Summer Procrastination

    Today, rather than writing the article I’m doing this summer on patent bar ethics, I’ve decided to think about the ways of justifying delaying the grunt work of producing the actual document. The list of excuses for this summer:

    1.    I have obligations in addition to my job. The bathroom does need repainting desperately, and I’m the one to do it. Besides, the Zen of the paintbrush will help me figure out how I’m going to address the difficult issue of enforcement that I’ve avoided thus far by writing pages of drivel to proceed addressing it — pages that I know will never survive to be published.

    2.    I need a break from the grind of the academic year. This would be fine if I had actually done more writing on the article during the year, but I focused instead on the research. “I’ll write the article this summer,” I told myself.

    3.    Summer is for writing, so I’ll write the article when summer really comes. After all, everyone knows that summer doesn’t start until after Memorial Day. Whoops, Memorial Day is long gone. Maybe I can have summer start on the Fourth of July. Unfortunately, the Fourth is basically here, so I should be writing today and I’m not. Some years, I have used the end of my family’s vacation as the start of summer, but this year it doesn’t end until the week before the fall semester starts.

    4.    Well, maybe I can count Faculty Lounge posts as my scholarship for the year. I’ve always wondered if the Dean actually reads my articles ...

    The moral here is clear. Unless I want to conclude my paper by advocating that miscreant patent attorneys should be sentenced to paint bathrooms, I need to get serious.

Comments

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[Matthew Bruckner]

One tactic (advocated in different contexts) is to promise yourself that you will sit down for 10 minutes each day to write. You surely have 10 minutes every day, right (or most every day)?

After 10 minutes, you should feel free to get up and paint the bathroom. However, most people find that they get on a roll and continue doing their writing.

[Jeffrey]

Here's another way to procrastinate: tell us, is UMass hiring this year?