It’s funny that this article appeared this morning, for it’s what I spent most of my morning doing. I have a 250GB external drive that is pretty much my life, and I found it to be in frustrating disarray as I archive the semester’s work into backup folders.

Seems like a waste of time, but it had to be done. I have pinging guilt pretty much every day of May/June. It’s this time of the year that I feel most privileged and at the same time most wasteful – the beginning of the summer.

how to best make use of the time? When I was in graduate school a professor said to me, "Look, you have to be writing, reading, and teaching – all at once. It’s not like you say now is the time to teach, now time to write – or you’d never get anything accomplished." So true, when you think of how short a 6 year tenure jog is.

I’m trying to think of good ways of using the day. I want a balance between my natural desires (when I naturally get up, get sleepy, and get bored) and the amount of work that needs to be finished in a day. I’m thinking Google Calendar might be the way to go, as it can be configured to email you daily updates of your schedule.

The first thing though I think is to make a list of priorities – what has to be finished by when, so that you know how many hours are available for the completion of the project.  From there you can then easily prioritize percentage of hours in the day.

My biggest challenge is keeping a project "new" – that is, once I get an idea, I’m a fiend at writing, reading and taking notes about it.  After a while though (2 weeks generally) I get bored with it and want to move on. How do I best capture that initial energy, use it productively, and then spend the rest of the day working on the old project that has a deadline?

Hopefully this summer I can find some more long-term solutions to this question.