Switching Gears
So I started NaNoWriMo this year. I truly do think that this is a great thing to do, and I encourage everybody to complete it at least once. Unfortunately, I will not finish.
I just never got truly excited about it this year. However, I still like the idea of using your downtime to do something productive. Not in the sense of checking things off of your todo list, but in the sense of producing something.
One of the nice things about NaNoWriMo is the notion of the deadline. The big 50,000 goal and the 30 days force you to put aside your inner editor and just write. “30 days and nights of literary abandon.” I think that is a great slogan, and it is at the heart of the endeavor. You just have to go for it, to dive head first, and at the end there is a novel. It may be terrible, but you finished it, and that is awesome.
So why I am stopping?
The conceptual core of NaNoWriMo is what really excites me, but I was not able to get excited about the particular vehicle this year. So I decided to get a new vehicle.
I am just not sure what I will be driving.
Some may read this post as a cop out, and that is fair. But I am hoping that I can look back at the end of the month and see that I have produced something. Whether it be taking some pictures, writing posts on here about things I find interesting, or building something, who knows? (Okay, probably not that last one…)
In Perpetual Search of Continual Productivity
This is an issue I have had for a while. While I feel over the long term I am productive, I always feel like I could be more productive in the short term. Or more accurately, I could have more guilt-free time if I could consistently be productive ever day. I am always looking for ways to basically force myself into this. Will power is overrated, as Jillian Michaels once said on The Biggest Loser, and I know that this is the case. Every so often, you are going to cave, unfortunately.
So I stumbled upon an interesting article on being a productive academic. I’ve read articles on this topic before, and I often find them preachy and written by people who seem to have no problem running on full gas all the time and who can just work work work. That’s not me. I am easily distracted, and well, at times lazy.
However, very quickly in the article he points out that he 1) has lots of things going on outside of his academic life and 2) is lazy. I was starting to like this article already.
The key thesis is to reduce the barriers to being productive so that is the steady state. And make things that get in the way of productivity have higher cost. Effectively, make being productive the laziest thing you can do at any given point in time.
He talks about many of the issues that plague me, but one in particular gets me: the dreaded web browsing loop. Keep checking sites over and over. I find myself doing it without realizing sometimes. My laptop now has an edited /etc/hosts file. Again, willpower is overrated, I need something to break the cycle. You feel real silly when you go to facebook (sorry Harry) and see a 404 message staring you in the face.
There are other tips in the article, and I plan on using many of them. Some of them don’t quite fit my/our life, but many of them do. Right now things are pretty easy to manage work-wise, but I hope to be a professor some day, and I know the number of things to juggle will increase dramatically. However, I don’t feel the solution is throw every waking hour at work. That can’t be the solution. Not all the time, not 365. I need to be more efficient, more productive on a regular basis.
I figure if I can give up cheese and lose almost 40 pounds, I can get more work done, right?
