On Working From Home

I’ll often leave the office planning to finish up a small bit of business at home: read a paper, work on a manuscript, write a bit of code, or something else along those lines. It almost never happens in practice. I don’t think I’m the only one who has this experience — I know that my adviser has the best of intentions, but whenever he tells me that he’ll take care of something “this evening,” I can assume that it won’t get done. (He’s at least got a family to go home to, while all I have is this tear-stained magazine clipping of Justin Bieber.)

In my case, the Internet is the problem: when I’m physically at work, I do a good job of not distracting myself every ten seconds with Twitter, blogs, and the rest; but at home, I don’t. (Perhaps relatedly, the one kind of homework that I do well is that ur-distraction, email.) I’ll sit down and be totally ready to do something useful but then some funny link will come up and suddenly it’s midnight. I’ve found that I have enough discipline to keep working once I get going, but unless super-hard deadlines are involved I don’t have enough discipline to start working in the first place.

I think that I’ll be more likely to start my homework if I believe that I’ll finish it quickly — “OK, I’ll just get this over with, then I can go back to YouTube.” So I’m going to try imposing a half-hour homework rule: if I plan to do non-urgent homework, I’ll be satisfied with half an hour of effort. During that time, I won’t let myself get distracted, but once it’s passed, I’ve done my duty and can go back to cat videos if I want. If I get engrossed and want to keep going, so be it, but I will refuse to feel bad for calling it quits after thirty minutes.

I’m optimistic about this strategy. I think the name is catchy, too, and isn’t that half the battle right there?

Questions or comments? For better or worse this website isn’t interactive, so send me an email or, uh, Toot me.

To get notified of new posts, try subscribing to my lightweight newsletter or my RSS/Atom feed. No thirsty influencering — you get alerts about what I’m writing; I get warm fuzzies from knowing that someone’s reading!

Later: Peer Production and Science

Earlier: How to Run a Research Group

See a list of all posts.

View the revision history of this page.