Slacking
Jun 27th 2004Wallabynerd alert
Just been one of those weeks where I really haven’t felt like doing much at work. Great camping trip last weekend, which should’ve counted as vacation enough (at least for a while). And certainly I got a lot done this past month or so before that. So it’s not really too big a disaster that I got so little done this last week… and I did lots of interesting (well, necessary) stuff at home. Caught up on sleep. Laundry. Cooked. Took the car in for service.
Today, sat around the house and watched TV, after trying to revive my old computer for use as a mail server. (Replaced the power supply a few months ago… I think everything works, I just got bored with copying over all the packages and config stuff from my desktop. Besides, 90% of what I get is spam anyway, not exactly a lot of interest in working hard to collect all of that. And I went shopping. Finally remembered to get a potholder, so I have my very own potholder for the first time in about two years. (Now that’s excitement.)
So it hasn’t been a completely wasted day. And yes, I’m a firm believer in “mental health” days and so forth, whatever you want to call them. It’s definitely been a good week for that. Hard to avoid feeling slightly guilty, though, for putting in so little mind (and time) at work, even on the weekend.
It’s interesting to compare the habits (? culture? atmosphere?) in my old lab versus the current one… The old lab would typically have someone working from about 8 am to 10 or 11 at night, including on Saturdays. Sundays too, for all I know. New lab – most people show up by 10 or so, most everyone goes home by 6, very little interest in working evenings or weekends except to get stuff done at crunch time. The interesting thing is that I can’t see that people were really more productive, on average, in the old lab (well, with a couple notable exceptions) – it’s hard to tell, since the new lab also tends (sometimes) towards the least publishable unit model, while the old lab definitely didn’t. (Doesn’t.)