Tom (and dcat) On Productivity

Tom has a new post over at his Diary Blog. I especially like this, as it reflects my own views:

The truth is that lack of productivity, any kind of productivity, begets lack of productivity. Blogging, diary writing, attempts at op-eds, book reviewing, short and long article writing, book submitting, lesson writing, building things, playing with the kids, taking loved ones on dates, taking care of the house and lawn, and so on, are all productivity. For me, anyway, engaging in blogging, diary writing, attempts at op-eds, book reviewing, short and long article writing, book submitting, lesson writing, building things, playing with the kids, taking loved ones on dates, taking care of the house and lawn, and so on, does not make me less productive, but rather kicks me into high gear. One leads to the other. And every successfully completed little project that gets a little feedback, makes me want to finish another one, and another one, and another one. And at the end of it all, there is something to show for it--a body of work that is, at very least, a catalogue of a time in my life and what I thought of issues big and small, personal and professional.

Dean and chair-types tend to think that any time spent devoted to X automatically takes away from Y. That if only you were to focus on that one big project all would be fine. But I am not hard wired to work that way. Were I to strip away blogging and op-ed writing and book reviews, were I to read nothing but that directly related to The Big Project of the Day/Week/Month/Year, were I to shift from ruthlessly multitasking on several projects at once, I would slip into ennui. I would not be more productive, but rather I'd be paralyzed by my inability to take the Calvinistic road to productivity. Like Tom, I find that the little accomplishments eventually add up, that writing a good blog post inevitably fuels getting a paragraph or two written on "real" work. I'm lucky in that I do not need absolute focus and hours to devote to getting, say, a chapter done. Give me fifteen minutes and I can get a paragraph written that will probably pretty closely resemble its final product with that first draft. But don't make the mistake of thinking that I can simply multiply that fifteen minutes times four or eight or sixteen, or that had I not spent the time I have spent this evening blogging I would otherwise have been pounding away on a long-overdue book chapter. (And, by the way -- no one recognizes more than I do, or Tom does, what is and is not overdue; we work how we work, which does not make us unaware of lingering deadlines.) Sometimes I do take the hour or the two hours or the day to write and craft and hone and think. But that occurs organically and not as the result of simply sitting at a desk as the clock ticks.