I looked at my watch the other night around 7:30 p.m. "It's early," I thought, "Good, I can get a lot of work done." I looked at it again what seemed like a few minutes later and it was 11:00 p.m. Where had all that time gone? As I am almost every day, I had been the victim of the weekday-evening-time-vortex.
Now I'm sure all of you know what I'm talking about. Somehow, the hours between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. seem to disappear. I always have the best intentions about getting work done. I always plan to put these hours to good use. I always have a long to do list that could more than fill these three hours. But repeatedly I find myself having lost this time and pondering what I have actually done.
The problem with the weekday-evening-time-vortex is that you feel like you have all the time in the world. You come back from dinner and think, as I always do, "Hey, it's early; there's plenty of time to do work." You relax, watch some TV perhaps, sit around and talk with friends. You check your email, do your laundry, get some coffee. You want to work out, so you change your clothes, go to the gym, talk with friends there, exercise some. Then you take a shower, relax some more, because it is, after all, so early. You organize your books, think about where you want to do work that night, decide, since you have so much time, that you'll be hard-core. You go to Firestone. At the library, you put your books down in the Reading Room, but it's too busy there, so you go to C-Floor — not the right place either. You find yourself on B-Floor and spread your books out to begin studying. You have to check your e-mail first and you send out a few non-sensical messages to friends about how much work you have to do. Satisfied with yourself and how diligent you are, you sit down and look at your watch, expecting it to be 8:30, 9:00 at the latest. Except, it's 10:45 or 11:15 and all this time you thought it was about 8:00.
What is it about these three hours that makes them fly by? Why do we consistently think we have that time to do work when we know that we consistently spend that time doing almost anything but work? Perhaps I am only speaking for myself, but I think the quandary lies in the fact that we view time spent doing work as the only well-spent and worthwhile time. Perhaps we wouldn't spend so much time thinking about and obsessing over our work if we viewed time spent doing things other than work as just as well-spent?
As I've tried to get into the swing of the new semester, I've come up with this plan: I am not doing any work from 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM. Instead of planning to get "so much work done," I am going to plan to do anything but work — a sort of reverse-psychological method. At first, it might provide for a few late nights, a few unprepared precepts and a few confused lectures. But I wonder if I actively attempt to do things other than working, I'll end up working, in the same way that I actively attempt to do work now and end up not working. Or maybe I'll just sit around, talk with my friends and write another column about how the weekday-evening-time-vortex keeps me from getting any work done. John Lurz is an English major from Lutherville, Maryland. He can be reached at johnlurz@princeton.edu.
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