Sometimes too much discretionary time paralyzes me. Case in point: I did more writing in the last week--the first week of my fall semester--than I did during any single week during the summer. I sat my ass down at Caribou on the better part of three of my non-teaching days and worked on the empathy paper that I'm hoping is going to become my 4Cs presentation as well as a co-written article with my good pal Lew. Having done some planning, Lew and I are each composing separately right now.
Okay, there's a context for the alleged increase in productivity. I spent much of the summer *reading* for this article and for several other projects. I spent part of the summer coding some of last year's service learning data. I prepped for and went to several conferences, including a long visit to The American Democracy Project's meeting in Utah.
Excuses, excuses. The fact is, I do a better job divvying up time among teaching and writing than I do taking full advantage of long stretches of no teaching. Weird. My colleague Liz (go Liz!) just got tenure and is collecting on the post-tenure sabbatical in 2009. If the tenure gods smile on me next year and I get that sabbatical the following year, I'm wondering about the best ways to get myself ready to use that time for all it's worth.
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