Optimal Hours of Productivity
May. 16th, 2012 09:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
corrielleI am coming to the realization that while my best hours for creative work are in the afternoon and evening, my best hours for academic work are in the mornings.
And I hate mornings. If I could start my day at 11 or noon each day, I would be just fine. I'm a night owl from a family of night owls.
But I also seem to have somehow developed the ability to get up and get stuff done early in the morning. These past couple of weeks, I've had to do a ton of grading, and I'm still making my way through the pile, and I'm finding that my most productive days are the ones where I get up early, have some breakfast, and sit down and work for a couple of solid hours. Take this morning. I got up at 6:30 and had breakfast with Rae before she had to leave to go babysit, and it's not even ten yet, and I've got ten of the seventeen essays that must get done for tonight finished, and I walked the dog, and I'm about to get some work for other classes done.
I need to remember this for next semester. Because as much as I hate mornings, getting up a little earlier every day for the whole semester would be a heck of a lot easier than cramming a bunch of work into the end for myself.
It's like I tell my students... "Yourgrade work load at the end of the semester is a reflection of all of the choice you've made over the course of the class."
Now, I'm just hoping to have some energy left tonight when I'm on creatively. Because... I'm writing something positively awful. I got the idea from a tumblr friend last night and ended up writing a bunch of snippets of it when I should have been grading, and it's possibly the most depressing thing I've ever done. It's terrible of me to say so, but I'm having an odd kind of fun messing around with it. I think I'm starting to see why GRRM knocks his characters around so much. They're interesting when they're making painful decisions and having horrid things happen to them. (Yes, it's an ASoIaF fic. No, I won't tell you what it's about. I want to build up suspense and unrealistic expectations, you know.)
And I hate mornings. If I could start my day at 11 or noon each day, I would be just fine. I'm a night owl from a family of night owls.
But I also seem to have somehow developed the ability to get up and get stuff done early in the morning. These past couple of weeks, I've had to do a ton of grading, and I'm still making my way through the pile, and I'm finding that my most productive days are the ones where I get up early, have some breakfast, and sit down and work for a couple of solid hours. Take this morning. I got up at 6:30 and had breakfast with Rae before she had to leave to go babysit, and it's not even ten yet, and I've got ten of the seventeen essays that must get done for tonight finished, and I walked the dog, and I'm about to get some work for other classes done.
I need to remember this for next semester. Because as much as I hate mornings, getting up a little earlier every day for the whole semester would be a heck of a lot easier than cramming a bunch of work into the end for myself.
It's like I tell my students... "Your
Now, I'm just hoping to have some energy left tonight when I'm on creatively. Because... I'm writing something positively awful. I got the idea from a tumblr friend last night and ended up writing a bunch of snippets of it when I should have been grading, and it's possibly the most depressing thing I've ever done. It's terrible of me to say so, but I'm having an odd kind of fun messing around with it. I think I'm starting to see why GRRM knocks his characters around so much. They're interesting when they're making painful decisions and having horrid things happen to them. (Yes, it's an ASoIaF fic. No, I won't tell you what it's about. I want to build up suspense and unrealistic expectations, you know.)