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April 30, 2007
Take the Weekend Off
I said to myself. You need it. So I did.
Well, I didn't really take the weekend off. On Friday, for instance, I cleaned my office and organized some stuff and re-organized some other stuff. And on Saturday I cut up all the new paper I got into notebookable sizes and made some small books and did a bunch of grading. And on Sunday I had an 8-hour Reiki II workshop, just to get myself recharged & reconnected. So really, I didn't take the weekend off.
But what I did do was take the weekend off from my computer. Well, most of the weekend. I didn't check my email after sometime Saturday morning. In fact, I turned the machine off on Friday night, and then again on Saturday in the late morning. And I just never turned it on again on Sunday. It was liberating.
See, I have this overdeveloped sense of responsibility. I feel like I need to be available to my students practically every moment of the day. (I don't. My professors in undergrad weren't available on weekends, and I turned out just fine, so perhaps they will too.) I also have a pretty high degree of loneliness going on right now. And somehow, reading blogs and checking my email every 10 minutes makes me feel less alone (though it also seems to feed that sense of loneliness. Go figure.) So I sit down at the computer and I lose 2-3 hours, just like that. And there are things I could be doing with that time.
In thinking about it, because this really bugs me, the lost and wasted time, I decided that if I turned the machine off, I'd have to really want to use it to turn it back on. So once I'd checked email and my favorite blogs on Saturday, I did just that. I turned the laptop off. And every time I thought about using it again, I realized I'd have to turn it back on, and it was never worth the bother. So I just didn't. I got huge amounts of stuff done as a result, and I was ready to come back to school to teach this morning because I felt like I'd actually had some time away. I really did take some time off.
Now I just have to figure out how to manage that next semester as well...
Posted by sally at April 30, 2007 09:58 AM
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