Design of Work Time

Imagine designing the perfect office for yourself. What kind of lighting would you need, furniture, etc... I basically just sit down wherever I am and work. I wish I had the perfect environment but I don't.

Now think of your time as the temporal office. In other words, design your time as you would a physical space. For me the time is much more important that the physical space.

Here is mine for the upcoming semester.

Sunday: spend 1/2 hour to several hours, as needed, planning what will be done during the rest of the week.
Monday: go back to Kansas. Prepare Tuesday courses. "Precrastinate" on coming week, as Ms. Gabbert would say.
Tuesday: Teaching day. Prepare Thursday classes before and in between two classes.
Wednesday: Research day. Get something substantial written.
Thursday: Teaching day. Use time in between classes for library research or reading, or grading.
Friday: Drive back to St. Louis. Do no work at all except light reading if needed.
Saturday: Read, catch up on any other tasks.

So most of the work gets done between Sunday night and Thursday around 5:15. The week is front-loaded with work, much on the same principle as getting up early to get a head start on the day. Evenings are mostly free except on Monday. Almost all work for classes is done in the office between Monday afternoon / evening and Thursday. Writing will be done on Wednesdays and the weekends I don't go back to St Louis. Occasionally in the evening. I am working on a book, but I'm thinking I want to write only one or two chapters during the semester. One could be started on Wednesdays and finished during spring break. The other could be started right after that and done by the end of the semester.

The general principles of time design are pre-planning (use the time right before the work week), front-loading (doing as much as possible early in the day, early in the week, compression (doing as much as possible during normal work hours), and leaving space (at the ends of the day / week in reserve for when you really need it, rather than planning on working around the clock).

Clutter

Clutter can reduce focus by distracting the attention and by making materials harder to find. At the same time, some degree of clutter can provide a sense of comforting busyness. A complete lack of clutter can cause anxiety. Piles of clutter tend to follow me around: in my car, my office, my apartment, different rooms of my house, my computer desktop, my email inbox. This year I am keeping my inbox as clear as possible--even if it means searching through other folders to find old messages I need. I am also keeping the desktop of the computer as clear as possible, with only three folders of work. I am working toward an almost completely paperless existence. The idea would be to have only the computer itself, some notebooks, and whatever books I need at any given time.

Care and Feeding of the CV

The CV documents your entire career and needs to be updated monthly or whenever information changes. I view mine as a beast the must be fed. I am always correcting minor formatting errors and the like.

Shorter Projects

Doing a lot of very short projects can be inefficient. It seems easier to write a book review, but writing five 1,000-word reviews is probably more time than a 6 thousand-word article. Writing 10 such articles on disparate matters would be more work than a book of 10 chapters of 8,000 words each.

The advantage of shorter writing assignments, however, is that each one is less painful than a larger one would be. There is a more immediate short-term benefit in getting something done quickly. Since scholarship is a game of delayed gratification, it is nice to have a few things that pay off more immediately, if only in a fairly trivial way.

The trick, then, is to arrive at the right calculus of shorter and longer, shorter term and longer term, things that you have to write. In my case, for example, I sometimes published next to nothing in a year I was writing a book. Since my evaluation period is a calendar year, I have to make sure that something appears or is accepted each year, even if a long-term project might take several years to come out. At the same time, I can't let myself be distracted with lots of little stuff because that creates inefficiency.

Rhythm

in prose is related to the illusion of fluency. A lot of stylistic revisions I make have the aim of fixing unwanted rhythmic hiccups, interruptions of the flow. Once again, the process of writing (how you achieve that flow) is less important than the product, or having achieved that fluency at the end. Unfortunately, few of us are fluent writers in early drafts.

Take that paragraph above, which is basically written on the fly. It's fine for a blog post, but wouldn't really cut it in one of my books. Almost no prose is as well-written rhythmically as poetry. That would be an impossible standard. Of course most poetry doesn't achieve that standard either.

I'm writing something in Spanish now to give as a talk later this month. The rhythm of Spanish prose is quite different because the information structure of sentences is more flexible and sentences tend to be longer, with more seemingly unimportant material in the beginning of sentences, so this makes me conscious of having to achieve a different sort of flow in my writing.

Writing as Product, not Process

I envision writing as a product, not a process. I think an over-emphasis on the process itself is damaging in that it prevents us from envisioning the final product that we are aiming for. I call this the translators fallacy: suppose the translator goes back and forth between the words "vertigo" and "dizziness" a half-dozen times, finally settling on "dizziness." The translator can write a beautiful essay explaining the process, but ultimately the reader of the translation only has the final result, one work of the other. It doesn't matter if a sentence is revised many times if the end-result is not better.

There should be, I feel, a base-line first-draft style that is serviceable and produced with some degree of fluency. Revisions of style might still be laborious, but they will make something good even better.

Fluent Writing

I'd like to be able to write fluently the way I can sometimes talk fluently. In other words, produce complete sentences continuously on the first try, writing pretty much at the pace of medium-slow typing. I can do it in blogging, but more rarely in scholarly writing. I think the culture of revision means that we have trained ourselves not to write so fluently: after all, we can always go back and rewrite it. I'm thinking about trying to develop that capacity of fluency. I did it this morning, finishing the preface to the new modernism book fairly quickly.

Here the key might be to notice when I'm doing it and trying to remember what it feels like.