Last spring and summer I instituted “my time”.  I started scheduling off 3hr blocks of time 2-3 times a week on my calendar for research.  This happened around the time that I started making my calendar available so students would know when to find me.  (It has made scheduling meetings very easy.)  But I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t interrupted arbitrarily.  I treat these blocks of time like any scheduled meeting.  They are precious.  I will only cancel one or intrude on one for very important things (such as working with collaborators on research or attending a graduate exam).

My productivity went up, I found.  I knew I could rely on a decent chunk of time regularly.  Before, I had found myself with useless one hour blocks squeezed between meetings – not enough time for me to think seriously about a problem.

For some reason I stopped in the fall.  I probably just forgot to reschedule the time for the quarter, with new committee and teaching schedules to work around.  Last week, I was reminded about the importance of uninterrupted time for the creative process from John Cleese’s surprisingly relevant-to-research speech on creativity, posted by Luca.  So, “my time” is reinstated.

Of course, that’s no excuse to waste precious minutes of “my time” writing this post.