On Wasting Time

Dr. Crazy has a post up about wanting the summer fun to start. If you're an academic, it never can because--surprise!--there's always another book to read, manuscript to work on, and so forth.

Exactly right. When I emerged from the cocoon of feeling too sick to work earlier this week, I thought, "all right, now I'll be productive." I have deadline-driven writing to do, but my brain is still in lazy sickness mode: it's hard to sit at the desk, let alone to work or to make my brain think about what it ought to be thinking about. What I apparently can do, very well, is to sit in a trance and think about the work I'm not getting done.

About the best I can manage now is what I call "peri-writing." It's not really writing, or even pre-writing, but it's the work that surrounds writing. This involves huge amounts of time (in between reading a manuscript sent to me for review) spent looking up things I ought to read, making notes of things I should look at, and so forth. The manuscript review is part of this, because I can then say to myself, "hey, this person isn't as lazy as you are, and here's a manuscript to prove it. Get moving!"