Thanks to the most adorable little creature in the world, my time has been chopped up into tiny slivers, and a few times a day, after I have eaten something myself, I contemplate trying to work. While my brain is too frazzled to get any real work done (or, gasp, write!), I found something I was capable of doing: editing! I took a document, a piece at a time, and edited the heck out of it. It felt good to be using my brain again, and I knew I was being productive in those 20-30 min spurts, yet when Dovie (formerly known as the Little One, but now cooing!) whimpered and needed my attention again, I could drop what I was doing at the end of a sentence/paragraph and get right back to it when she went back to sleep.
Ah, I have a brain! It appears that I just need to train it to work in short spurts.
The perverse incentives of academia
6 years ago
5 comments:
That's actually good training for when you have a "real job." My time is divided between about 8 projects, so being able to dive in and get some work done over the course of a very short span of time comes in handy.
Way to go!
I agree with Rebecca. I've been trying to get out of the mindset that I HAVE to have 2 or 3 hour blocks of time to really get anything done. It's just not practical; I need to be more efficient with smaller chunks of time.
Rebecca - are you actually able to do this with code?!? I am pretty good at getting things read/looked at, and am even learning how to write in short spans of time, but programming is hard.
UR - I am trying to learn; my time is increasingly fragmented at work as well, so I guess I will have to!
Code is a little harder. I don't write that much original code anymore -- mostly analyzing and improving other people's codes. What I do for that is I have a notebook for each project and I take a lot of notes on the code and describe what I need to do next time that I work on this project, which helps me get up to speed quickly the next time I come back to this task.
Ah, I am in the process of designing a large piece of code for my dissertation; I think once I am past the design stage, working in smaller pieces will get easier.
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