Imaginary magnitude

As an academic, one has to shift between many different tasks; writing drafts for That Next Great Paper, polishing text, going over referee reports, writing grant applications, reading, marking students’ papers, developing lectures, lecture, talk with students about this and that, and so on.

Some of these activities are easily started (and sometimes even easily finished), for other stuff one needs more time to get things going. Enter one or more kids in the civilian side of the equation, and you also have some serious boundary conditions that envelopes these activities.

Mathias Klang has interesting things to say about these issues. How, he asks, should one guard the valuable time? One thing that works for me is to change location, spend an afternoon in the university library reading room with books and Powerbook. Another thing that some colleagues have suggested and that I’ve tried sometimes is to keep a quantized goal: “read at least half an hour every day, even if you’re swamped with teaching”, “write at least one page a day, no matter what”, that kind of thing. Works for me sometimes, but easily breaks down.