive work done during the day, and especially the morning, when I’m more mentally alert, and maybe try to save some of the more mundane busy-work-type work for the evening when I feel less on top of things.

Also, starting tomorrow, I’m going to throw regular exercise into the mix again, which is something I’ve been badly neglecting for far too long again. I know that being in good shape always gives me more energy, but it’s a matter of making time for it, which is not something I seem to be consistently good at.

Okay, back to work.

Disgusting

Here’s a more-repellent-than-usual piece of junk from today’s mail. Stay inside! Watch TV! Get fat! It’s “great”! And all for only $9.00 more! I’d be an idiot not to take it! Sheesh.

On Laziness

We’re all familiar with the old parable of the busy ant and the lazy ant, right? The busy ant works all summer storing away food and provisions for the winter, while the lazy ant just kicks back and relaxes. Then, depending on which parental controls are in place, the lazy ant either starves to death over the winter, or comes knocking at the busy ant’s door. Moral of the story: be the busy ant, not the lazy one.

I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think anyone has ever accused me of being a lazy ant. I’ve always worked hard, even too hard, but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about how laziness creeps into my life and my worldview, nevertheless. For instance, at least once a week, I wake up thinking, “eggs would be good for breakfast.” But do I make eggs? No, I pour the same bowl of cereal every morning because I just don’t feel like going through the trouble of getting out the eggs, bowl, pan, and spatula, and then making the eggs, washing the pan, etc. It’s so much easier to just open a box, dump out the contents, douse with milk, and rinse out the bowl after. That one little decision, made every morning, is pretty much the working definition of laziness, and there’s a hundred more little things like that throughout my day. Why haven’t I ever cracked either of the giant cookbooks we’ve recently received/bought and learned a new way to make eggs? Why do I wait until the recycling is literally spilling out on the kitchen floor from its spot under sink before taking it out? You get my drift, I think.

Laziness also frequently keeps me from getting out and doing new things and meeting new people. It’s just easier not to go out and do something, especially something new that might take a little extra social effort. It’s easier to play it safe and keep firmly to my ruts, rather than jostle myself out of them and head off in a different direction. While I seem to be able to mix things up in big ways–like moving from Oregon to Chicago, or Chicago to Washington, or Washington to California–I always seem to find a different variant on the same old ruts in each new place.

Ironically, I think one reason for my persistent life-laziness is the fact that I do work so hard. Being an academic sort, I not only spend a lot of time with my thoughts, I spend a lot of time alone writing them down. For me, this is intensive work, and I’m a careful guardian of the mental space, as well as the time necessary to do this work. Five or six hours, the bulk of a working day, can pass without my hardly noticing them. I frequently feel the need to economize the rest of my time, taking shortcuts, deciding not to do things (being lazy) all for the sake of preserving my resources for work. And again ironically, I sometimes wonder if this unwillingness to challenge and expand myself makes me a less imaginative and productive scholar.

Part of my reason for keeping this journal is to hold myself accountable for this sort of thing–to give myself a different voice with which to say to myself: hey, snap out of it! Sometimes just getting things written down lets you look at them from a different perspective, and the need for change seems suddenly evident. It’s not always easy to see the solution, though, and I don’t suppose it should be. This self-examination stuff can be hard work, and I guess that’s really the point.

So, maybe tomorrow morning I’ll start by just making some eggs.