Here's the OTHER new challenge

 So, surprise surprise, I have actually been getting work done this evening. It's tedious busywork, mostly just copy and pasting things in excel and adjusting fonts and error bars, but it still has to get done so I can make graphs to show my committee and likely put in some publications and my thesis.

Here's how this used to go: I'd be sitting at my computer, trying to remember not to slouch, with a podcast or youtube video or movie or something mildly entertaining going in the background to make the tedious busywork less tedious, and eventually I'd get bored. What next? I pick up my phone to scroll. I have done this probably 5 times in the last half hour and it is very frustrating that the old quick fix is gone. If I want to have fun, I have to do something else.

One part of work I've struggled with is that I feel less guilty about wasting time so long as whatever I'm doing could immediately be ended to do the work I want. It makes me feel like "I could quit any time" by just putting the phone down and looking back at my computer. Other activities I like- seeing friends, crafting, reading- require some level of immersion and usually a different location, so to end them and go back to what I was doing requires me to physically change location and also to mentally switch tasks. That feels MORE like I'm procrastinating and so I usually stick to things I can do at my computer. 

Lo and behold, I can only play survivor.io for so long before it's not interesting anymore. Nonstop balls, an iphone game I have legit been playing on a regular basis for 6 years (brickbreaker habits die hard, I guess), is the same. I could just play a video game on my computer- but again, this can't quickly be minimized in order to give the illusion that I can stop any time, really!

I think this, more than any other aspect, is going to force me to be at least marginally more productive because if I really want to do anything fun, I have to justify it to myself. I've been putting off this data analysis for over a month at this point, but I can't really justify going downstairs to work on my new cross stitch kit until I make some progress. 

Not sure this is helping much with the burnout I talked about several posts ago, but there you have it.

Can you tell this blog is becoming a crutch? If you want to talk about things I did in high school, you should see all the posts I deleted off here (I'm talking multiples a day every day for weeks on end. There's a reason why all posts before June 2013 no longer exist here, my friends. Nobody needs to see that). 

Until next time (which may well be like 15 minutes from now).