Don't multi-task. You are trying to "save" time by doing it, but each activity requires its own attention. Take your time. Multi-tasking is cognitively taxing, and even people who think they are good at it are actually not.
[exceptions: listening to music while cleaning or cooking. You can also think about a problem while walking. I take a walk (exercise) while also looking at birds. We could call this "complementary multi-tasking," where one activity reinforces the other rather than being a distraction.]
Segment time if you must, but only for a deep purpose. It's fine to set a timer to get the laundry out of the machine, or for meditating for a certain number of minutes.
Don't fret about time. Impatience means you are undervaluing the moment you are in right now.
Stay off facebook / twitter for most of the day, or for whole days at a time. You won't miss a whole lot.
3 comments:
Yes. I really like this and the scarcity model is a career ruiner. But I tend not to like to tell people my preference because they are so scandalized and yell at me so much. What? You wrote a 300 page manuscript in less than a year by only writing a page a day, taking weekends off? And you did a lot of other things while doing that? You are lazy, then, you could have done it even faster, if you only wrote one page a day! And I am so mad! I didn't get that much done and I worked much harder, in my opinion. You are not fair! You are a bad student! You will never have a career with this attitude! And on, and on, and on. I hate academics and am very traumatized by them, and it is hard to walk into work or even start work because the majority of people are punitive authoritarian small minds and they hate writing, teaching and the intellectual life. This is what I have learned and concluded. Academics are really mean and destructive and have got to go, the whole thing has got to go if it is going to traumatize and ruin as many people as it does.
P.S. And gosh, I believe I've said this before at some point, on this very blog.
I remember a conversation in Denmark, when I was a teenager, the others were saying school was awful and I was saying it did not have to be, was not where I was from. They said I was from a rare progressive moment and it was not the reality for most, school was prison / etc., a la Foucault. I discovered later that they were right and I am still not over it . . . I guess because from ages 4-30 or so school was THE place of safety and sanity, the only place, and when it, too, became a place of torture I went into shock and I am still not out of it.
I might seem lazy too if you followed me around all day. Yet somehow I have accomplished more than people who always complain about how busy they are.
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