Tuesday, September 25, 2007

My guilty pleasure

I just saw this thing over at Cosmic Variance about the innocent guilty pleasures of academics. I can immediately tell you what my guildy pleasure is. Writing (fanwriting, that is). Especially blogging. It is non-productive, just for fun, and I often steal a few minutes of work time for it (like now). Bad work ethic? That's what I'm afraid of, although I hope that it's just making me a happier person who works better the rest of the time.

But as Peter at US/LHC blogs noted:

Life + Blogging = Const.

This means that the time has to be taken from somewhere. Well, at least I'm reading science blogs, right? I'm really working too.

But I'm scared of this.

1 comment:

Andreas Björklind said...

Oh, yes, this is a tough nut to crack. The eternal bad conscience of people, "What if I didn't do this, I'd have more time to do that!". Like now, I post this comment instead of working on my thesis *cough*.

Anyway.

Time management in the workplace is another tricky issue, especially for many white-collar professions; like academics. We all know that it'd be impossible to just write papers, prepare classes, lecture, go to conferences, write papers, do occasional empirical work (!), and write more papers. 100% focused, 100% of the time. Would I be a more productive academic that way? Nope, I know I wouldn't be.

From a moral point of view, I tend to think that as long as I have a guilty conscience, I am all right. ;) If I didn't have that guilty feeling, I argue, I wouldn't understand I was wasting my time when I did.

Ah, the wonderfully quirky ways we deceive ourselves!