sub-days.

the great thing about summer is that you can opt out of teaching [1].

a month (or two? [2]) ago a colleague of mine suggested that i'd be a good fit to teach a summer course, since the department knows me and trusts me to teach well.

it would be nice to make more money
.. but teaching for 1-2 hours a day, 3-4 days per week .?

i think about all the times, last semester, when i had an idea and had no time to attack it. i've been looking forward to uninterrupted research, for a while .. have probably been blogging about it, too.

having enough time .. that's worth a pay cut, i'd say.

in short i've accepted a summer of (relative) poverty in favor of intellectual freedom. so that my decision won't be in vain, i'm trying to be more productive this summer ..

.. and so i've been trying a new routine:
work on multiple projects, every day.

it hasn't been a complete disaster, no more difficult than switching between teaching and research duties on workdays. it is strange, however, to tell myself:

stop thinking about this,
because you promised to think about something else now..!

it doesn't always work. sometimes i get a seemingly good idea. experience tells me that it probably won't work, so it's a matter of finding its breaking point .. and usually i want to know, right away.

like everyone else, i hate being wrong.

---

what seems to help "multi-tasking" is splitting the day into natural blocks, and setting aside a task for each.

in the morning i drink coffee and work on "geοmetry." (lately i've been trying to characterise measurabΙe differentiabΙe structures.)

when i can't think of any more ideas to try,
then, to clear my head, i have lunch, maybe go for a walk.
some days lunch is at 11am, other days at 3pm.

"in the afternoon" i run errands and work on joint projects. (it's been sοbolev extensiοn domains lately.)

when i'm sick of being confused or of having my ideas repeatedly fail, then i go running or rock-climbing. if i haven't complained to anyone lately about my life, then i might meet friends afterward.

it's a leisurely life. there's always tomorrow to sort out yesterday's ideas, to see where i went wrong.

in other words, why worry about working for a whole day, when you can work several sub-days in a row?


[1] .. provided that your academic year salary is enough to pay the year-round bills.

[2] another great thing about summer, or not teaching, is the freedom of forgetting what day of the week it is. if i feel like working, then so what if it's sunday? if my ideas aren't working, then why not take wednesday afternoon off?

just because i haven't taken wednesday afternoon off in a while doesn't mean that i can't .. (-;