I often feel inundated by emails. Not the personal emails from friends, which are always a great pleasure, but the ones reflecting professional obligations.
Students stuck on a problem, potential collaborators, upcoming lab visitors, conference organizers, people requesting reviews — each by itself is perfectly reasonable, but in the aggregate they can become overwhelming.
You would think that it would be even worse when I’m programming. After all, when you’re in the zone, trying to work out some interesting problem, that would seem to be the worst time to get emails about something else entirely.
But it doesn’t work that way, because when I program, time slows down.
It’s like I’m in one of those slow motion scenes in a movie. I’ll be working intently on something, thinking through a problem, writing tons of code, trying something five different ways, and I’ll feel as though I’ve spent an hour. And it will turn out that the whole process took only ten minutes.
It’s as though my mind has one kind of internal clock for programming, and another kind for everything else.
And one good thing about this is that the world around me is still moving at its usual pace, so when I’m programming those emails seem to come very slowly.
It’s actually rather peaceful.