Back in the uncomfortable questions post, crowther asks:
This is an excellent blog, but the volume of posts leaves me with a mixture of envy and annoyance (to be unnecessarily honest, perhaps). How in the world do you find the time to do so much blogging and reading of others’ blogs? Aren’t you supposed to be insanely busy trying to get tenure, changing diapers, guiding excitable but naive undergrads in research projects, etc.? Do you have time management secrets based on how time can be warped in some weird quantum way whose theoretical basis is traceable back to Einstein?
Well, one or two items here aren’t that significant for me– I already have tenure, and the trick to usefully guiding excitable undergrads in research projects is to let them do the work. It would go faster if I looked over their shoulder all the time (and in most cases, even faster if I kicked them out of the lab and did it myself), but they wouldn’t actually learn anything. If you want them to have a significant research experience, the problem is finding something to do during the times when you’re not looking over their shoulder in the lab.
But as for the rest, I have a simple and entirely classical time-management trick, which I will place below the fold to make you click through to read it:
I don’t get nearly enough sleep.
That’s pretty much it, really. Yesterday, for example, I spent a bunch of time cooking dinner, and a bunch more time checking through the draft index for the UK edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, then I stayed up late responding to comments about Chris Mooney and surfing blogs for things to tag for today’s Links Dump.
As a result, I’m a little fried this morning. And today is going to be one of those days where I need to take a much more active role in the lab. So if this blog has a certain zombie-ish character today, it’s not that I was too slow running away, it’s just a breakdown of my highly sophisticated time-management system.
(Anyway, I’m safe from zombies– Emmy would be all over any smelly dead thing that happened by, faster than you could say “BRAAAAAIIIIINNNNNZZZ….”)
a cook, a maid, and daycare. 🙂
Something on your front page today (probably an ad) is autoloading a PDF that then tries to run Javascript.
Sleep deprivation: the secret to success.
😀
I think people tend to grossly overestimate how long it takes bloggers to write blog posts. For example, I am guessing that this post took you less than five minutes to write. AMIRITE?
Ouch. I hate being sleepy, and I really _feel_ sleep deprivation. Sometimes needing sleep feels somehow immoral, when people say that they get more done by sleeping less, but I can’t do it. I need eight hours or I get really grumpy, inefficient and slow. Also I get bad sugar cravings! I wish you had had a trick that would work for me 🙂
Chad, thanks very much for taking the time (more than 5 minutes, surely?) to answer my question. Like Aka, I wish that your trick was more applicable to me!
Åka: I totally feel you. And yet if I ‘claim’ to “need sleep” my friends think I am totally being antisocial when I leave to go home. Not everyone can function on no sleep all the time like them, geez. And they complain about the lack of sleep they’re getting enough of the time too >_<
I also badly need sleep, 6 hours minimum but 8 hours preferably. I hate being sleepy, my thinking is very severely handicapped without sleep.
(Based on these effects of sleep deprivation I suspect the main goal of sleep is to restore the pools of neurotransmitters packed in lipid vesicles near synapses so they can be quickly released during the day)