to be more creative, try becoming a more boring person?

first of all, apologies to my readers for the dearth of posts in the last few weeks months and especially the lack of posts with any personal depth in them. i won't go into detail about it today, but this change in my life from a "gun-for-hire" postdoc to a "lifer" prof has bent my mind awry and i'm still learning how to cope with the job. sometimes it just feels .. crippling.

more precisely, it's not the actual job that's hard, but the stress and overthinking of this faraway goal called tenure. the more i think about it, the more it feels like i'm getting my ph.d. again.

all of that said, i'm going to go the lazy route again: i'll pass someone else's well-written piece to you (instead of writing my own).

---

when i was younger and a newer hand at research, i'd make a startling insight in my work. immediately aftewards, i'd lament why it took me so long to figure it out .. especially when the outcome appeared very simple.

i've become less critical of myself over the years, but the question still remains:

what if there were ways to become better at solving problems?
is it more than just a pipe dream to improve oneself?

below are excerpts from an essay i found, through one social media engine or another. what struck me about it was how i've unconsciously kept some of these habits and gotten more insights, in the last few years.

"A 2004 study published in Naturε examined the role of sleep in the process of generating insight. They found that sleep, regardless of time of day, doubled the number of subjects who came up with the insight solution to a task. (Presented graphically above.) This effect was only evident in those who had struggled with the problem, so it was the unique combination of struggling followed by sleep and not sleep alone that boosted insight.
..
"There’s a good reason for this: mind-wandering fosters creativity. A 2012 study (results pictured below) found that any sort of mind-wandering will do, but the kind elicited during a low-effort task was more effective than even that of doing nothing .. This, too, is congruent with my experience. How much insight has been produced while taking a shower or mowing the lawn? Paul Dιrac, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, would take long hikes in the wood. I’d bet money that this was prime mind-wandering time."

~ from "The Science of Problem Solving" @rs.io

of course, this could all just be a manifestation of confirmation bias (or if you will, the fallacy of the consequent). what i do recall, however, are periods of correlation: i was highly uncreative during those times when i was sleeping very little and had no time to exercise.

lastly, the tl;dr at the end of the essay is suggestively helpful. i'd recommend newcomers to research at least to try a few of the habits listed, if only to see what works (or not) for you.

ARR! more machine now, than man .. twisted and evil.

"On the one hand, today’s computers feature programming and writing tools more powerful than anything available in the twentieth century. But, in a different way, each of these tasks would be much harder: on a modern machine, each man would face a more challenging battle with distraction ... Kafka, Kerouac, and Wozniak had one advantage over us: they worked on machines that did not readily do more than one thing at a time, easily yielding to our conflicting desires. And, while distraction was surely available—say, by reading the newspaper, or chatting with friends—there was a crucial difference. Today’s machines don’t just allow distraction; they promote it. The Web calls us constantly, like a carnival barker, and the machines, instead of keeping us on task, make it easy to get drawn in—and even add their own distractions to the mix. In short: we have built a generation of “distraction machines” that make great feats of concentrated effort harder instead of easier."

~ from "HOW TODAY'S COMPUTERS WEAKEN OUR BRAIN @newyorker "

so today i wrote out something by hand.

i must said this before, but ..

always stick to a plan whenever you use a computer!

.. .. regardless of whether the task is for work or for play.

it's taken me long enough to realise .. but i'm a lot happier (or satisfied) in the mornings if i spend 1-2 hours working on paper first and then tend to the computer (read: internet).

i guess i dislike my email inbox that much. 7-:

also: as that "easy" proof that i wrote about yesterday bothered me enough that i wrote it out longhand on a sheet of A4 or two.

looking at it now, maybe it's worth adding to the revision .. or at least, some abridged version of it ..


added: 07:24EST

there's something very soothing about paper .. especially as an adult who was raised before the age of touchscreens, the prevalence of home internet, or even GUIs. sure, i struggled learning cursive script for years at school, as well as a few summers of practicing hanzi (but the latter ultimately, to no avail). back then, it was often a personal flaw to have bad handwriting.

despite fewer options in the past, i still prefer working things out longhand and on paper. (if smartboards and tablets improve their functionality, then i'd be happy to switch, of course.) maybe i'm imagining things, but i find it harder to remember what i type [1] than what i write by hand.

as long as i'm speculating, i think it has to do with visual or body-spatial awareness. the redundancy of information, though encoded through different sensory inputs, might actually strengthen the memory.

yes, this may be a spurious claim. on the other hand, memory techniques such as the method of loci have been around since the time of ancient rome .. which reminds me: i've been meaning to train in that.

all that memory technique stuff aside, there are other strengths of paper over typing. for example, when writing on a page, i have the whole page and i can be nonlinear in my thinking, switch modes at will.

• i can draw a diagram in one corner,
• start a chain of inequalities in the middle,
• pass back and forth quickly between them,
• circle one term in line 2 of those inequalities,
• jot down a note next to it (say, that i need to check if this variant of yοung's inequality in the literature) ..

.. and so on. so far there aren't too many computer interfaces that can easily do the same [2]. in regards to typing, the problem is that every thought you have has to be "discretised" into words or symbols.

in fact, there are some mornings when i've set a rule: no words: just diagrams and computations, just to vary my thinking a little and push what i can do. conversely, when the pile of pages of notes starts containing more and subtler items than i can easily keep track, then the LaTeX comes:

remembering: to type is to force a linear order on your thoughts.


[1] there are exceptions, and they are the rare times when i say aloud what i'm typing in order to see if the words and phrases sound right. (this is often the case, as you may imagine, when i'm writing some sort of introduction.) in these cases, i suspect that the memory is recorded through audial cues as well.

on a related note, i was always the kind of student who, during lectures, would write down what was on the blackboard as well as what the instructor said. it took me a long time to realise that people didn't do the same thing .. and why everyone kept wanting to borrow my class notes (even before my handwriting improved as an adult).

[2] i mean something different from being able to add handwritten comments to an extant PDF or Word document. so far i've not seen anything sufficiently robust so that one can build a document on a tablet purely from digital handwriting.

MoAR: more bad news than good, this week.

i don't think that this week's roundup will cheer you up. 7-:

the first two stories are about have's and have-not's, the next two are about setbacks in research and publishing, and the last one's about the downside of "quantifying everything" ..

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1. the world might be flat, but what if you're not part of "the world" ..?

it's easy to forget that though "everything" is available on the web, some people might still not have the access to it .. especially those who need it.

on a related note, i worry about the future of public libraries ..

"Joshua sometimes does his homework at a McDonald's restaurant — not because he is drawn by the burgers, but because the fast-food chain is one of the few places in this southern Alabama city of 4,000 where he can get online access free once the public library closes.

Cheap smartphones and tablets have put Web-ready technology into more hands than ever. But the price of Internet connectivity hasn't come down nearly as quickly. And in many rural areas, high-speed Internet through traditional phone lines simply isn't available at any price. The result is a divide between families that have broadband constantly available on their home computers and phones, and those that have to plan their days around visits to free sources of Internet access."

~ from The Web-Deprived Study at McDonald's @wsj

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2. name, email .. rank?

in the first lecture of the course i'd teach, i often spent the first minute or two introducing myself .. and then indicating who i was not:

you wouldn't call a corporal a general, right?
so: i'm not "professor" geminus.

these guys, though, have a similar rule but with a few other things in mind ..

"To ensure that we remain conscious of the adjunctification of CUNY, we ask that you do not call us ‘Professor.’ We are hired as adjunct lecturers and it is important that you remember that. You deserve to be taught by properly compensated professors whose full attention is to teaching and scholarship."

~ from "We Ask That You Do Not Call Us Professor" @thebillfold

well, if it really is the truth, then maybe the students should know, one way or another.

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3. it might be wrong, but is it still interesting?

everyone is wrong on occasion.  for me, "on occasion" should be replaced with "almost all the time."  my ideas are wrong at least 95% of the time, in that they don't work for the intended task.

as some small consolation to myself, i happen to believe that ..

.. if you've never been wrong before, then you've never reached your limits;
if all of your ideas are working, then you're probably not getting enough ideas.

that said, these authors have my respect. it's not easy, admitting you were wrong about something ..

"On 10 December 2012, we submitted a paper “Rota’s Universal Operators and Invariant Subspaces in Hilbert Spaces” for publication, and we spoke about it several times before the more formal announcement at the RSME meeting in Santiago de Compostela on 25 January 2013. By that time, the paper had been read and no problems found by several other mathematicians. We have heard nothing so far from the journal to which it was submitted.

We regret to inform you, however, that a gap in our proof was discovered after the announcement at Santiago. After working for the past few days to bridge the gap, so far unsuccessfully, we are today formally withdrawing our submission to the journal.
...
So far at least, there have been no errors found in the paper besides the erroneous assertion that the work included in the paper proved the Invariant Subspace Theorem, while in fact it did not. "

~ from "[a] Statement from Cowen and Gallardo" @cafematematico

i'm neither an expert in functional analysis or in psychology. the mood of this announcement sounds positive to me, though .. which might be crucial for these two researchers.

that sounded cryptic. by that i mean:

depending on one's training and personality, it can be easier to think creatively about
something when not under constraint. it's the difference between looking (A) for
something interesting and (B) being driven to find a very specific something.

so my hope is that these guys keep in mind that they already have some good theorems
in the bag. if they can still prove the conjecture, then great; in the meanwhile, if something
else interesting comes up from their investigations, then it already has the publicity to
make a good upcoming line of research.

[shrugs]

for a while, everyone always told me to be optimistic .. which, to be honest, constantly got on my nerves. i guess i've finally been fully brainwashed! (-:

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4. definitions can be important.

i encountered this one definition of "genius," the other day.

"The “scientific genius” Simonton refers to is a particular type of scientist; their contributions “are not just extensions of already-established, domain-specific expertise." Instead, “the scientific genius conceives of a novel expertise.” Simonton uses words like “groundbreaking” and “overthrow” to illustrate the work of these individuals, explaining that they each contributed to science in one of two major ways: either by founding an entirely new field or by revolutionizing an already-existing discipline.

Today, according to Simonton, there just isn’t room to create new disciplines or overthrow the old ones. “It is difficult to imagine that scientists have overlooked some phenomenon worthy of its own discipline,” he writes. Furthermore, most scientific fields aren’t in the type of crisis that would enable paradigm shifts, according to Thomas Kuhn’s classic view of scientific revolutions. Simonton argues that instead of finding big new ideas, scientists currently work on the details in increasingly specialized and precise ways."

~ from is scientific genius a thing of the past @arstechnica

on the one hand, there is a point to this:

professionally, it doesn't pay to have a completely new idea that is essentially unrelated
to all previous approaches. in the case of mathematics, the problem lies in who can possibly
check the work, because there is an opportunity cost to learn something completely new
and separate from one's expertise.

on the other hand, i know of very few persons who can accurately predict history, even for
scientific trends (which draw on quantitative approaches).

the word "open" has a clear, standard definition in topology, but as for copyrights?

"One piece of evidence on researchers’ opinions comes from the open-access journal Scientific Reports, which since July 2012 has been offering researchers a choice of three types of licence. One is CC-BY. A more restrictive version, CC-BY-NC-SA, lets others remix, tweak and build on work if they give credit to the original author, but only for non-commercial (NC) purposes, and only if they license what they produce under the same terms (SA, or 'share-alike’). A third licence, CC-BY-NC-ND, is the most restrictive, allowing others to download and share work, but not to change it in any way (ND, ‘no derivative works’), or use it commercially."

~ from "Researchers opt to limit uses of open-access publications" @nature

there is a point to this, even apart from the discussion of profits, potential greed, and capitalism.

say that i take a great snapshot of a 4th of July barbecue, with a cute little girl holding a
pinwheel and grinning gap-toothed at the camera. would i have the right to forbid others to
use the photo if i have a personal objection? maybe a white supremacist group would want
to use it for their website --- it might give their theme of "america," after all --- if i chose
the wrong license, then i have no legal recourse from their use of it.

the same could be said for bio/engineering breakthroughs that lead to military weapons.

and then, what is a good definition of "lazy" ..?

lately i've been feeling unproductive .. not quite lazy, but just not effective. i think
it has to do with my not having to teach. it frees up a lot of time in the day .. which
means, shouldn't i be doing real work at some point?

i've not reconciled that feeling yet. this doesn't prove anything, but it does assuage my guilt a bit ..

"Now we also know that if you study absolute world class, best virtuoso violin players, none of them put in more than about four or so hours of practice in a day, because that’s the cognitive limit. And this limit actually shows up in a lot of different fields where people do intense training, that you really can’t do about more than four or so hours of this type of really mental strain.

And they often break this into two sessions, of two hours and then two hours. So there’s huge limits here. I think if you’re able to do three, maybe four hours of this sort of deep work in a typical day, you’re hitting basically the mental speed limit, the amount of concentration your brain is actually able to give."

~ from "Four hours of concentration" @johnbcook, via accidentalcreative

apparently it's not just musicians. it apparently worked for poincaré, too.

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5. maybe numeracy isn't a bad ability to have.

i found this article off a friend's social media feed. if you've not seen it yet, it's worth a look:

"Modernity provides too many variables, but too little data per variable. So the spurious relationships grow much, much faster than real information.

In other words: Big data may mean more information, but it also means more false information.

Just like bankers who own a free option — where they make the profits and transfer losses to others – researchers have the ability to pick whatever statistics confirm their beliefs (or show good results) … and then ditch the rest. "

~ from "Beware the Big Errors of 'Big Data'" @wired

... (UPDATED)

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originally posted: 4:13EST, 18 jan 2013

you'd think i'd have learned this lesson by now:

never do more than one thing at a time!

here, "at a time" also includes a time period as long as the same day morning or afternoon*. i'm considering extending the definition to include the same day*/week, too.

more on this .. but later, not now;
the sun is shining and there's work left to accomplish ..!

* = added later.

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added: 14:12EST, 10 jan 2013

to explain, on friday afternoons (like yesterday) i occasionally attend a research seminar at a different but nearby university. from my campus to there, the bus trip takes about 40 minutes and buses come regularly at 20 minute intervals.

the seminar is 2 hours long and ends at 16:00. allowing time for lunch, it usually means that i write off those afternoons. so if i want to be productive at all on those fridays, then it means that the morning becomes a rather crucial worktime ..

.. and yesterday morning didn't go so well, that's all. between emails and small errands and the like, i just lost my chance to be productive. i hate it when that happens ..

---

i'm starting to consider forming lists of tasks that only take 1 hour to complete, like read and take notes on the proof of this one lemma from a particular article or fix all the notation from this one section of this manuscript. a list like that would be really handy because otherwise, all of those hour-long blocks of time in my schedule would be wasted ..

.. that is, "wasted" in that i start a process that takes two or more hours, like re-work the proof of a technical lemma. from experience, i rarely have the luck that it requires just an easy fix [1].

the trouble with that kind of task is that it requires 10-15 minutes even to get into the flow of the project again, such as remembering how the lemma is used (and therefore which hypotheses can be relaxed, which ones not). even if you make a lot of progress and get the right ideas, then you still have to execute the idea.

often that involves $\LaTeX$, which always takes a lot more time than you think. there have been too many times when i knew what to do at that moment and started LaTeX'ing, only to be interrupted soon after for a seminar or class. in doing so, i'd lose that "runtime memory" that i had collected over that earlier work-hour .. so my old $\LaTeX$ becomes indecipherable crap and i'd have to start over.

so again: a list like that would be really useful. the problem is that maintaining that kind of list sounds like more trouble than its reward is worth.

i don't know. maybe i should try it anyway.



[1] more precisely, sometimes it is an easy fix, but you have to go through the whole argument to be sure that it will actually fix the problem (and not cause any further complications).

mildly relevant: creativity, DIY.

this is probably one of the recurring themes in my posts, such as the last one about mornings ..

.. but, if only to become more effective in one's goals, there's a lot to be said for hacking one's own habits and inclinations, conscious or otherwise. there's a difference between working effectively at a fixed task (where considerations of time can be measured quantitatively) versus being prolific at a creative task, for example.

the more i think about it, the more they seem like different modes of thinking. it's therefore appropriate to consider ways of making these experiences more efficient and separately so ..!

---

Creativity in the Wild: Improving Creative Reasoning through Immersion in Natural Settings

Ruth Ann Atchley¹, David L. Strayer^2*, Paul Atchley¹

1 Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, United States of America, 2 Department of Psychology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States of America

... However, the impact of nature on higher-level tasks such as creative problem solving has not been explored. Here we show that four days of immersion in nature, and the corresponding disconnection from multi-media and technology, increases performance on a creativity, problem-solving task by a full 50% in a group of naive hikers. Our results demonstrate that there is a cognitive advantage to be realized if we spend time immersed in a natural setting. .

---

Creativity Happens When You Least Expect It

By Sian Beilock | Dec 07, 2012

... But not all tasks require working memory for success. In fact, sometimes people’s ability to think about information in new and unusual ways can actually be hampered when they wield too much brainpower. This means that what we think of as our optimal time of day, may not be optimal for everything.

Recent research confirms this idea. In a paper published last year in the journal Thinking and Reasoning, psychologist Mareike Wieth and her colleagues found that when people have to solve “insight problems” that require a high degree of creativity, solvers are much more successful when they tackle these problems at the time of day in which they are least alert.

---

i must say: the more i learn about the human brain, the more amazed i am at how it works ..!

a quick one, while he's away .. (updated)

// started: 24 dec 2012, mid-morning.

i haven't worked in a coffeehouse in a while:
comforting but slightly unfamiliar.

the background christmas music is distracting, though.

// added: 25 dec 2012, early morning.

due to oceanic jet lag, i woke up dreadfully early, well before sunrise on EST .. and managed to improve a technical lemma in one of my manuscripts.

so if all goes well, then this will make an extant proof even clearer,
and will cut away ~2 pages from the previous writeup.

not bad: a little thinking done, even before any of the family's woken up. you see, the older i get, the harder it seems to carry a normal conversation, first thing in the morning.

put otherwise, i feel more encouraged to work out ideas, right away upon waking up ..

.. as if it were a perfect time to hack my unconscious,
see what strange intuitions have occurred to me while i slept, the night before ..

.. so it happens fairly often that i can't wait to get up and start the day, even if i'm not fully awake. ultimately, i'm a more effective (and less irritable) person when left alone in the mornings .. at least long enough to sort out an idea or two.

// added: 25 dec 2012, late afternoon.

i was about to check the arXiv .. but then realised:

if i do look for preprints, then it's likely that i'll browse through some of them and start thinking about ideas. once that happens, then the whole week will turn into something degenerate.

it won't really be a holiday, nor will it be a proper workweek. i'll probably judge it as one or the other; in either case, i won't be satisfied by what will happen.

no good can come out of this.

so i left the arXiv alone, for now. it's one thing to work in the early mornings when everyone else is asleep .. but if i've made a point to visit family during the holidays, then shouldn't i be consistent and set aside the maths?

[sighs]

a day in the life: lack of willpower, and footnoted opinions about on marginal utilities of productivity and on collaboration.

(this was originally written after sundown on sunday, 4 november 2012.)

the sentiments are pretty common in my life, so this post is probably an instance of the usual affect of academic researchers who work all the time. lately i've developed the opinion that this affect mightn't be the most effective means of working, especially if one trades in the coin that is creativity and innovation [1].

with that in mind, the short post below is about trying to hack my own personal productivity function, by way of a morning routine that exploits the temporary "reboot" effect after a good night's sleep.

despite the brevity of the post, i surprised even myself by how many side opinions i have in this business. some are about the nature of collaboration .. which i'll write more about in a future post.

---

---

---

in principle i want to work, but i cannot seem to gather the willpower to do so on a sunday evening to break out the pen and pad of paper, turn to section 3 of someone else's paper, and work out details to technical lemmas.

i'd much rather it be easy. anyone would.

experience tells me, however, that if i don't put in the work, then i won't really understand any of it .. at least to the degree that i can effectively use their results.

i'm not so tired from the week before and there is nothing stopping me from doing what i described above. on the other hand, i don't feel well-rested, either. there is the risk that

• i start working,
• everything's going well,
• and suddenly it's .. 2am? fvck!

my original intention would have been, as always, to get up bright and early at 7am [2] and make use of the pure productivity of the morning, as to make some significant progress on my own solo [3] projects ..

.. because i know, from experience, that the time i spend at the office will be productive, but not nearly as much as those first morning hours.



as for those footnotes ..

mildly relevant: for collaboration purposes?

interesting:

from mathιm

it would be more convenient, though, if they allowed rendering through LaTeX .. (-;.

mildly relevant: sometimes we are too smart for our own good.

the following article sounds paradoxical, but i think it's true. for the same reason(s), it's why i like getting up in the morning, making a cup of coffee, and while i'm waking up, start to do maths.

it's a brand new day;
i'm ready to work out the details now!

// from "why programmers work at night" @swizec

Why then do we perform our most mentally complex work when the brain wants to sleep and we do simpler tasks when our brain is at its sharpest and brightest?

Because being tired makes us better coders.

.. You’d think I’d work better – so much energy, so much infinite overclocked brainpower. But instead I keep tripping over myself because I can’t focus for more than two seconds at a time.

.. We have too much brainpower for ~80% of the tasks we work on – face it, writing that one juicy algorithm, requires ten times as much code to produce an environment in which it can run. Even if you’re doing the most advanced machine learning (or something) imaginable, a lot of the work is simply cleaning up the data and presenting results in a lovely manner.

And when your brain isn’t working at full capacity it looks for something to do. Being tired makes you dumb enough that the task at hand is enough.

sometimes being a little antisocial is helpful ..

this morning i worked at an idea for a while, until 9am.

when i thought about heading to the office, continuing with other bits of work, i got up to fetch my knapsack .. but then paused.

we have many visitors, this week;
there's lunch and then a seminar [1],
probably afterwards, a few discussions ..

.. so i sat down again, looked once more at my diagram ..

maybe 10am instead?

.. and continued to work at my kitchen table, with these funny "projections" on Lebesgue null sets.

---

i like my colleagues, i enjoy talking with them, but time often runs away if i don't keep a close watch on it ..

.. and in general, projects don't naturally fit themselves into my schedule.

like anyone else's work, my projects need attention and creativity .. and according to zenhabits, creativity needs solitude: to paraphrase,

“In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for contructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.” 

~Rollo May.

at any rate, solitude may not be necessary for me, but it is sufficient.  so to my friends, i enjoy your company ..

.. but i'll see you, sometime.  there's work to do. q-:


[1] as a general rule, seminars in finland are 2 hours long (2 x 45 min).  suffice it to say that it's something of a time investment.

i used to be cleverer when i was younger ..

no, i am not jεnna burkε from the bachelοr, for i am far uglier and i do maths.  you can find her here instead.

---

while loading up my web browser today, the mathscinet search page appears .. and suddenly i'm confused:

ye gods: what article did i want to look up?
i'm so forgetful .. what could it have been?

i mean, lately i've been thinking about this theorem and how to extend it,
but there's nothing in the literature that fits .. i checked already ..

then it occurred to me: it's the start page.

why is it now the start page?!?
but then i remember ..

[[[ rewind to yesterday ]]]

i'm loading up the web browser, intent on looking up a reference and the statement of a particular lemma, and so my start page appears ..

.. which is gmail.

absently i log in, and there are emails to reply.  so i start replying, wondering what to say for one particular message ..

.. and 20 minutes later, i realise that i never ran the mathscinet search!

*argh* ..!

an idea immediately comes to mind.  clicking on "settings," i switch my start page to mathscinet.

well, if i forget again and do what my browser tells me to do,

then at least i'll be directed towards mathematics,
which is a more productive form of confusion and misdirection ..

[[[ fast-forward back to today ]]]

i sigh and press Alt-F4, and the browser window disappears .. but then i remember that i wanted to check my email.

i'm about to click on the firefox icon, but my LaTeX is suddenly staring at me .. so i give up.

i probably don't have any new mail .. and if i do,
it's probably not important: i'll do it later.

*sighs*
*grins*

sometimes my past self is too smart for his .. er, my own good .. (-:

bombast (or: i really need to finish this grant)

i wrote this earlier in the morning, more because i wanted to get it out of my thoughts and move to more realistic matters.

as you can see, the wording is a bit .. grandiose.

"The path of research is not meant simply as one of self-discovery, but one where hard-won insights are shared with others, in hopes that the body of knowledge is further extended and refined.
in that sense we researchers seek a kind of diffuse immortality -- not through selfish means, but collective ones."

for those curious: i was originally thinking of a first sentence of a paragraph, regarding "visibility" and how to disseminate forthcoming research results.

"don't let the mornings get you down .."

in the last two semesters of teaching, i developed the morning routine of working for 1-2 hours at home before heading to the university to teach.

at the time i became paranoid of the office.

not only would students show up unannounced, at random times of the day [1], but so would colleagues .. and sometimes just for small talk.

i like my colleagues .. but if i truly wanted to accomplish something,
then it was important to protect the territory of my work time.

for a while, it worked. i'd generally curse my luck as the lecture times were approaching, but i was able to stay productive.

as for now, though, the dynamic is different. i think it's because of the content of my work. in the mornings, i generally think about open problems (read: obsessions).

it was fine to do this months ago, since preparing and delivering a lecture has the benefit of taking your full attention for the allotted time. so if i started feeling depressed about not making any progress, then by the end of the workday i'd have forgotten.

however, this doesn't work the same way when you're not teaching:

lately i've been productive in the mornings, but by afternoon i'm beset by the persistent frustration of failure.

yes- nobody else knows how to solve these problems either,
but honestly, i don't care: i still want to solve them.

so despite having other work goals in the afternoon -- writing, for instance -- this malaise is hard to shake. i lose focus and do very little.

[sighs]

so i suppose it's time to change my routine .. \-:



[1] .. which is fine, in the strict sense. instead of asking for make-up quizzes or leniency in grading, usually these students came to ask questions about lecture or homework problems. the problem became a matter of scale: word spread that i would take questions outside of the scheduled times, so more and more students started showing up.

it was easier for me to avoid the office, rather than shooing them away .. which probably reveals something about my personality. \-: