7 a.m.: Get up, shower, dress.
7:30: I am in the coffee shop reading Clark Coolidge as part of my 9000 books of poetry project.
8:30-:11:15. I am in my office. I work on the article I am supposed to be working on. I see a student for about 10 minutes. I make a phone call and leave a message. I write an email to another scholar with a very specific question. I get an email from someone how invited me to submit an article, with some comments on the article. I answer him. A colleague comes in to consult about something. I go back to the article between these other tasks. Altogether a productive two hours of writing jammed in amidst an hour of other tasks.
11:15: I close my document for the day. I pay my electric bill and look at some recommendations I have to write. Eat lunch. I read a chapter of El cuarto de atrás for tomorrow's class. The scholar I asked a question earlier in the morning responds by email. I read his response and thank him.
12:30: I read more Coolidge. Look again at the recommendations I have to write, making sure I have the addresses and deadlines handy.
1:30. Meeting with librarian about how to put all of my scholarship on line through KU's open access program.
2:20. Now I'm in my office. I email the librarian my cv so she can help me get my publications on line with open access. I blog a bit. Finish the Coolidge book and write a post about that. There are things I could be doing now, but it feels like my midafternoon lull.
3:00. I decide to read my students proposals (revisions). I go ahead and do that. There are two of them to read. Now it's 3:18.
3:19. Coffee break! I talk with the chair of the dept. about the lecture on Thursday, etc...
3:27. I'm back in the office. I send a few emails. Check in with the writer's group. Really, I don't have to do more work today. I can finish class prep in the morning and write those recommendations. A few more things come up in the email.
4:30-5:30. Therapy.
Back to my office to deal with some more email.
6:00. Phone call. Spouse is promoted to full professor! I go have dinner. Will I have energy afterwards to do something else academic? I'll have a drink with Barney at 7:30.
10:31: I'm back home now. I was with Barney at the bar until now, and we ran into Bob and Jessica too. I'll read James schuyler until bedtime.
11:00 p.m. I'm turning in now. Basically I figured out that the day is over at 3:30. If I can do more work after that, that's great, but my real work is from 8:30-12.
3 comments:
Jonathan, I noticed you didn't work on your book during this day. How do you go about balancing out working on mid-sized projects like articles, while also having a larger project in process?
Thomas has offered some helpful advice on this organizational problem, and I'm wondering what you would say.
The article is part of the book. Not exactly a chapter of it, but a place where I can work out some of the ideas for it, so I don't see it as too much of a deviation. I'm trying to publish not too many articles based on the book, so it's a delicate balancing act. I like publishing both books and articles, but if I didn't have a book project I wouldn't have to worry about the overlap.
Congratulations to your wife! She proves that research is not "effectively gendered male" as some people like to suggest.
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