Procrastination (and Community)

After an excellent twelve days of essentially zero work, I made it back to the office at 7:45am today. The new semester hasn’t officially started yet, but when it does, I’ll have to get in earlier since I’m slotted to teach the 8am section of second semester General Chemistry. The goal for this week is to make headway in things I procrastinated from doing end of last semester. It was nice to have a smooth, relaxing end partly because of my procrastination. I have no regrets after a good break.

The main item on my plate is to finish a research manuscript, or at least get it into good shape before classes begin. Last semester I wrote the abstract, half the introduction sans references, and half the methods section with references. The bulk of the paper, the results and discussion sections, are looming. My student has compiled some tables of results, but I will need to make some choices as to what goes into the main manuscript, and what goes into the supplementary material. She’s also started making a few figures, and chances are I will have to make some too. The undergraduate working on this project is very capable, but she’s only a sophomore and doesn’t have as much experience (this is her first project). In any case, I always double-check data before it goes out. Target submission: end of January.

But I’ve been avoiding making headway on the manuscript last semester, and today was no different. I always have difficulty motivating myself to write up research results. For me, it feels "unproductive", because the research is completed and I already know the story. So this morning I managed to distract myself by responding to some e-mail from the last couple of weeks, chat with colleagues and wish them a happy new year, write a recommendation letter for a student (due in three weeks), and catch up on some journal article reading in my research area of interest but not closely related to my actual projects. After lunch with another colleague, and more chatting about teaching and pedagogy, and “cleaning my desk” one more time, I had finally run out of excuses. So at 2pm, I downloaded the latest update of EndNote (my final bit of procrastination) and got to work. I made minor modifications to the text of the abstract and introduction but what I really accomplished was hunting down some papers I had read a while back and putting in the references in the introduction. Two hours later, I decided that was enough for the day, and I’ll make more progress tomorrow. The important thing was to actually start. Once I do that, it gets easier.

Over the break I was watching DVDS of the TV series Community. It’s about a bunch of quirky friends who form a study group at a community college. The characters are colorful, the adventures are wild, the college-wide laser tag and blanket forts are way over the top, and there are a bunch of crazy people who do silly things. Granted, this is TV, and I don’t think actual college students behave like this. I certainly didn’t get the same vibe reading Rebekah Nathan’s book. But it did make me think about how much students procrastinate. This study group spends practically no time studying (although there are many dioramas built as class projects) and it’s all about wacky interpersonal relationships. After all, the show is called “Community”, and it is a laugh-out loud comedy. It reminds me why I avoided study groups when I was a college student – you didn’t get very much done. Yes, I would ask friends who were classmates if I was really stuck on something, but we wouldn’t have scheduled study group sessions.

However, building community is important (as described in my last post). So the time I took to shoot the breeze with people is a good thing to do, even if I did procrastinate. It’s not always about cranking out the manuscripts. I think I’m willing to sacrifice some potential “productivity” for good community. And I make good use of procrastination. By having a larger project that I try to avoid doing, I get a bunch of other stuff done. It works well, until you really do need to finish that larger project. To get that accomplished I have an even larger pie-in-the-sky project (with no deadline) where I’ve made hardly any progress.

Goal for tomorrow: More writing. But it’s okay to work on a few other things too! And no, writing this blog is NOT used to procrastinate from work. I keep my work time separate from my non-work time, and almost never write this blog when I’m at work. Okay, there was the one time I was proctoring a final exam, and yes, I was procrastinating from something else I could have been doing! And maybe try to make it in 5 minutes earlier so I can ease into waking up earlier.