Yesterday morning, in what was supposed to be a productive day of coding, I encountered an intractible bug. I tried this and then that, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the darned thing to work.
After spending way too much time beating my head against the wall, I found myself just going walkabout. I raided the fridge, watched eight episodes in a row of Veronica Mars, surfed the web for random things. The hours drifted by.
All this time, part of my mind was wondering “What am I doing? Am I just running away from my problems? Shouldn’t I be doing something productive instead of wasting a whole day? Shouldn’t I at least be reading a research paper or something?”
But no. Back to the fridge it was, then on to the next episode of Veronica Mars.
Finally the evening came, and I went out to meet a colleague for a pre-arranged dinner. And we had a fabulous time. Conversation flowed, new ideas bubbled up, plans for collaboration moved forward.
Over the course of the thirty minute walk back, I thought about what a strangely uneven day it had been. Arrived home, fell promptly asleep.
Then woke up about an hour later, opened my computer and changed two lines of code to fix the bug. Now it all works perfectly.
On balance, I would say it was a productive day.
I feel like a warning is in order…”Kids: Dr. Perlin is a skilled professional. Don’t expect this to work on your semester final project.”
Oh, darn. And here I was, trying to be a role model… 😉
Well, according to Originals author Adam Grant, procrastination after starting a thinking process allows a person’s mind to wander, do “subconscious thinking” so to speak. So if that’s true, you’ve been perfectly productive – just not consciously 🙂
Well yes. Actually I knew exactly what I was doing. 🙂