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.

The Great 2009 Work Habits Experiment

Ladies and gentleman, you are bearing witness to a little experiment I’m currently conducting. While my wife is away on a conference (in Iowa in January, mind you), I’m being left to my own devices. As the, er, “under-employed” half of my marriage, I have traditionally been the cook and general workabout for chores and errands that need running during the week. This is most typically a pretty bearable burden, but there are some days and weeks where it feels like all I do is busy “administrative” work without really getting a chance to settle down and write.

Well, with only myself and the cat to keep track of for the next few days, and no where in particular to go, I’m going totally free-form with my work habits, just to see what develops. I’m going to need to work harder in the next three months than I have for a long time in order to get my dissertation finished, and I’d like to try out some new work habits and see what sticks.

First, I’m eating, sleeping, and performing other necessary functions only when I feel I need to, not according to some pre-set schedule. Also, I’m not setting aside specific “work” hours, but am going to try to work only when I feel the urge or need to. It turns out that this is quite often, so I’m not going to have to worry about not getting anything done. I’m also going to take time off to do non-work things whenever and for however long the urge strikes me. This way, I’m going to try to get all of the procrastination urges and goof-off urges taken care of all in big blocks, leaving other big blocks free for work.

I don’t know if all or any of this is going to work, but it’s going to be interesting. I’m especially interested in the prospect of working in the evenings, and perhaps late (early?) into the wee hours of the night/morning. I’ve traditionally done some good work during this time, but have gotten out of it recently. Hopefully, by Sunday, I’ll have some better knowledge about how I’m going to need to work over the next few months, what works, and what doesn’t. We’ll see how it goes.

December 31, 2008

Gurg. Now I have a cold, too. It seems to be a fast-moving one, though, so hopefully it will pass on before too long.

I got back to work yesterday after our vacation(?) during the last two weeks or so. I’ve been mostly working on reading and preparing some comments on a colleague’s chapters. Whenever I read drafts of someone else’s work, I can’t help but think about what process they went through as they wrote. Was it anything like mine? How many times have certain sentences been rewritten? Paragraphs moved around? Specific words deliberated over? It’s also good to see someone else’s work in a draft stage because it reminds me that we all go through a process as we write, not just pop out a finished product, which is what you most often see of someone’s work. It’s the writer’s equivalent of being reminded that we all put our pants on one leg at a time, as my mom used to say.

Today is going to be some serious work on my diss and preparing some materials for a fellowship application. And drinking a lot of green tea and probably blowing my nose a lot. Happy New Year!

I can quit any time I want…

It’s taken me a long time to admit this to myself, but I’ve become an addict. They say acknowledging your addiction is the first step toward recovery, so here goes: I’m hooked on the internet, and I don’t want to be any more. When you add it all up, I’ve got four blogs, four email accounts, two photo-sharing accounts, and about a dozen blogs that I follow regularly. I also read four mainstream news sites, a half-dozen non-mainstream news sites, several webcomics or LOL-related funnies, and when I’m done with all that junk, I also use the interwebs for actual work. Problem is, to avoid doing the latter, I check all of the former about ten times a day, just to make sure there isn’t a comment to moderate, a comment to post, a post to write, an email to send, an email to read, a new LOL cat to snicker at, or whatever. And, if I’m honest, there’s a little endorphin rush every time I’ve got some new piece of internet candy to consume. I spend a ridiculous amount of time waiting, checking, writing, posting, etc. online ALL TO NO PURPOSE WHATSOEVER! How much of my day is spent in front of the computer and online? I don’t even want to think about it.

I don’t think the answer is just to scrap all of my online projects and favorite sites. Addiction or no, I really do enjoy maintaining the sites I have, and reading the ones I like, so I think the key is (like with so many things): moderation. This addiction has happened so gradually, I never even noticed. It’s so easy to just sit down and say, check my email, which turns into a circuit of checking ALL the sites and accounts, and what-have-you. An hour later (or more), I finally look up, bleary-eyed and ashamed, and try to then get some real work done. This happens multiple times during the day. Also, if I do this at night before bed, I find that bouncing around from one site to another has also conditioned my brain to behave in such a way, and I find myself laying in bed (an hour at least after I intended to go to bed), with my brain skipping from one topic to another, just like I’d been doing online. It takes me that much longer to fall asleep, then, and I don’t think I sleep as well as when I, say, read a book before bed.

So here’s my goal, it’s pretty simple: spend less time online; and related, no internet before bed. It’s just that easy, right? I’m not going cold turkey; honestly, in this day and age, I couldn’t if I wanted to. Just do it less. How hard could that be? Hmm…

I Can’t Think of Anything to Write

I really can’t. I don’t even have a pretty picture to post. As a writer, I try to stick to the old artists’ maxim “a line a day,” so I guess this is technically fulfilling that mandate, but certainly not with anything substantial. I “finished” the first draft of my dissertation this week, although it will need revision before sending it to my adviser next week, and I guess I’m just fresh out of writing for the moment. I’m about to go to the hardware store to pick up some things for the chair rehab, so that’s how I’ll spend my afternoon. I have a longer rumination on mental work versus physical work marinating in the back of my mind for next week.

Respect the Process

Back in college, I coined a sort of personal slogan that has stuck with me ever since. “Respect the process” is an over-achieving nerd’s way of saying, “that paper isn’t due until tomorrow morning, I’ve got plenty of time!” For me, “the process” is an approach to work (writing, specifically) that combines intuition, inspiration, preparation, and procrastination into one dangerously attractive package.

Although I suspect my friends and family would beg to differ, I am not always a very organized person. Or rather, the outward manifestations of my organization belay the inner disorganization I often feel when approaching a big writing project. The disjunct between appearing organized and still not feeling ready to write might be the result of growing up with two different schools of thought about writing. Until high school, I was told that writing should just “flow” out of you, that you should write about what inspired you, and I was generally given the impression that creativity just happened if you opened yourself to it. In high school, and then later in college, I was introduced to the more realistic view that writing is hard work, and requires discipline, organization, and structure. Unfortunately, just what structure, or how a person was supposed to organize it, was supposed to be something that each person developed on their own. So writing became, for me, a struggle between inspiration and intuition on one side, and different models of organization and discipline on the other.

When I start writing, I usually listen to only one side; either inspiration or organization, and inspiration usually wins. The problem is that inspiration usually peeters-out after a little while, and I’m left with two brilliant pages, but no idea really of where I’m going from there. It happens with both fiction and non-fiction. Then, I have to back-track mentally to figure out if there’s an argument (for non-fiction) or the bare bones of a story (for fiction). I’ve had more practice retrofitting arguments and theses onto my non-fiction work, and I’ve gotten more adept at it as I’ve progressed through graduate school. Combine this backwards approach to writing with the fact that I almost always change or shift my argument as I write, sometimes just adding nuance , and sometimes stopping and fundamentally restructuring an entire essay, chapter, section, passage, or paragraph, and you’ve got the much feared and revered “process.” It’s a roller-coaster of inspiration, dejection, abandonment, reevaluation, inspiration again, retrofitting, and rewriting.

I suppose maybe that everyone goes through a process that’s at least somewhat similar, and my admonition to myself is also a reminder that, although it may differ in the particulars from person to person, everyone ultimately has to respect the process.