Salvaging Dead Time and Procrastiworking

I currently have a class that runs from 10:10am to 11:25am. Then I go to a lunchtime talk at noon. Taking out the 5 minutes or so to get back to my office that leaves about half an hour that would normally be wasted on Hacker News or Twitter. As a graduate student I need to have pretty long blocks of time to sit, think and get work done. Thirty minutes generally isn’t a lot of time to get brain-work done and hence this would be “dead time” – time that is just lost.

However half an hour is more than enough time to knock off errands. Today I filed two helpdesk tickets, processed email down to inbox zero, paid my power bill and wrote out my rent check. Not only did I get actual work done (and a little high from crossing them off my checklist) it means I don’t have to take out time for them later. I don’t have to devote separate time chunks to errands later and I can allocate that time to actual research work. I think that counts as an all-round win.

While knocking off errands works great to salvage small blocks of dead time (up to about half-an-hour) sometimes there are sometimes larger blocks of 1-2 hours that also needs salvaging. This generally happens around dinner – I don’t have a fixed dinner time. Hence there’s often this awkward state where I won’t be having dinner till a little later, but don’t have anything planned before. Normally that time would evaporate into nothingness, but I’ve been trying out a different technique to salvage it.

While an hour isn’t enough time to do real research work, it definitely is enough to do some programming exercises or go through a few more pages of Real World Haskell. Earlier this week I decided to finally sit down and learn Haskell seriously. I’m familiar enough with Haskell at the moment that I can get up and running in a few minutes. Doing exercises is challenging enough that it takes brain work and requires thinking and learning. However at the same I don’t feel bad about leaving in the middle for dinner (I can generally finish the program I’m working on before leaving). This is classic procrastiworking: I’m slacking off on what I really should be doing (research) but instead of digesting Twitter I’m doing something beneficial.

There’s also a small matter of me being lazy and using dead time as an excuse for slacking off. Even though I know I could use an hour for programming exercises I’m tempted to slack off anyway. I’ve been trying to use procrastiworking for that too. I start off doing something that is really not work: like updating all my git repos or cleaning up my Emacs config. But once that’s over, since I’m already at the computer in a terminal, dealing with scripts and code I just quietly move myself over to a Haskell file and start hacking. It helps if I leave an unfinished function that I can then fill in (or a TODO note).

Salvaging dead time and procrastiworking isn’t a catch-all solution for time management but I’ve found that it works great for the small blocks of time that I would have been wasting otherwise. Of course, you can’t fill in the blanks unless you have things to fill them with. Personally I use OmniFocus to keep a list of errands that I can go through in sequence. I also have a “project” for the longer blocks – working on Haskell – that easily decomposes into blocks of just a few minutes in length that can be taken up and put down without too much buildup. Finally I hope that in this case practive makes perfect and I get better at making use of dead time the more I consciously do it.